Darts, spiders, or toads? Opinions?

[Kevin]

No love for Spirit Barrage?

Personally, I've been running with Spirit Barrage as my single/few target DPS spell, and Locust Swarm for my sorta-AoE. I load up with a few moderate-cooldown spells (Spirit Walk, Big Bad Voodoo, Soul Harvest, Horrify), run near a pack, Swarm->Soul Harvest->Swarm (swarm can double-apply if you change your INT)->Horrify->Spirit Walk out, then spam the hell out of barrage. I have Vision Quest, Pierce the Veil to crank that spam up, along with Spirit Vessel for the inevitable crap I get into. Spirit Barrage can really crank out damage with those passives, and the Locust Swarms give me some nice passive damage for when I need to kite.

I'm still swapping and testing as I go, I've had some very nice build with spirit barrage. I think it may not have been mentioned because it's one of those skills that gets better as you progress. The damage/mana ratio gets a lot better as you gear up.

Playing mostly hardcore I feel I've really only got one passive that I can swap around as the 20% damage reduction and the "get out of jail free" passives (the cooldown reduction on spirit walk is nice too) are too valuable to me. So I actually run the builds around the other passive and where my gear is at for the mobs I'm facing. Of course fun plays too.

I'm currently running with a build that is using the three bounce firebomb (since each bounce does AoE) and medusa spiders with pierce the veil for the passive. The extra mana cost doesn't matter for those two and you get AoE from the skulls, CC and single target from the spiders. I also still use haunt with lifesteal as a bit of a spammable that still lets me move and apply damage.

My new favorite skill is mass confusion runed to up damage by 20% to all affected targets. It works well solo and it's amazing in nightmare difficulty if you are playing with a barb that has earthquake. Champion and rare/minion packs can just melt so fast with some of them smacking each other and the earthquake ramping up the damage even more. In groups I've wondered about getting the fetish that ups attack speed and damage since the champs and rares are generally the real issue. I'd probably have to give up my gargantuan for it and he can be very handy at times still (and stinker adds a nice little AoE damage at all times). I'm trying to keep the builds usable in groups and solo.

I'm 52 now I think (might still just be 51) and there is some stuff still locked that I want to try, but I'm still usually OK soloing in a 2 player game in Act III NM with most of the builds I've tried. I know if I were SC I'd like be in Hell somewhere at that level but I play it safe.