12-31-2012, 08:58 PM
In an attempt to liven up this LL topic, I'm going to cross-post some of my ramblings that have been posted on my guild website. For some quick background, my main character is a witch doctor, but somewhat gimped with magic-find equipment. With the introduction of the Paragon system bonuses, I've slowly been able to gain some DPS while swapping out of m/f gear. I also realize I'm relatively new in these parts and it's possible that Willie Tanner has already covered all of this ground. In fact, and I'll note it below, one area was specifically taken from something Willie Tanner posted here. But, hey, if you're like me and you barely remember months ago, some of it might seem new! I've tried to edit out the guild-specific stuff, but if I missed something it might not completely make sense.
I'll start off with something I posted a couple of weeks ago, with the title "What was I talking about again?":
So I noticed that in all of my rambling on this thread, I haven’t delved into my favorite class to play: the witch doctor. Ever since version 1.04 was released, there are many good skills to choose from. You can do a number of different builds that are effective and fun. Or if you just get tired of one you can switch it up just for something different-and you don’t really sacrifice killing power to do so. I’m not going to write an entire guide (I just heard a collective sigh) because that would be way too long. I mean, it’s not like the monk, where I could write a guide in 6 sentences.* No, really, the monk has no build diversity. In fact, here is your cookie-cutter monk guide:
Fists of Thunder/Thunderclap
Sweeping Wind/Cyclone
Serenity/Ascension
Breath of Heaven/Blazing Wrath
Blinding Flash/Faith in the Light
Conviction/Overawe
Passives: One With Everything, Seize the Initiative, and pick whatever third one you want-it doesn’t matter since they’re equally crappy.
Get your critical chance up to at least 30%, life on hit at least 1,500, and all resist to 800. Voila, you’re a tank monk. The play style is: cast mantra, cast Sweeping Wind when approaching a group of monsters, refresh your mantra, hit Breath of Heaven at least once every 30 seconds, refresh your mantra, cast Blinding Flash for a 3-second damage boost, refresh your mantra, hit Serenity for 4 seconds to attack (or retreat) without taking damage, then refresh mantra. If you get bored with that style of play, you can always refresh your mantra again. Or, you know…just refresh your mantra.
Yeah, yeah, with elite levels of gear you have a few other viable options, but usually those posts I read end with “I only have 140k DPS, and I can do an Alkazier run in 13 minutes.” Great-except my monk has fought and clawed his way to 45K and unless I hit the item lottery I don’t see it going much higher. I’ll admit that spewing out the pretty blue tornadoes is fun, but the repetition in the play-style has worn thin for me.
Do I have any numbers to back up this claim of build diversity? Of course. Looking at the most-used skills list on Diablo3ladders.com, I added up the top 6 skills and 3 passives to get cumulative percentages. Here they are:
Barbarian: 521
Monk: 502
Demon Hunter: 392
Wizard: 349
Witch Doctor: 322
I realize this isn’t the most scientific way to do this, but clearly the DH, Wiz, and WD have more diverse build options with the lower amount of agreement on the “best skills” for each class. And, yes, the Spin2Win barb beats out the monk in cookie cutter points, but considering that is the most powerful build in the game it’s not a surprise. The monk is sturdy, can buff the party at the margins, and is dreadfully repetitive. Note that none of this means I’m permanently abandoning my monk-it’s just that I’ll probably limit him to uber runs in the near future. So there’s the monk guide.
Wait…where was I? Right! The witch doctor. So here’s the build I’ve been using to farm Act 3 MP0 for most of my 30s (Paragon level):
Plague of Toads/Rain of Toads
Unbreakable Grasp/Death Is Life
Hex/Jinx
Spirit Walk/Honored Guest
Acid Cloud/Acid Rain
Soul Harvest/Swallow Your Soul
Spirit Vessel, Gruesome Feast, Grave Injustice
Someone pointed out to me that this meant my main damage skills both rained from the sky, so I’m thinking of this build as the “Rain Doctor.” (Maybe if I were an elite player, I’d name it “Rain King.”) Rain of Toads casts very fast plus has a small area of effect, so it’s a nice damage skill to use when you’re low on mana. And you WILL be low on mana as a witch doctor, at least if you’re gearing up with magic find equipment that isn’t on an elite level. If I were doing Act 2 key runs, I would swap out PoT for Corpse Spiders/Leaping Spiders as there is no better way to take out those deadly wasps. You can be a full screen away and kill those buggers with Leaping Spiders. It’s also a nice skill for monsters which are going to spawn in a pre-known location. Just start spamming the jars and once the monster appears over a dozen spiders leap onto it instantly. A lot of WD’s use Poison Dart/Splinters which is also a great choice for single target damage. Plenty of good options here.
Unbreakable Grasp is an excellent crowd control spell that also serves as an important mana source in this build. The Death Is Life rune gives a 10% chance to drop either a health globe or zombie dog when a monster dies in the skill’s area of effect. The dogs aren’t terribly powerful, but they’re great for further crowd control and distracting the baddies. They’re also pretty durable on MP0, with only the arcane sentry, molten, or desecrator elites tending to take out your whole pack at once. Green suicide guys in act 3 (Fallen Maniacs) can also wipe out your doggies, but at least they’re taking the damage instead of you!
[Complete rip-off of Willie Tanner/Chesspiece-Face found in next paragraph]
I’m surprised that Hex isn’t a more popular skill. I understand why people like Gargantuan, which provides an extra tank that does actual damage, but Hex can negate 1 or even 2 elite monsters at once. Taking away that much danger for a couple of seconds is huge, and killing elite packs is the name of the game in D3. The Jinx rune increases the damage the cursed monster takes by 20%, so it’s a great spell for the entire party.
Spirit Walk is the 2nd-most used WD skill, and it’s easy to see why. It increases your movement speed for 3 (or 4) seconds, makes you invulnerable to any attacks, and allows you to walk through anything but walls. It can also heal you or regenerate your mana at the same time; my preferred rune has been the mana generator, until very recently.
The most-used skill is absent from my listed build: Zombie Charger/Zombie Bears. I’ve used it a lot in the past, and it is quite fun. The problem I ran into was the Reflect Damage affix. Without any life steal, spamming bears was very dangerous for me. And it is extremely mana-intensive. So when I found a legendary voodoo mask with a bonus to Acid Cloud, I happily switched over. Acid Cloud has better life on hit, more range, more area of effect, and uses less mana. [Edit: I later found out that it does NOT, in fact, use less mana. It just felt that way to me for some reason.] Winner! If I ever find a suitable 2-handed weapon with significant life steal, I will happily switch back to zombie bears. But in the meantime it’s Acid Rain for me. (The Acid Rain rune increases the area of effect for the skill.)
Soul Harvest is a self-buff skill that increases your intelligence for a short time. Since that is the WD’s primary stat, your damage increases as well. My preferred rune gave me additional, much-coveted mana to dish out more acid damage.
And speaking of self buffs, Gruesome Feast adds to your mana AND gives you a short-term boost to INT when you pick up a health globe. Between GF and SH, you can easily double your DPS for 10 seconds at a time (and SH actually lasts for 30s).
We’re not even done with the synergies in this build yet. Grave Injustice lowers the cooldown of all of your skills by 1 second for every monster that dies within 8 yards, plus gives you back 2% of your max life and mana. And this range is increased by items that increase your pickup radius for gold and health globes. So, you kill stuff, which gives you shorter cooldowns, pops out more health globes which heals you (and your minions!) plus adds to your mana pool almost instantly since as soon as those globes appear you’re sucking them down with your increased radius. And the Death Is Life rune gives you minions plus extra health globes. Pretty frickin’ sweet.
Spirit Vessel is a wonderful spell that lowers your cooldowns on Spirit Walk and Soul Harvest, plus keeps you alive and sends you into Spirit Walk if you take fatal damage (although this effect can only occur once every 90 seconds). In other words, it keeps you mobile, agile, and hostile.
I find the play-style much more interesting than the monk’s, because you have to be constantly on the move, figuring out where to position yourself, staying close to the action but not getting caught in the middle of a pack. But you’re still running into the middle of packs to buff yourself with the Spirit Walk/Soul Harvest combo. And if for some reason you get stuck you can often escape with SW. There’s also controlling mobs with Unbreakable Grasp and laughing at elites when they get turned into a pig and can’t attack you. It’s fast-paced with plenty of opportunities to buff and heal just-in-the-nick-of-time. Add in the build diversity and you can understand why it’s my favorite class to play.
Since this has already gone too long, I’ll explain why this build sux and my new build rulez in another post. (Not really-there are just a few tweaks.)
*Long-time readers know this to be false. It takes me at least 6 sentences just to clear my throat.
I'll start off with something I posted a couple of weeks ago, with the title "What was I talking about again?":
So I noticed that in all of my rambling on this thread, I haven’t delved into my favorite class to play: the witch doctor. Ever since version 1.04 was released, there are many good skills to choose from. You can do a number of different builds that are effective and fun. Or if you just get tired of one you can switch it up just for something different-and you don’t really sacrifice killing power to do so. I’m not going to write an entire guide (I just heard a collective sigh) because that would be way too long. I mean, it’s not like the monk, where I could write a guide in 6 sentences.* No, really, the monk has no build diversity. In fact, here is your cookie-cutter monk guide:
Fists of Thunder/Thunderclap
Sweeping Wind/Cyclone
Serenity/Ascension
Breath of Heaven/Blazing Wrath
Blinding Flash/Faith in the Light
Conviction/Overawe
Passives: One With Everything, Seize the Initiative, and pick whatever third one you want-it doesn’t matter since they’re equally crappy.
Get your critical chance up to at least 30%, life on hit at least 1,500, and all resist to 800. Voila, you’re a tank monk. The play style is: cast mantra, cast Sweeping Wind when approaching a group of monsters, refresh your mantra, hit Breath of Heaven at least once every 30 seconds, refresh your mantra, cast Blinding Flash for a 3-second damage boost, refresh your mantra, hit Serenity for 4 seconds to attack (or retreat) without taking damage, then refresh mantra. If you get bored with that style of play, you can always refresh your mantra again. Or, you know…just refresh your mantra.
Yeah, yeah, with elite levels of gear you have a few other viable options, but usually those posts I read end with “I only have 140k DPS, and I can do an Alkazier run in 13 minutes.” Great-except my monk has fought and clawed his way to 45K and unless I hit the item lottery I don’t see it going much higher. I’ll admit that spewing out the pretty blue tornadoes is fun, but the repetition in the play-style has worn thin for me.
Do I have any numbers to back up this claim of build diversity? Of course. Looking at the most-used skills list on Diablo3ladders.com, I added up the top 6 skills and 3 passives to get cumulative percentages. Here they are:
Barbarian: 521
Monk: 502
Demon Hunter: 392
Wizard: 349
Witch Doctor: 322
I realize this isn’t the most scientific way to do this, but clearly the DH, Wiz, and WD have more diverse build options with the lower amount of agreement on the “best skills” for each class. And, yes, the Spin2Win barb beats out the monk in cookie cutter points, but considering that is the most powerful build in the game it’s not a surprise. The monk is sturdy, can buff the party at the margins, and is dreadfully repetitive. Note that none of this means I’m permanently abandoning my monk-it’s just that I’ll probably limit him to uber runs in the near future. So there’s the monk guide.
Wait…where was I? Right! The witch doctor. So here’s the build I’ve been using to farm Act 3 MP0 for most of my 30s (Paragon level):
Plague of Toads/Rain of Toads
Unbreakable Grasp/Death Is Life
Hex/Jinx
Spirit Walk/Honored Guest
Acid Cloud/Acid Rain
Soul Harvest/Swallow Your Soul
Spirit Vessel, Gruesome Feast, Grave Injustice
Someone pointed out to me that this meant my main damage skills both rained from the sky, so I’m thinking of this build as the “Rain Doctor.” (Maybe if I were an elite player, I’d name it “Rain King.”) Rain of Toads casts very fast plus has a small area of effect, so it’s a nice damage skill to use when you’re low on mana. And you WILL be low on mana as a witch doctor, at least if you’re gearing up with magic find equipment that isn’t on an elite level. If I were doing Act 2 key runs, I would swap out PoT for Corpse Spiders/Leaping Spiders as there is no better way to take out those deadly wasps. You can be a full screen away and kill those buggers with Leaping Spiders. It’s also a nice skill for monsters which are going to spawn in a pre-known location. Just start spamming the jars and once the monster appears over a dozen spiders leap onto it instantly. A lot of WD’s use Poison Dart/Splinters which is also a great choice for single target damage. Plenty of good options here.
Unbreakable Grasp is an excellent crowd control spell that also serves as an important mana source in this build. The Death Is Life rune gives a 10% chance to drop either a health globe or zombie dog when a monster dies in the skill’s area of effect. The dogs aren’t terribly powerful, but they’re great for further crowd control and distracting the baddies. They’re also pretty durable on MP0, with only the arcane sentry, molten, or desecrator elites tending to take out your whole pack at once. Green suicide guys in act 3 (Fallen Maniacs) can also wipe out your doggies, but at least they’re taking the damage instead of you!
[Complete rip-off of Willie Tanner/Chesspiece-Face found in next paragraph]
I’m surprised that Hex isn’t a more popular skill. I understand why people like Gargantuan, which provides an extra tank that does actual damage, but Hex can negate 1 or even 2 elite monsters at once. Taking away that much danger for a couple of seconds is huge, and killing elite packs is the name of the game in D3. The Jinx rune increases the damage the cursed monster takes by 20%, so it’s a great spell for the entire party.
Spirit Walk is the 2nd-most used WD skill, and it’s easy to see why. It increases your movement speed for 3 (or 4) seconds, makes you invulnerable to any attacks, and allows you to walk through anything but walls. It can also heal you or regenerate your mana at the same time; my preferred rune has been the mana generator, until very recently.
The most-used skill is absent from my listed build: Zombie Charger/Zombie Bears. I’ve used it a lot in the past, and it is quite fun. The problem I ran into was the Reflect Damage affix. Without any life steal, spamming bears was very dangerous for me. And it is extremely mana-intensive. So when I found a legendary voodoo mask with a bonus to Acid Cloud, I happily switched over. Acid Cloud has better life on hit, more range, more area of effect, and uses less mana. [Edit: I later found out that it does NOT, in fact, use less mana. It just felt that way to me for some reason.] Winner! If I ever find a suitable 2-handed weapon with significant life steal, I will happily switch back to zombie bears. But in the meantime it’s Acid Rain for me. (The Acid Rain rune increases the area of effect for the skill.)
Soul Harvest is a self-buff skill that increases your intelligence for a short time. Since that is the WD’s primary stat, your damage increases as well. My preferred rune gave me additional, much-coveted mana to dish out more acid damage.
And speaking of self buffs, Gruesome Feast adds to your mana AND gives you a short-term boost to INT when you pick up a health globe. Between GF and SH, you can easily double your DPS for 10 seconds at a time (and SH actually lasts for 30s).
We’re not even done with the synergies in this build yet. Grave Injustice lowers the cooldown of all of your skills by 1 second for every monster that dies within 8 yards, plus gives you back 2% of your max life and mana. And this range is increased by items that increase your pickup radius for gold and health globes. So, you kill stuff, which gives you shorter cooldowns, pops out more health globes which heals you (and your minions!) plus adds to your mana pool almost instantly since as soon as those globes appear you’re sucking them down with your increased radius. And the Death Is Life rune gives you minions plus extra health globes. Pretty frickin’ sweet.
Spirit Vessel is a wonderful spell that lowers your cooldowns on Spirit Walk and Soul Harvest, plus keeps you alive and sends you into Spirit Walk if you take fatal damage (although this effect can only occur once every 90 seconds). In other words, it keeps you mobile, agile, and hostile.
I find the play-style much more interesting than the monk’s, because you have to be constantly on the move, figuring out where to position yourself, staying close to the action but not getting caught in the middle of a pack. But you’re still running into the middle of packs to buff yourself with the Spirit Walk/Soul Harvest combo. And if for some reason you get stuck you can often escape with SW. There’s also controlling mobs with Unbreakable Grasp and laughing at elites when they get turned into a pig and can’t attack you. It’s fast-paced with plenty of opportunities to buff and heal just-in-the-nick-of-time. Add in the build diversity and you can understand why it’s my favorite class to play.
Since this has already gone too long, I’ll explain why this build sux and my new build rulez in another post. (Not really-there are just a few tweaks.)
*Long-time readers know this to be false. It takes me at least 6 sentences just to clear my throat.