I want to start this post with a disclaimer - This build is great if you have a friend who is horribly overpowered and will kill everything very quickly.
I thought of this build while playing with a barb friend of mine, who after the patch, is now destroying everything in a matter of seconds. It got me thinking about wearing full MF gear, and what the best build would be to take advantage of the fact.
There is one slot open at this point for the skill of your choice. I was using acid cloud to spread bad medicine, but it didn't seem to make a very big difference. I would probably change it to something that gave you personally more survivability, as nothing is worse than dropping BBV then immediately dying and having it go away.
I went for a tanky approach, as Vit / MF / all resist / no main stat gear on the AH is usually very cheap. The idea was also to try to abuse Grave Injustice to keep those damage steroids going more often. Without too much trouble I got my pickup radius to 30 yards. All said the gear set ran me about 200K and I'm sitting on-
~50K life
~400 resists
~190% MF (still debating on picking up that WD set dagger with 30%MF. you can get low damage ones for about 400K)
~6K damage? something trivial basically
As far as the drops, sample size was small, so it's hard to say for sure, but I'd say 2 rares per group was probably the norm. Definitely had some 3, still had some 1, but I've had these results with no MF equipped, so I'm not sure if it would be better for me to just be doing damage as well. For the record I'd say duoing with this build is probably your best bet, as the MF is divided by less people. Blizzard has made some posts stating they are looking at MF swapping before elite pack kills, so I think it is still "working".
With Grave Injustice and a 30yard radius, Mass Confusion is coming off cooldown very often. BBV voodoo was also ready for every champion pack. The only problem I really ran into was that the cooldown is still long enough where I don't feel comfortable using it every time it's up and still having it available for elite packs. When I did drop it on elites things just melted (I think my friend said he was getting 500K melee crits with his cooldowns popped). The stars even aligned on Zultan Cool, and I had him hexed, in 20% confuse, and BBV radius. Toad confusion is also a fun little mini-game, and a way of doing damage without having it be playerbased.
Like I said, not a very serious build, but a nice break from the normal. I think I'm actually going to switch most of the gear over to my monk when it hits 60, as spamming the damage aura might be more beneficial in the long run.
Tanking up in general is a great idea for this patch. It's been crazy how much the power level (in my mind at least) has shifted because of the fact that glass-cannon-keep-everything-off-the-screen-kiting builds should no longer be the norm. I was playing with my wizard friend (I had always envied their survivability before), and basically outclassing him all the way. Blizzard / Hydra always looked great when you're constantly running away from things, but going toe to toe with monsters I'd gladly take Hex / Horrify.
One question I would ask though, is if you think it's best to do act 3 if you're hitting enrage timers. With your stats, I think you could be rolling through act 2 at a much quicker pace, and only at the cost of 4% on your drop rate. My VQ / bats build is a little more bursty, but I can clear act 2 packs in about 15-25 seconds on average. I full cleared act 2 in a few hours yesterday, and ended up with 4mil in sales. Don't think I got too lucky, as it was spread out over about 4 items.
switched over to a ceremonial knife / mojo with 10 regen a piece and this build took me places.
I had never put much thought into vision quest regen being % based, I always just kind of thought, "if VQ is active I get full mana," but it wasn't really true. Regen is at 120 now with VQ up and it's finally clicking - no need for a primary. With a 5 stack of SH my bats were critting for over 200K, and this is with a 750 1H / 200 some max offhand.
The rest of my crit gear is quite good however. It's funny with all the people migrating away from IAS and trying new builds, the crit necklace I picked up weeks ago for about 700K is selling around 20 mil.
How are acts 2-3 (4?) going for you guys post nerf?
I'm assuming most people won't have full resist all sets to swap to as soon as the patch drops, so it would be nice to hear how big a difference your tankiness is making on the further acts.
Gonna try this tonight, although probably switching Grasp for a longer cooldown like BBV or confuse.
I just don't understand the love for Grasp of the Dead. Sure it trivializes white melee mobs, but they're not that much of a problem to begin with. The times I've used it elite / champion packs just blitz through the area, maybe buying me 1 second at most, where Horrify can send a mob back to the edge of the screen. Did I just use it on fast mobs and give up on it too easily?
As far as my gear progression with the build, I toyed with getting some attack speed, mostly because the cast animation for zombie wall could be a bit rough, but went back and forth on the value. I also abandoned a bunch of my vit / resistances for more int, just to see what kind of a damage increase it would net, but the results were mediocre at best.
I'm currently sitting on:
38K damage
37% crit
244% crit damage
1.o attacks per second
18K life / ~250 all resist / 3K armor
You can gear for whatever you want / can afford really, but shooting for at least 33% crit is nice, just because it "guarantees" at least one of your splinters darts will crit.
That said I have temporarily shelved my witch doctor until 1.03, possibly longer. I really don't like farming seigebreaker. I think other classes have an easier time of it, and might be "death zerging" a little less than WD is forced to, but I basically don't enjoy fighting monsters that I can't afford to have on the screen (kiting).
Even with monster damage being fixed though, WD is in a very rough spot when it comes to our resource. This build focuses on the least expensive of our "high mana cost / high damage" spells, and is still considered by most to just be wildly inefficient.
After some of the replies pointed to other classes doing "way more damage", I went over to the skill calculators and realized that their weapon damage %modifiers are actually much lower than our WD nuke abilities. Example: the demon hunter staple Nether Tentacles hits for 155% weapon damage. You can see blizzards design intent - dire bats does much higher %based damage so they made it cost much more of our resource.
The imbalance begins when you realize a demon hunter can run hatred completely dry, and still have a full pool of discipline ready to kite / survive. WD doesn't have this option. Our only true options within our passives to combat this shortcoming are spiritual attunement, and vision quest. Attunement is nice, but not really strong enough on it's own, especially since our big damage increase passive amplifies our mana problems (PtV). We're left with vision quest, which feels unnecessarily clunkly. I'm going to cut my ramblings short and just say mana is a huge problem. It's rooted in bad passives, and is the reason the agreed upon "best build" revolves around spamming a primary.
Don't forget about +armor stat while gearing, as it can make a huge difference. I've been shifting more towards glass cannon, 30K life / 170 resist all currently, but a few of my recent upgrades had a lot of +armor on them, and I can now take 1 of the spears from the spearmen in act 3, or one swipe of ye old wiggle claw guys.
It might not seem like a lot, but it makes a pretty big difference, as it just keeps spirit vessel off cooldown, which saves a lot of time.
Poison Dart + Splinters with tons of Attack Speed and Crit/Crit damage will do more damage. Each Poison Dart will crit for about 50k or so. If you get your attacks up to 3.0, well, you see where this is going.
This build sounds really cool. However it basically makes you a shitty version of a Demon Hunter. WHo has a very similar ability that crits for 250k easily.
assuming equal gear, 180% single target cannot do more damage than 220% piercing. I understand with a fast attack you can't cast many bats, but I don't think you're giving piercing enough credit. Even a non-crit bat for me does 40K. If this travels through 5 enemies, that's 200K for one cast. A noncrit dart hits for what, 10K? You'd have to cast splinters aprox. six times to reach that kind of damage.
Also, add soul harvest and better gear than I have and I'm sure you'll be hitting 250K. You could say it's a shittier demon hunter, but you're also comparing your class to probably the most OP damage dealing class. And if 250K piercing makes me a shitty demon hunter, what is a kiting fast attack splinters build equivalent to?
I'm not saying spinters spam fast attack is a bad build, or that mine is better, but I think it's important to talk out new strategies and not have everyone sheep the same build that might not be optimal.
It's really more about the cooldown length for me. I find during a kiting session, by rotating spirit walk / wall of Z / hex / horror, I can basically kite indefinitely. Right when you get in trouble something is always coming off cooldown. Remove one of those from the equation and things start to catch you, which is death.
Don't get me wrong, the longer cooldowns have great effects, but they're not great enough to down a shielding group within their timespan, or some other troublesome affix.
With the way act 3 /4 monsters behave, it's almost a different game entirely. I find myself taking short stutter steps just to attempt to only put a few monsters on the screen at one time. Most of the time I am only casting when monsters are on the very edge of the screen, barely in my field of vision. Single projectiles (spears and fireballs) from white mobs are often enough to force me to pop spirit walk. I'm beginning to focus more on glass cannon due to this.
If someone has figured out a non-suicide way to cast some of our shorter range spells I'd be interested to hear it, but there are many times where even the range on firebats isn't enough.
Frenzied Muffin - you hit the nail right on the head with the "overall damage part". While IAS is a great stat, I feel like it somewhat inflates the character damage sheet in a way that can be deceiving. Reaching incredible damage numbers but being reduced to spamming a single target damage spell just might not be the best way to take on champion packs (the real challenge in inferno).
I personally think blizzard needs to look at how witch doctor primaries function - all other classes either gain their resource with primaries or they have no cost, but it's possible for witch doctor to actually lose mana using only primary. While overall I do like the mana on this build, it hasn't been enough to sustain corpse bomb / bears over bats. Those spells are just a little too much without vision quest.
Once you take into account that IAS is also completely inflated on the auction house as well, I think this build becomes totally competitive.
Glad to hear you like it Pok. You will run into some frustrating bat pathing occasionally, the worst of which is standing in a door and the bat flying into the wall next to you. But every now and then the bat takes a perfect wandering route and swoops back and forth hitting everything.
Act 1 inferno is actually pretty sweet because build options can be a lot more diverse, and as Derwiv stated, usually more time efficient farming. I miss my fetish ambush. Maybe your post will inspire me to bring it back. Probably swap it out for Horror.
I've done a few seigebreaker (act3) runs with a mage friend of mine with about the same level of gear. I won't say no problem to that, but it was mostly insane spearthrower elites that caused the problems
0
In a way it's kind of coming down to-
Resist all + Armor + Possible set bonus vs. 3% damage reduction from melee.
Any Input?
0
I thought of this build while playing with a barb friend of mine, who after the patch, is now destroying everything in a matter of seconds. It got me thinking about wearing full MF gear, and what the best build would be to take advantage of the fact.
After some testing last night, here's the build for the moment-
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#W.URjQ!VcT!Y.ZZYb
There is one slot open at this point for the skill of your choice. I was using acid cloud to spread bad medicine, but it didn't seem to make a very big difference. I would probably change it to something that gave you personally more survivability, as nothing is worse than dropping BBV then immediately dying and having it go away.
I went for a tanky approach, as Vit / MF / all resist / no main stat gear on the AH is usually very cheap. The idea was also to try to abuse Grave Injustice to keep those damage steroids going more often. Without too much trouble I got my pickup radius to 30 yards. All said the gear set ran me about 200K and I'm sitting on-
~50K life
~400 resists
~190% MF (still debating on picking up that WD set dagger with 30%MF. you can get low damage ones for about 400K)
~6K damage? something trivial basically
As far as the drops, sample size was small, so it's hard to say for sure, but I'd say 2 rares per group was probably the norm. Definitely had some 3, still had some 1, but I've had these results with no MF equipped, so I'm not sure if it would be better for me to just be doing damage as well. For the record I'd say duoing with this build is probably your best bet, as the MF is divided by less people. Blizzard has made some posts stating they are looking at MF swapping before elite pack kills, so I think it is still "working".
With Grave Injustice and a 30yard radius, Mass Confusion is coming off cooldown very often. BBV voodoo was also ready for every champion pack. The only problem I really ran into was that the cooldown is still long enough where I don't feel comfortable using it every time it's up and still having it available for elite packs. When I did drop it on elites things just melted (I think my friend said he was getting 500K melee crits with his cooldowns popped). The stars even aligned on Zultan Cool, and I had him hexed, in 20% confuse, and BBV radius. Toad confusion is also a fun little mini-game, and a way of doing damage without having it be playerbased.
Like I said, not a very serious build, but a nice break from the normal. I think I'm actually going to switch most of the gear over to my monk when it hits 60, as spamming the damage aura might be more beneficial in the long run.
0
One question I would ask though, is if you think it's best to do act 3 if you're hitting enrage timers. With your stats, I think you could be rolling through act 2 at a much quicker pace, and only at the cost of 4% on your drop rate. My VQ / bats build is a little more bursty, but I can clear act 2 packs in about 15-25 seconds on average. I full cleared act 2 in a few hours yesterday, and ended up with 4mil in sales. Don't think I got too lucky, as it was spread out over about 4 items.
0
I had never put much thought into vision quest regen being % based, I always just kind of thought, "if VQ is active I get full mana," but it wasn't really true. Regen is at 120 now with VQ up and it's finally clicking - no need for a primary. With a 5 stack of SH my bats were critting for over 200K, and this is with a 750 1H / 200 some max offhand.
The rest of my crit gear is quite good however. It's funny with all the people migrating away from IAS and trying new builds, the crit necklace I picked up weeks ago for about 700K is selling around 20 mil.
0
I'm assuming most people won't have full resist all sets to swap to as soon as the patch drops, so it would be nice to hear how big a difference your tankiness is making on the further acts.
Are you still kiting? If so, how much?
0
I just don't understand the love for Grasp of the Dead. Sure it trivializes white melee mobs, but they're not that much of a problem to begin with. The times I've used it elite / champion packs just blitz through the area, maybe buying me 1 second at most, where Horrify can send a mob back to the edge of the screen. Did I just use it on fast mobs and give up on it too easily?
0
I'm currently sitting on:
38K damage
37% crit
244% crit damage
1.o attacks per second
18K life / ~250 all resist / 3K armor
You can gear for whatever you want / can afford really, but shooting for at least 33% crit is nice, just because it "guarantees" at least one of your splinters darts will crit.
That said I have temporarily shelved my witch doctor until 1.03, possibly longer. I really don't like farming seigebreaker. I think other classes have an easier time of it, and might be "death zerging" a little less than WD is forced to, but I basically don't enjoy fighting monsters that I can't afford to have on the screen (kiting).
Even with monster damage being fixed though, WD is in a very rough spot when it comes to our resource. This build focuses on the least expensive of our "high mana cost / high damage" spells, and is still considered by most to just be wildly inefficient.
After some of the replies pointed to other classes doing "way more damage", I went over to the skill calculators and realized that their weapon damage %modifiers are actually much lower than our WD nuke abilities. Example: the demon hunter staple Nether Tentacles hits for 155% weapon damage. You can see blizzards design intent - dire bats does much higher %based damage so they made it cost much more of our resource.
The imbalance begins when you realize a demon hunter can run hatred completely dry, and still have a full pool of discipline ready to kite / survive. WD doesn't have this option. Our only true options within our passives to combat this shortcoming are spiritual attunement, and vision quest. Attunement is nice, but not really strong enough on it's own, especially since our big damage increase passive amplifies our mana problems (PtV). We're left with vision quest, which feels unnecessarily clunkly. I'm going to cut my ramblings short and just say mana is a huge problem. It's rooted in bad passives, and is the reason the agreed upon "best build" revolves around spamming a primary.
0
0
It might not seem like a lot, but it makes a pretty big difference, as it just keeps spirit vessel off cooldown, which saves a lot of time.
2
assuming equal gear, 180% single target cannot do more damage than 220% piercing. I understand with a fast attack you can't cast many bats, but I don't think you're giving piercing enough credit. Even a non-crit bat for me does 40K. If this travels through 5 enemies, that's 200K for one cast. A noncrit dart hits for what, 10K? You'd have to cast splinters aprox. six times to reach that kind of damage.
Also, add soul harvest and better gear than I have and I'm sure you'll be hitting 250K. You could say it's a shittier demon hunter, but you're also comparing your class to probably the most OP damage dealing class. And if 250K piercing makes me a shitty demon hunter, what is a kiting fast attack splinters build equivalent to?
I'm not saying spinters spam fast attack is a bad build, or that mine is better, but I think it's important to talk out new strategies and not have everyone sheep the same build that might not be optimal.
0
Don't get me wrong, the longer cooldowns have great effects, but they're not great enough to down a shielding group within their timespan, or some other troublesome affix.
0
With the way act 3 /4 monsters behave, it's almost a different game entirely. I find myself taking short stutter steps just to attempt to only put a few monsters on the screen at one time. Most of the time I am only casting when monsters are on the very edge of the screen, barely in my field of vision. Single projectiles (spears and fireballs) from white mobs are often enough to force me to pop spirit walk. I'm beginning to focus more on glass cannon due to this.
If someone has figured out a non-suicide way to cast some of our shorter range spells I'd be interested to hear it, but there are many times where even the range on firebats isn't enough.
0
I personally think blizzard needs to look at how witch doctor primaries function - all other classes either gain their resource with primaries or they have no cost, but it's possible for witch doctor to actually lose mana using only primary. While overall I do like the mana on this build, it hasn't been enough to sustain corpse bomb / bears over bats. Those spells are just a little too much without vision quest.
Once you take into account that IAS is also completely inflated on the auction house as well, I think this build becomes totally competitive.
0
Act 1 inferno is actually pretty sweet because build options can be a lot more diverse, and as Derwiv stated, usually more time efficient farming. I miss my fetish ambush. Maybe your post will inspire me to bring it back. Probably swap it out for Horror.
0
I've done a few seigebreaker (act3) runs with a mage friend of mine with about the same level of gear. I won't say no problem to that, but it was mostly insane spearthrower elites that caused the problems