Poison/summons based WD - Infernocore viable!

[ElementEight]

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...TQP!ZcU!aZaYbc

Features:

-Tanky tanky. Based around the idea keeping the Bad Medicine passive up on foes - hence why basically every skill is runed to inflict poison damage. With Jungle Fortitude, and proper Bad Medicine application, you and your summons start out at something like 36% damage reduction.

-2 summons to tank for you and your friends.

-2 big cooldowns for those situations.

-A "free" passive slot for whatever you need. Almost everything becomes a good final choice.

-2 damage skills specifically picked to tackle basically every situation. Poison darts are very cheap, efficient single target DPS. Acid cloud is a wide, high damage aoe skill (over its duration, it deals anywhere from 175% to 325%, depending on how the wording is to be interpreted). Slimes bring an incentive to spam acid cloud in between darts casts even against a single target.

Enjoy easymode!

[WD pimpin summons]

I'm wondering if you should switch the poison dart rune to spined darts. The mana regen would allow you to spam Lob more often.

[ElementEight]

I'm wondering if you should switch the poison dart rune to spined darts. The mana regen would allow you to spam Lob more often.

I thought about that as well. Alternatively, the third passive could be the 300% mana regen one when 4 skills on cooldown - since we have 4 cooldowns, it could be kept up permanently, making it probaby possible to always have enough for Lob. What do you think?

[Sulle]

Elemental your build looks good. For the last passive I would maybe add grave injustice, because it decreases the cool down for all your summoning skills, but furthermore also gives you life and mana, which especially the latter you might need, when you have to spam acid cloud(lob blob bomb).

btw have you guys tried saying lob blob bomb very fast? itīs almost impossible ahaha

[z00t]

Stick with Splinters - it may be the first Rune you get for that skill, but it still looks like the best! 180% weapon damage with every shot @_@.

The build is very good - I made something near-identical :P. I'd only recommend swapping out one of your two 'big cooldown' spells for Spirit Walk, just because you can't always count on your pets to aggro EVERYTHING, and you'll need some sort of personal escape mechanism, just for now and again ^^. I would personally even swap out both the big-cooldown spells for something like Horrify AND Spirit Walk, just because I think we'll need stuff like that in Inferno when we have crazy scary monsters with four Affixes like "Arcane Enchanted, Vortex, Jailer, Frozen" @__@

Oh also, in my variation, I used the Acid Rain rune for Acid Cloud, so that I could more reliably apply Bad Medicine's debuff...but I think the default AoE is large enough that this is a matter of preference :P.

Also, you could even take Pierce the Veil if you wanted, since your build isn't very mana-dependent. :]

[Jaago]

Vision Quest is really an awesome passive for this build. It's what I'd take for the last slot, especially now that it seems witch doctors almost must have mana regen in the build. On the other hand, Gruesome Feast is never a bad option, either, and with the help of + gathering radius gear, Grave Injustice could become quite awesome as well.

I like the build too, and as was said above, Acid Rain might be worth a look as well as a rune option, at least if you find don't have the mana to cast Lob Blob Bomb as often as you would like.

[ElementEight]

the third passive could be the 300% mana regen one when 4 skills on cooldown

Vision Quest is really an awesome passive for this build. It's what I'd take for the last slot, especially now that it seems witch doctors almost must have mana regen in the build. On the other hand, Gruesome Feast is never a bad option, either, and with the help of + gathering radius gear, Grave Injustice could become quite awesome as well.

I like the build too, and as was said above, Acid Rain might be worth a look as well as a rune option, at least if you find don't have the mana to cast Lob Blob Bomb as often as you would like.

Ah yes, Vision Quest is what it was called. As I said, 4 60+ sec cooldowns will make it very easy to maintain, making Lob Blob Bombs a viable thing to spam. I also thought of Gruesome Feast, but the former just seemed obvious with the 4 long cooldowns.

The reason I go Lob Blob is that the spawned smiles aoe damage likely stacks, making it probably one of the best spammable AoE DPS skill in the game. Acid rain doesn't really seem to improve the area in a manner that it seems like a better choice (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWEyoKnc0qM)

There are so many passives that could work. Pierce the veil could also be fine, given that the build doesn't seem super intense on mana usage. Fierce loyalty and thorn stacking? Why not. Blood Ritual? Could work. Grave Injustice? Heck, yes, faster cooldowns on big skills, and of course, health and mana? Actually, I'm now leaning towards that one. Zombie handler is pretty foolproof if they die too quickly. Gruesome feast could be good as well, though not as much as the other ones. Spiritual attunement is lacking when compared to the others again. Tribal rites is overshadowed in cooldown-reducing power as long as you kill at least 30 enemies within 2 minutes, and that's without the mana/health back.

[z00t]

Yeah I've seen that video :P. Was considering linking you to it too in my last post XD.

I forgot what you call these circular chart thingies, but here's a totally unrelated image to help illustrate my point :P :

http://favim.com/orig/201104/27/Favim.com-25503.jpg

See if you were to cover an area with Acid Cloud and each of these two circles represented the AoE of one Acid Cloud, then only that sliver inbetween the two circles will have monsters that get hit with both casts. If you were to cast Acid Cloud with the Acid Rain rune to get the damage-over-time AoE on those same two spots, the initial up-front 100% weapon dmg AoE will hit many more monsters within both circles!

But like I said, it's largely preferential because you do have that extra damage-over-time going for you. I just value that up-front damage more, as well as being able to more-reliably hit lots of targets (since the build really likes to be able to apply the Bad Medicine debuff asap) :P.

[ElementEight]

I wonder if the slimes can take a couple of hits, or if they're really just effects. They look yummy!

[WD pimpin summons]

Tribal rites is overshadowed by Grave Injustice in cooldown-reducing power as long as you kill at least 30 enemies within 2 minutes, and that's without the mana/health back.

I would disagree. Grave Injustice requires you to be at almost melee range of the monsters and that's not going to happen unless you use a skill like Firebats. Another way is to get gear that increases Gold pickup radius, but what are the chances of that spawning in significant quantities on good gear?