WD Perpetual Fetish Build

[Tamer]

objective of this build is to have Fetishes out fighting by your side 100% of the time. With this build you will find that:

1) you will have a few fetishes fighting by your side all the time. sometimes youll have a lot of them and other times youll have 1-2 only.

2) Some crowd control

3) very mana efficient

4) lots of survivability

5) very strong pve build (no clue if it will be good at pvp... time will tell)

6) clears rooms with lots of mobs fast

7) simple to play

the build can be found here:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#PQdhea!ifa!bZbZcb

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commentary on skills:
1) Fetish Army: Gold Rune + Tribal Rights (passive) = brings the CD for this spell down to roughly 1 minute. This combo allows for fetishes to be up and about more often. the Jungle Fortitude is the cookie for this spell as well as it makes your fetishes "tankier."

2) Big Bad Voodo: Crimson Rune + tribal rights (passive) + jungle fortitude (passive). Cast this at the same time that Fetish Army is cast to optimize the damage boost from fetish army and to help clear rooms fast as hell.

3) Hex: Gold Rune + Jungle Fortitude (passive) + tribal rights (passive). Ive played with Hex in beta and the range on the shaman while casting chicken is very small. Furthermore, mobs die pretty fast anyways so the other rune I was considering (alabaster) seemed not to matter in overall room clearing ability. The gold rune adds more versatility and gives the shaman something else to do when hes not casting chickens. Also its safe to say that you wont be able to turn bosses into chickens so having your shaman cast heals to you, your army, and your party members seems like it will be more useful for boss fights.

4) Gargantuan: Crimson Rune + jungle Fortitude (passive). Basically helps with bosses and elites and large packs of mobs and is your mainstay tank thats always around no matter what (its not a fetish but looks cool and is needed to tank and to thicken out your army. I was also considering indigo rune for the cleave and for pvp the best choice is probably alabaster rune for the stun. However for overall DPS and help "when you need it most" in pve then Crimson rune becomes a great option.

5) Horrify: Obsidian Rune. what more can I say... 9 seconds of crowd control buys more time waiting for Fetish Army to come back up and buys you a lot of survivability. Also while mobs are feared your fetishes get in free hits and dont take any damage. those of you who play WOW know how powerful fear can be in both pvp and pve. I expect the same to hold true in D3. this spell is amazing both offensively and defensively.

6) Poison Dart: gold rune + Fetish Sycophants (passive). This is your spamable mana efficient physical realm spell that synergizes with Fetish Sycophants (physical realm spells have a 3% chance to summon a fetish). This is pretty much the main spell you are going to sit back behind your fetish army and cast the entire time you are playing this game. Its the spell most suited for working with Fetish Sycophants because of its low mana cost and being a physical realm spell.

7) Tribal Rights (passive): lowers the cooldown of all your fetish spells by 25%. considering this build utilizes all 3 fetish spells this is a no brainer here.

8) Fetish Sycophants (passive): used in conjunction with the WD's most spammable cheapest physical realm spell (gold runed poison dart) and should have no problem keeping 1-2 fetishes active when fetish army isnt up.

9) jungle fortitude: Helps you and all 4 of your summon spells.

10) Follower: I like the Scoundrel for the precision aura which will greatly increase the DPS of your army. I also like the Scoundrel for Powered Shot (knockback) which will help keep mobs away from the backline (where your WD and follower will spend more of their time). You can see the build for the Scoundrel here:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/follower#!0110

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Thats pretty much it. with this build all you have to do is cast your fetish spells when timer is up and spam poison dart. use horrify when you want a tactical advantage (whether its to buy more time or to use offensively to give your fetishes free hits on mobs)

critiques are welcome of course.
pz
T

[Pyrates]

Looks nice, I do have some questions though, hope you don't mind :)



commentary on skills:
1) Fetish Army: Gold Rune + Tribal Rights (passive) = brings the CD for this spell down to roughly 1 minute. This combo allows for fetishes to be up and about more often. the Jungle Fortitude is the cookie for this spell as well as it makes your fetishes "tankier."

Wait, that doesn't compute. 120s standard CD, 25% reduction and 80s reduction will end up in 30s or 10s, depending on how it stacks. I'm not sure about JF, because those things die after 20s anyways... I didn't see anything else worthwhile though, might just keep JF. Maybe Vision Quest for Mana (having 4 things on CD won't be hard with this build), and then use Damage Enhancement runes on the Poison Dart?


2) Big Bad Voodo: Crimson Rune + tribal rights (passive) + jungle fortitude (passive). Cast this at the same time that Fetish Army is cast to optimize the damage boost from fetish army and to help clear rooms fast as hell.

This will end up with 90s CD, so you won't be able to cast it with FA every time... probably every 3rd or so. Tactical tool, but I sorta fear one will wait for this CD when encountering something heavier, which will disturb the flow of play.


3) Hex: Gold Rune + Jungle Fortitude (passive) + tribal rights (passive). Ive played with Hex in beta and the range on the shaman while casting chicken is very small. Furthermore, mobs die pretty fast anyways so the other rune I was considering (alabaster) seemed not to matter in overall room clearing ability. The gold rune adds more versatility and gives the shaman something else to do when hes not casting chickens. Also its safe to say that you wont be able to turn bosses into chickens so having your shaman cast heals to you, your army, and your party members seems like it will be more useful for boss fights.

Sounds pretty weak to me. Maybe go for Zombie Dogs instead? They have a nice synergy with Big Bad Voodoo.


6) Poison Dart: gold rune + Fetish Sycophants (passive). This is your spamable mana efficient physical realm spell that synergizes with Fetish Sycophants (physical realm spells have a 3% chance to summon a fetish). This is pretty much the main spell you are going to sit back behind your fetish army and cast the entire time you are playing this game. Its the spell most suited for working with Fetish Sycophants because of its low mana cost and being a physical realm spell.

How many of those Fetish Sycophants can be up at any time? Just one, or will you have more if you're lucky? Are those worth it, i.e. strong enough?

Followers won't be available in end game, right?

[WD pimpin summons]

I actually have a similar build thought up, but with a few tweaks. It's meant to be a summoner with a massive army, kind of like the Necromancer in d2. The main focus is having the maximum number of summons out at once.

Zombie Dogs + Crimson: Your dependable minions, which you will have 4 with the Zombie Handler. The Crimson Rune helps the dogs kill faster and offer AoE.

Gargantuan + Obsidian: The tankiest summon that also gives you poison AoE. Zombie Handler boosts health.

Hex + Golden: The Shaman is pretty damn useless without the runes. With the runes I would choose either Alabaster or Golden, Alabaster to kill bosses and tough monster and Golden for healing minions. The problem with Hex is that it is so untargettable, if the tough monster has minions it will never cast it on the boss monster, but something else instead. Golden healing is idiot proof and both you and your minions alive, even if the monsters start doing pretty insane damage in Inferno. I am assuming that the damamge output of the monsters is so high in later difficulties that some sort of Healing skill is necessary for survival. I am also asuming that the heal occurs once per cast and heals all your party. With Tribal rites you can have a massive heal every 7.5 seconds and I deem that much better than the unreliably targeted Alabaster.

Big Bad Voodoo + Indigo: I am actually a bit put off by this skill. You can't move the ritual around and the cooldown is quite long. If the battle takes place in a single location and the enemies are more or less stationary this is a great skill, but if the battle takes place all over the place this skill is useless. I would consider replacing this with Soul Harvest, since that adds to your and your minions damage. Other choice is to use the Crimson rune for a short duration Fanaticism.

Fetish Army + Golden: These guys deal a good amount of damage and the Golden rune + Tribal rites decreases the CD for quite a bit. Definitely a must have skill.

Zombie Wall + Crimson: I am assuming that this skill summons short lived minions that draw aggro. I am basing this belief on the fact that it would be almost useless otherwise. This is also your Physical Realm skill that procs your Fetish Sycophants. The mana cost and minion abilities are essential, because you need to have a physical spell you can spam,s o your sycophants are procced often. If the mana cost is high you need the Golden Blowdart or some other mana friendly skill.

Passives:

Zombie Handler: offers way more than Jungle fortititude, since it buffs your minion by a whopping 60 % and adds an extra dog. With the Hex Shaman healing your dudes, they won't be dying much.

Sycophants: With enough attack speed you can have loads of these guys. I am guessing you can have at least 3 of these guys rolling all the time. 20 attack gives you a 50 % chance to summon one and they hang around for 60 seconds. If you manage to attack once every second you have about 3 of them around all the time. It is problematic to choose the right physical skill for this since so little is known about the game. Will you have to conserve mana? How does Firebats proc Sycophants? There are many questions.



Tribal Rites: It's either this or Blood Spatter that gives you mana, life and -1 CD for every enemy killed. Which one is better depends entirely on how fast you are at killing. Either way, less CD gives you more Fetish army, more Hex healing, more attack speed from BBV.

[Tamer]

replying to a few points to the above 2 posts. In no special order:

1) followers are available pretty early on in the game.

2) good point about soul harvest vs big bad voodoo... cept big bad voodoo is better vs bosses because its a flat increase. Still the long CD is annoying. will consider it.

3) concerning the CD of fetish army with both gold rune and tribal rights its going to bering the CD to about a minute. (not 10-30 seconds) by how they stack.

4) Also keep in mind that all numbers in green get better as you level up and get more advanced forms of the silll/rune etc... there are like 5-6 different levels of runes alone. As the game progresses its going to be easier and easier to keep your fetish armies up and running.

[soulzek]

I actually kind of like it and have thought of trying out this style of build myself.

[AKUder]

Wait, that doesn't compute. 120s standard CD, 25% reduction and 80s reduction will end up in 30s or 10s, depending on how it stacks.

The rune reduces CD TO 80s, not by 80s, so then 25% off 80 is 60s.

[WD pimpin summons]

The rune reduces CD TO 80s, not by 80s, so then 25% off 80 is 60s.

Level 4 rune reduces CD by 40 secs, I am assuming Level 8 is 80 secs.
Golden
120 - 80 = 40 sec CD.
Tribal
40 * 0,75 = 30

You will have FA active most of the time.

If the stacking was the other way:

120 * 0,75 - 80 = 10 secs CD

You could have 2 FAs on all the time!

In either case, if you add in Grave Injustice you might be able to have many FAs active at the same time, assuming it isn't limited to one at a time

[Tamer]

Level 4 rune reduces CD by 40 secs, I am assuming Level 8 is 80 secs.
Golden
120 - 80 = 40 sec CD.
Tribal
40 * 0,75 = 30

You will have FA active most of the time.

If the stacking was the other way:

120 * 0,75 - 80 = 10 secs CD

You could have 2 FAs on all the time!

In either case, if you add in Grave Injustice you might be able to have many FAs active at the same time, assuming it isn't limited to one at a time

well either way the point is to lower the cd of fetish army by as much as possible (hence stacking gold rune and tribal rights). If its under 60 seconds ill be pleasantly surprised.

Will just make it that much easier to keep more fetishes up. ;)

[AKUder]

Level 4 rune reduces CD by 40 secs, I am assuming Level 8 is 80 secs.
Golden
120 - 80 = 40 sec CD.
Tribal
40 * 0,75 = 30

You will have FA active most of the time.

If the stacking was the other way:

120 * 0,75 - 80 = 10 secs CD

You could have 2 FAs on all the time!

In either case, if you add in Grave Injustice you might be able to have many FAs active at the same time, assuming it isn't limited to one at a time

It seems unlikely to me that the CD bonus would scale with rune level, but only time will tell.