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With some information out may or maynot be correct about how hard monsters hit in Inferno will WD pets still be viable?
JayWilson:Yes, pets scale pretty well in inferno. You do have to refresh them, but they are useful for tanking mobs

So, all we have to be concerned about is pets accidentally pulling in mobs. I'm sure Blizzard has this one figured out, be pretty glaring omission otherwise.

Blood Ritual is going to be very useful in Inferno, because health is going to scale while mana will not. Here's why, creatures will be doing 10's of thousands of points of damage to your health, so therefore, your HP will have to increase dramatically. However, the only thing that does "damage" to mana are your spells...and those cost the same at level 60 as they do at level one. Therefore, while your HP's will probably be in the 5 digits later in the game, it is unlikely that mana will. Therefore, the 15% drain to your health from blood ritual is going to be practically "free" at later levels.

How much patience must Bashiok, Rygarius, and the other blue posters have? With the never ending barrage of complainers, the Blizzard reps do an amazing job keeping their patience and responding honestly and accurately. Here are some classic threads, where you've got to commend the blue for keeping their cool:

http://www.diablofans.com/blizz-tracker/topic/221347-id-rather-play-it-my-way-and-suck/

http://www.diablofans.com/blizz-tracker/topic/221976-the-monk-is-too-skinny/

Are there any ridiculous posts that the Blue responded to that made you think, these Blizzard guys have a lot more patience than I do?

Quote from ecutruin

Honestly, you're deluding yourself if you think that'll happen with the way Diablo 3 mechanics work. With all the AoE effects and such available, you could lose a match to a few well placed spells. PvP in Diablo 3 isn't going to be some great skill challenge. You will die to other players..

You're right and you're wrong. A lot of people will go right towards the center and there will be a major blood bath. I'm going to avoid the AOE bloodbath by running to the border of the map and blending in with the trees. After the blood bath, then I will pick off one person at a time. Most people look at PvP as a contest to kill as many other players as possible. I look at the game as survival and that will afford me the most victories.

When you're hardcore, you don't live long by killing off three people at once and dying in the process. You win by hit and running.

I propose the PvP should include a hardcore version for us hardcore folks. It would be ridiculous to die in a PvP game and then still use that character. That is an insult to us hardcore players.

I am sending in my hardcore PvP suggestion to Blizzard, along with a $10 Paypal donation so they include this feature. Keep a lookout for my Demon Hunter Katniss on Battle.net.

Quote from Zero(pS)

If you are rushing the game, even if you aren't into breaking barrels or collecting gold when the game launches, try not to ignore big "barrel zones" with 10-12 barrels all together.

You can quickly break all of them with an AoE and essentially you're multiplying the chance of getting something for 12 when breaking those compared to breaking single barrels (kinda like having 1200% MF in D2?).

Also, gold stacks are pretty random as well. Even if you're not "wasting time collecting gold", you should try to not ignore the "big stacks" (early on, these are like 40-50 gold). It's not a big deal when you don't collect that 2 gold stack, but when it's a 40-50 one, you're missing up on a decent oportunity.

this. and also, might be random, but villagers' corpses drop significantly more gold in my experience than say individual barrels. Also, get rings! it's amazing to me to still see people playing beta that aren't wearing rings from the fence. you can instantly add about 10 dps at lvl 6, not to mention +xp and +GF/MF. they are a huge early level boost.

Quote from Kyoob

I would see a problem in lack of proper DPS skill. Firebomb is only 85% weapon damage. And you have no other damaging spell (GotD damage portion is a joke, just small bonus). You will have problems dealing with champion packs and bosses (imagine for example teleport affix monster, now your GotD is virtually useless), if pyromancer is your theme, maybe get firebats? Looks pretty... fiery.

Yep yep... when making a build, always ask yourself the following questions:

1.) Will I be mana capped? The skills that do more damage are the ones that take more mana. If you're wasting mana by being mana capped, you're throwing damage out the window.
2.) Will I be out of mana and be forced to cast nothing for any period of time?

I just don't understand why we don't have Shield Bash\Smash and Spell\Projectile Reflect.

This is making me rage, there is no motivation to play with shields, fine, it adds armor, health, etc, but thats the usual stuff. Shields are supposed to be fun as well as protective, it should be a PLAYSTYLE rather then just equipping an item.

Anyone else with me on this?

I'm hurt that you'd think Khrull would just wander straight into and hang in melee range of mobs. But imho, I don't think most mobs will be /that/ threatening for the careful player. Even against quick, extra life, vortex/teleporters/waller the spirit walk's a good getaway and assuming the mobs dont kick it right off the bat you can assume that at least some of the mobs will be distracted.

I suppose we haven't seen much yet in the way of difficulty but seeing extra quick mobs I think the normal action will be to maintain distance, position yourself behind your summons, and get ready rather than rush in headlong for a soulharvest. Anyway, in a party this looks to be a pretty decent frontline dps dealer and roughly the same as I intend to work at except swapping the summons for some other CC spells since I do intend to play in a party more often than not and the spells allow for a little more personal control.

Ah, but what do we really know until the game comes out? Being a roguelike gamer (zangband mostly, and a little dcstonesoup) I proceed carefully even if it only looks like a small brown rat (or in this case a treasure goblin).

I wonder if it would be better however to swap out the Zdogs/rabid for something else.
Hex offers life with the hedge magic rune, and spirit walk offers potential mana, whereas the dogs offer nothing particularly synergistic with the build since the gargantuan I think should take care of what CC is necessary.

Hex also offers a +10%/20% damage taken debuff on affected enemies depending on the rune (I've heard three is roughly the number that the hex will hex before it expires) which makes it good versus tougher mobs/bosses. The loss of healing here could be recouped from varying lifesteal/gain on kill/hit equipment.

In place of hex, the spiritwalk/Honored guest for mana regen could allow you to run in, soul harvest(Sos), spam a few haunts and get out fairly safely to spam bats from a mostly full pool.

The life drain from the bats is something like 18.3/sec which is pretty negligible. Around 22 with pierce the veil with would also probably necessitate more mana than life generation. This is given that my L13 WD with no EQ in the beta has 404/324 HP/Mana I think, pretty close anyway, and a base 23 mana regen. Soul harvest and vampirebats/consuminghaunt is pretty comprehensive.

Speaking of which, why no pierce the veil. Drop JungleF since the toughness is not so useful since the skills are ranged then there's no reason to hang in melee range except for the soul harvest.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#acUdeT!XW!aZZaaa

After all this, if dropping the level is important there are some tweaks that can be done to get it down a bit but I think the basic idea is certainly viable.

I like the revision Ruppgu put up. This is definitely the type of build I'd like to test while leveling to my "planned build."

should be doable.

I made it better though http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#acYdeT!ZX!aZaZaa

I'm not sure why you'd want grasp (beyond the extra damage) since you'll always be in melee range doing firebats. You won't be kiting. Haunt makes this build awesome though. Haunt a few enemies and then start spamming firebats... the heals from haunt should keep you alive.