Darts, spiders, or toads? Opinions?

[Arethor]

It sounds like you've adopted a similar playstyle to what I've been doing GG. I also have preferred to stay at range and watch them melt. My build I used most of last night was this one. I've found Fetish Army does a pretty good amount of AE damage in a small area around your character when you first cast it, and then there's lots of little guys to do damage and run interference. Since I don't have to worry about survival quite as much with you I've opted for some more offensive runes on things like Grasp too. Zombie Handler is there because Molten or other aura-type rares can burst him down quickly if he gets surrounded, Spined Dart because Acid Cloud + Haunt can be a lot of mana gone fast. I could have used Widowmakers too, and i'm not sure which would be better, but I chose to try out the darts.

One important thing to remember, and is worth repeating, is that ALL of your damage abilities scale off of weapon damage. Intellect is good. Intellect scales up your damage. However, the ratio at which Intellect scales up your damage is not as good as taking a weapon with higher DPS. Last night I swapped out my 1h/oh combo for a staff. I lost almost 200 Int, but because the staff was ~90 dps higher (My 1hander was old but best I had found up til then). My damage per dart more than tripled.

At the end of the night, right as I was about to log off I hit 43. So next time I'll be swapping to Flaming Darts and trading Zombie Handler for Spiritual Attunement. I very briefly hopped into a friend's game. He was in Act 1 Nightmare right where you meet Cain and fight the small group of Skeletons. My Flaming Darts were doing almost 2x the damage of the Spined Darts and were 1-shotting the Skeletons. I look forward to giving it a more thorough test drive next week (I'll be away this weekend )