Witch Doctor 1.04 preview

[DeeBye]

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6923459/...-8_16_2012

I must admit that I stopped playing D3 almost entirely. After spending some time bashing my head against Inferno Act 2 I just stopped having fun and gave up. The only successful builds were Vision Quest/Zombie Bear ones, and I really hate the mechanics of Vision Quest (Bears is fun though).

Personally I really love the proposed changes. Pet survivability appears to be going WAY up. Mana regen more than doubles. The mechanics of Vision Quest changes to "it will increase Mana regeneration by 30% for 5 seconds after dealing damage with Firebomb, Corpse Spiders, Poison Dart, or Plague of Toads". Good. Radical change. All of those attack skills are a lot of fun to use, so I like how I can keep Vision Quest going by simply spamming fun to use skills instead of babysitting cooldowns.

The other snippet I like is "we’re buffing a lot of other skills to make them as appealing as Splinters and Zombie Bears". Splinters and bears is fun, but so is throwing clay pots filled with angry spiders, chucking around bouncing fireballs, and dropping toads on heads.

[swirly]

This is the preview I was looking forward to the most and I am hopeful for the changes. I'm sure there will be a lot of complaining about the weakening of VQ, but I'd say that I am happy with the change much like you are. I just don't think it was really healthy for the class before.

I'm greatly looking forward to going back to my original pet heavy WD. I have expectations now of it getting me much further in Inferno, but we'll see about that. Hoping spiders end up decent as well. Can't wait for the patch to get to try it all out!

[Chesspiece_face]

I was very interested in this roll out as well as I have been playing my WD exclusively over the last few weeks. The Vision Quest change doesn't effect me at all though, as I've never used the passive. Truthfully it suprises me that it is generally perceived as "must-have". The changes to it will unarguably open up build diversity though.

After evolving my build throughout normal-hell I have recently settled on This. I LOVE it. When entering Inferno I spent 200k on increased gold pick up radius gear and another 100k on a reasonable weapon and destroy everything in my path. I will admit that I am spoiled now that any gold that drops on my screen is auto-picked up. LOL. It's also probably one of the most efficient farm builds I've found for entering Inferno. There is no reliance on any of the high-cost stats that most builds require so anyone can afford to get started with it, and on top of that every drop of gold that falls is getting gobbled up so you never will leave money on the table.

Anyone that may be bored with their Witch Doctor should try it. Unbelievably fun.