What do you think will be the must take active and passive skills for hardcore and why?
I think a summon WD in HC will be a necessity. Also adding ruins that add to life which there will be a lot of will also be a necessity.
For instance summon zombie dogs with the Alabaster ruin returns 65% of damage as life for you and your pets add the passive Zombie handler and you have 4x 32.5% returning life to the hero.
I also think having spirit walk with the alabaster ruin will be imperative to survival which gives 16% of your life for every second spirit walk is active.
I can see where a WD has so much healing available as a return you can actually over heal yourself and gimp yourself damage wise. The WD is my 1st character and 1st HC character so it will definitely be a juggling act of dmg vs healing.
Below is my HC build for the WD. This of course is subject to change depending on how certain spells feel and playout. And I am torn between big bad voodoo and gargantuan.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...SgQ!Xbf!aZaZZa
Last edited by Muggs; 27-09-2011 at 13:22.
Between health globes, potions and the whole concept of don't get attacked... I don't think healing from skills is particularly important. I am not advocating everyone always taking absolutely none, but I am saying that powers that give self-healing are not a requirement and not a mainstay of a majority of Hardcore Witch Doctors.
Similarly, Sorcerers and Necromancers in Diablo 2 did not focus on self-healing skills. Avoidance of damage altogether was most important.
Yes but in D2 we had health pot spam. There was more than once with my HC necro I had was hitting my health pots frantically while running away. And we don't know what the drop rate of health globes will be in Inferno.Originally Posted by smurphys
If I do find that I am able to stay alive with my HC WD I will probably drop the healing effect from the zombie dogs and replace it with crimson, which is my desired effect for them, but I do think the one with spirit walk is a double win. It is an escape tool and it heals you while you run.
Only half of that 65% will heal you and it's unclear if your pets get the other half or the full 65% themselves. It remains to be seen how effective these Leeching Beasts will be in the long-term, since I think that without damage runes your dogs won't deal too much damage.
For HC would go with something like this: http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...jci!XYW!baccZY
I really like this build, because (thanks to Zombie Handler) you have 5 permanent and strong summons to keep your enemies busy.
Your main, multi-target attack is Spirit Barrage with Well of Souls, while Haunt should be used as a life stealing attack if you get damaged in small increments. Since the most used abilities in this build's arsenal is two spirit skills I chose Rush of Essence for mana management, which may not be necessary and could be swapped out for more defense or damage if needed.
Mass confusion is awesome when you encounter dangerous elite monster packs, since it gives them even more dummies to hit and with Mass Hallucination it also deals extra damage to them.
Now, the really interesting part is that Sacrifice is set up to resurrect some of your dogs. This can be used offensively by chain-sacrificing or even defensively, since thanks to Final Gift when dogs die, they have a good chance to drop health orbs. By doing this you can heal yourself between battles, without using your potions and activating their cooldown, so potions can be reserved for true emergencies. Oh, did I say that health orbs will also boost your damage? Gruesome Feast is awesome, and with this build it can be used to pre-buff yourself before a battle.
The way I see it this build has amazing staying power and it's damage should be more than adequate to clear areas.
Last edited by HardRock; 27-09-2011 at 17:13.
If I find that Zombie Dogs heals are lackluster I noted in my 2nd post I would replace alabaster with crimson for some firedogs. I did modify my 1st post to reflect the proper information thanks for pointing that out.
The biggest issue for me is whether the dogs will be viable tanking pets for inferno. With Gargantuan on a 2min CD it is not a reliable tank for all situations. I can see a situation where I don't use pets at all and rely on slowing and escape skills to keep me alive.
I think by default they will be good tanks against normal enemies, but when you'll find yourself facing an elite pack with especially nasty modifiers, then I bet Zombie Handler will be required to keep your dogs alive.
I agree I have zombie handler in my build too. It almost seems a must have if you plan on being a summoner WD. I just remember running hell baal with my summonancer and watching my summons being decimated in a matter of seconds. I hope that is not the case with WD and I think we can safely assume it won't be and at least it doesn't require corpses.
Shouldn't we examine what the WD will be wearing before we examine what skills the WD will be using?
If you are stacking defense, then your damage reduction will be high enough that you won't need as many summons or survival skills. For instance, if you had extremely high resists and Damage Reduction, you might just choose to go offensive with all of your skills and use a single skill slot on a skill such as Soul Harvest - Siphon when your health is getting low.
Conversely, if you choose to ignore defensive items in favor of more damage, you would probably be focusing a lot more on minions, crowd control, and escape abilities. This seems a lot more risky for a hardcore character.
Of course items matter, but personally I treat the whole item database as a placeholder until the game gets released or the CM's say that it's more or less final.
Besides, I reckon that most of the time you will choose your skillset first and your items second, since your playstyle is dictated by your skills and you can swap them around easily. Items are random and because of that I think you will usually equip them when they complement your skills. Although if you get a really cool item, it may change your skill priority, but I don't think that will happen too often.
The problem is that whatever you do, you will get disconnected from time to time and when it happens summons are your best bet for surviving until the server realizes that you are gone and kicks you out of the game, which may take half a minute.
I seriously considered Soul Harvest's Siphon effect, but the problem is that I would have to run up to 5 enemies to get a big heal and I don't want to do that when I'm on low health, no matter how much damage reduction I'll have.
Like I said, I ignored items altogether for now, but I can guarantee you that for Hardcore I would consider using defensive items, even with a defensive skillset.
Last edited by HardRock; 28-09-2011 at 08:00.
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