Spirit WD build

[Zoltar]

Actually, I think I should be going with Slow Burn because what I'm looking for is a fire and forget AOE that I can supplement with Haunt or Spirit Barrage. Problem is, Witch Doctor aoe does seem kind of messed up as far as the mana/damage/utility is concerned.

Acid Rain: 120 mana. 125% + 6*25% = 275% over 6 secs with Slow Burn.
GotD: 75 mana. 8*62% = 496% over 8 seconds with grasping eels.
Fire Bomb: 24 mana. 135% instant with Conflagration.

GotD is obviously the outlier. The damage it provides with Eels is off the charts, especially considering that it provides aoe snare as well. So if the game went live like this, the obvious thing to do would be to drop Acid Rain for GotD. More damage, more utility, less mana. I guess I'll hold out hope that they will buff Acid Rain or lower it's mana cost. Wouldn't be surprised to see a GotD nerf as well.


Something else I wanted to point out with Build 1 was that in a group situation you could easily swap out PtV for the Bad Medicine passive. Lets you spam acid cloud more while providing a nice -dmg debuff for the group. Bad Medicine was in my original concept, but I realized it was sub-optimal for solo play.

As far as swapping Acid Rain for Mass Confusion in Build 2, it would be easily doable. However, I still think Mass Confuse has a lot of value. What about ranged mobs? GotD doesn't help there. MC will give you a nice way to lock down ranged mobs. Plus you get the damage they do to each other + the damage from the hallucinate rune.

[HardRock]

About Haunt and Resentful Spirit: the base skill does 350% weapon damage over 15 seconds. Resentful Spirit does 175% over 3 seconds. That's a DPS of 23.3% weapon damage versus 58.3%, a 250% increase. Because you have to cast two Resentful Spirits to deal the same amount of damage that base Haunt does, mana efficiency is halved. Resentful Spirit wins in every situation, where you want more damage.

As for Haunt versus Poison Dart: Poison Dart may deal more damage, but it's mana cost is higher and if your target is behind enemy lines, then you're screwed. With Haunt, that's not problem. It's also worth considering, that overkill is almost non-existant in the case of Haunt, meaning that you're rarely wasting mana on an ability, that won't do its full damage.

[Sooru]

http://d3db.com/tool/calculator/witch-doctor/13984

This would be my take on spirit Witch Doctor. This build is be best against hard inferno monsters since it lacks any real large scale aoe power. The plan is to proceed carefully and keep mobs totally controller while killing them at decently good pace.

There's a good snare in form of Death Grasp which keeps everything slowed. Haunt is the go to attack for larger groups, Spirit Barrage when you need nuke power or life leech. Soul Harvest is simply awesome, Horrify and Mass Confusion for added CC options.

I chose the no convert -> stun instead rune for MC so I would 100% get every mob hit to s top chasing me, Horrify would be the option for longer duration control for smaller number of monsters.

Pierce the Veil gives me more damage at the cost of mana, and the other two passives sustain that mana so I can keep spamming. One of the mana related passives could be changed for Spirit Vessel if staying alive is larger concern than mana regeneration.

What do the other venerable Doctors think?

[z00t]

As tempting as it is to load up on Spirit spells in order to take advantage of stuff like Rush of Essence, I feel that the Spirit Tree in general isn't very synergistic with itself.

Here are my thoughts in no particular order.

I used to like Desperate Grasp with Grasp of the Dead, but in the Beta, I noticed that certain champion packs have had a significant movement speed increase. Even over Grasp of the Dead, they move across it much too fast for comfort, and I can see this being problematic on higher difficulty levels. On the other hand, I've had the opportunity to try out the Demon Hunter's Caltrops (slows enemies by 60%) and the rune which increases the slow to 80%. That extra +20% slow is much more noticeable than I thought it would be, and I now advocate the use of the Unbreakable Grasp rune for Grasp of the Dead instead .

The main problem with a build as reliant on Spirit Spells as this is that there is no real way to deal with masses of enemies. Resentful Spirit is good for killing stuff, but it is a lot of work to cast it on so many enemies when you are being swarmed. You will find yourself wishing you had a spell like Locust Swarm which could apply the DoT to multiple enemies at once, even if it does less damage per second. In my opinion, you should take a different rune for Haunt since you also take Spirit Barrage.

Consider - both are spells that you need to stop, momentarily to cast. Resentful Spirit and Spirit Barrage have a lot of overlap in the sense that they both specialise in killing single targets. Imagine being attacked by a swarm of 20 medium-sized enemies - you cast Haunt (with Resentful Spirit) on 5 of them, but by the that time, the first Haunt's 3-second duration has timed out. Why would you cast Spirit Barrage on the next target when you could just cast Haunt?

The only time you'd use both of them is when you're only fighting a handful of tough opponents. Like 4 super-tough elite guys, or a single boss.

Since they both require time to cast, it's more efficient mana-wise (and for the sake of versatility), if you use another rune for Haunt (maybe the one that returns mana) and apply THAT over multiple enemies. While you are kiting them and getting mana back, you can snipe people with Spirit Barrage. The Draining Spirit rune for Haunt lasts 15 seconds so you can do good amounts of kiting and shooting with Spirit Barrage instead of needing to re-apply Haunt.

And that mana-return will certainly help, I think :P. As you probably figured out, Rush of Essence alone isn't going to solve your mana problems, since it only cancels out the drawback to Pierce the Veil.

I'm also very conflicted about Vision Quest. At the moment, I don't think it's a good passive. If you use Horrify just to trigger it, you may find yourself needing Horrify like 5 seconds later, and then regret using it. I feel like Vision Quest has the potential to bait players into making bad decisions :P. It feels like a waste if you don't use it, but sometimes, activating it can be the wrong play. If I were you, I'd take a win-win passive like Spiritual Attunement - you're going to have enough to worry about kiting enemies and applying Haunt to all the guys you see while trying to always manuever and position yourself favourably.

Haunt with Draining Spirit MIGHT be enough to offset your mana issues, so maybe Spiritual Attunement isn't necessary - this'll have to be something we see for ourselves once we play the full game :P.

[Jaago]

I'm also very conflicted about Vision Quest. At the moment, I don't think it's a good passive. If you use Horrify just to trigger it, you may find yourself needing Horrify like 5 seconds later, and then regret using it. I feel like Vision Quest has the potential to bait players into making bad decisions :P. It feels like a waste if you don't use it, but sometimes, activating it can be the wrong play. If I were you, I'd take a win-win passive like Spiritual Attunement - you're going to have enough to worry about kiting enemies and applying Haunt to all the guys you see while trying to always manuever and position yourself favourably.

Haunt with Draining Spirit MIGHT be enough to offset your mana issues, so maybe Spiritual Attunement isn't necessary - this'll have to be something we see for ourselves once we play the full game :P.

Funny, I'm very confident about Vision Quest, too, and I think it's in the top two most powerful passives the witch doctors have. :P That being said, it definitely doesn't fit into this build, you need either 4 preferably long cooldowns that you're happy to recast any time, or 5 cooldowns if you have 2-3 situational ones.

If I were to make a spirit-themed build, which I probably won't with the current state of things, It'd look something like this:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...dij!bfV!aaZbaZ

This would have most of the things a successful build should have, from defense to versatile offense, but I feel it just does everything a little worse than a non-themed build would do. I guess that is inevitable with theme builds, though.

[HardRock]

To put Vision Quest in perspective, here are some relevant stats. A level 60 WD will have 740 base mana (no items) with a regen of 20 / sec. Vision Quest will quadruple that regen to 80. What this means is that VQ will cause mana to behave almost like Arcane Power, but with much less relative costs on skills.

If a build can use it to its full potential, then mana consumption will cease to be a problem. I don't think a spirit themed WD could do this optimally, it seems much better for summoner builds, since Gargantuan and Summon Zombie Dogs can be used then to fuel it. It's not that hard to find two other cooldown skills to complement a summoner build. Basically a summoner with VQ will be able to spam whatever skill he wants if he's smart, without worrying about mana costs.

[Sooru]

Lots of words

A good catch about Haunt and Spirit Barrage filling somewhat similar roles in my suggested build. I had overlooked the slow effect available on Soul Harvest, and by taking that one gets a) slow effect b) proper aoe in Acid Rain c) keeps 5 spirit spells for Rush of Essence. I really like your version (would probably change the MC rune to the stun one though, I don't like the random dogs. All dogs or nothing!)

My largest concern about Vision Quest is that with skills with relatively low cooldown (my Death Grasp rune even made it worse!) is that one spends such a large time actually casting the spells. I wouldn't worry about it luring to bad decisions by being greedy, just need to be skilled enough to make the judgement. Horrify can also be used offensively, taking the opportunity to CC mobs with it when it suits the Witch Doctor, not only when the WD is taking too much damage. Preventing bad situations from happening > having 'oh ****' buttons available when they do happen.

[Jaago]

I can't say for sure, but the stun rune on Mass Confusion seems kind of redundant; the confused enemies should already tie up many, if not all of the non-confused ones. I like the dogs because they provide a crowd control effect lasting beyond the 12 seconds of MC. If they die in 15 seconds or less, the cooldown-reducing Unstable Realm would definitely be the better defensive rune choice, though, but I'd think the dogs would last almost up until the next MC.