Best Consistent Sacrifice WD Ever!!!

[WDfromBg]

I love the idea of constant sacrificing because it is really strong and has a great AOE. I just wonder if it does full damage on bosses. Anyway, how can I know, as a whole, which skill does less dmg or lasts less time on a boss?

[Karpalo]

I wonder what's the delay before you can recast sacrifice again? I assume there is a slight delay before new set of dogs emerge from the ground. Anyways with zombie handler and next of kin it's only less than 1 in 5 chance that no dogs will respawn after you do a 4 dog blow up.

I think one can safely scrap circle of life later into the game.

[sacridoc]

Zombie Handler should be better.

If you kill 20 enemies per minute...

That's 1 dog/min with CoL. And it's 1.33 dog/min with ZH (and Grave Injustice). Not to mention that with ZH you'll get +1 dogs using Mass Confusion and Big Bad Voodoo.

It may be a little bit easier to keep Gruesome Feast up with CoL, but it probably won't make a big difference.

The only way that CoL is worth getting I think is if you've made a sacrifice build without MC or BBV or if you don't get Grave Injustice or Gruesome Feast for some reason...

I really just think it's for builds that want to use pets but don't want to get the pet summon ability.

[Karpalo]

I don't think BBV is worth the slot for wannabe corpse exploder. It has the zombie dog rune, but you can't even get that 30% damage boost from it because of that said zombie dog rune. Cooldown is too long and you can't spare the slot for Tribal rites passive and attack and movement speed are kinda wasted since you are popping your dogs before they get chance to attack too many times.

Personally i think getting gargantuan with restless giant rune and zombie handler will be the better choice, since i think biggest problems sac WD will have is with champion and boss fights.

Imo BBV is better suited for zerg rush builds and should be paired with tribal rites and fetish army.

[Karpalo]

Zombie Handler should be better.

If you kill 20 enemies per minute...

That's 1 dog/min with CoL. And it's 1.33 dog/min with ZH (and Grave Injustice). Not to mention that with ZH you'll get +1 dogs using Mass Confusion and Big Bad Voodoo.

It may be a little bit easier to keep Gruesome Feast up with CoL, but it probably won't make a big difference.

The only way that CoL is worth getting I think is if you've made a sacrifice build without MC or BBV or if you don't get Grave Injustice or Gruesome Feast for some reason...

I really just think it's for builds that want to use pets but don't want to get the pet summon ability.

CoL is good early on before you hit lvl 50 and get chance to pick up grave injustice. Outside of that i don't think it should be used.

[sacridoc]

Yeah, you may be right.

What I've found is that you end up having 4 abilities that I feel like are pretty necessary.

Sacrifice, Summon Zombie Dogs, some kind of primary nuke and Grasp of the Dead.

You could leave out GotD, but I really feel like it's necessary when you consider how bad your CC will be.

Also, the 3 passives are pretty much set (ZH, GI and GF).

So with your 2 remaining slots you could probably get Mass Confusion, BBV, Soul Harvest or Gargantuan. And honestly, I would only consider the first 3, and hopefully the templar could tank stronger enemies if you're solo.

One issue with Mass Confusion is it basically requires 16 monsters to get 4 dogs back. Because it only confuses 50%, and then you only get dogs from 50% after that.

If Soul Harvest benefits from Gruesome Feast, it becomes way better.

Ultimately I think it just depends on how easy it is to keep the 5 stack of Gruesome Feast up in Hell/Inferno. Really the build is more about health globes than sacrifice in the end. If it's really difficult to keep it up, then having more dogs to sacrifice makes more sense so you can get more globes. But if it's pretty easy to keep up, it'll always be better to get Soul Harvest + one of the other abilities.

Still though, you're right that Mass Confusion would be your first choice because it has half the cooldown. One would think you could get more dogs over time with Mass Confusion than BBV.

[sacridoc]

A few things... (turned out kind of long actually)

1) The different yard descriptions for Grave Injustice and CoL makes you think that they should be used differently. If you go with GI, you'll need 4 more yards from gear basically to equal the distance you can get with CoL. And you're probably going to want to be far away with this build. However, you don't want to be picking up health globes immediately when they drop.

What I'm trying to say is that if you have +20 yards from gear, you'll want to be between 21-28 yards from a dying enemy. But if you're using CoL and GI, you still have to be the same distance away. You basically just lose the extra 4 yards from CoL.

2) If you do the calculations... what you find is that GI = CoL when you don't have Zombie Handler, and you don't have more than 1 Summon Skill. So in terms of summoning dogs (ignoring the yards and mana/life gains) Grave Injustice is basically the same as CoL when you have only 1 summon skill and no ZH.

Once you get MC or BBV, plus ZH, Grave Injustice becomes a lot better. And like I said, it's kind of silly to use CoL and GI together because you lose the yard increase from CoL. And more importantly, if you have GI, ZH is pretty much always better than CoL because that extra dog gets multiplied by the reduced cooldown. If you use CoL and ZH, without GI, I'm pretty sure your summons will still be lower even with only 1 summon ability. If you have more than 1 summon ability, it'll be even lower than that.

Gruesome Feast I consider a must-have for this build, so there's no removing it.

3) The conclusion is that CoL is really never better than Grave Injustice even with only 1 summon skill. The only time CoL = GI, is when you don't use ZH and have only 1 summon skill.

GF / ZH / GI seem like they should always be the best passives for a build that's focused on maximizing dogs and globes.

4) MC should be better than BBV so long as you can average over 2 dogs per use (over the long-term). I'm pretty sure this will be possible, so I would consider MC better than BBV for summoning dogs. This means that you wouldn't get BBV before you get MC in a sacrifice build.

5) For the 6th slot, I'd say it's between BBV and Soul Harvest. Soul Harvest should be more helpful, but we'll have to see how this works out. At this point, it seems likely that Soul Harvest seems better for what this build is trying to do.

Keep in mind though that one might make a build that (for some reason) ignores globes with sacrifice. In this case you might get rid of gruesome feast, change the other passives, and pick up BBV over Soul Harvest.

6) That pretty much just leaves the decision for a main attack... as I think Grasp is mandatory because your CC is so weak.

The 3 choices that seem the most likely are Explosive Beast / Firebats / Spirit Barrage (in order from most mana to least). The amount of mana you have from gear and other stats would determine which of these makes the most sense.

EB does 236%, Firebats 220% and Barrage 190%. So as your mana cost goes up your damage does to, this is a choice you'd have to make later. EB and Firebats both pierce though essentially meaning that they do a lot more damage than Barrage. However, the runes for Barrage let you do some other interesting things.

7) So a typical build might look something like this:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#cZYVjd!YdT!abZZZY

Where you try to get stats like: + Globes Radius, + Globe Healing and Intellect.

[antvoltie]

Howabout Undeath(Zombie Charger) for the nuke? 205% damage, but if it kills something, it summons another zombie charger for free (can be repeated 2 times). Another nice recursive, mana-efficient skill -- if it's killing things off. It should also do some pretty damn good damage if you've got Soul Harvest up with 5 stacks of Gruesome Feast... and it's not like you're spending your mana on much else.

[sacridoc]

Yeah, I kind of discounted it because you have to be in melee range to use it basically. And truthfully this build is kind of fragile and does better farther away. I left out Haunt too (with the rune) because it doesn't really seem like a true primary attack spell.

[Karpalo]

One issue with Mass Confusion is it basically requires 16 monsters to get 4 dogs back. Because it only confuses 50%, and then you only get dogs from 50% after that.

Wait a second? So is confuse same as charm that means that confused target will start to fight for you or are confusion different effect from charm? From the wording of MC it would look like they are 2 separate effects.

If it's possible to pop a confused enemy with sacrifice the next of kin will be active as well. Cap is only 4 dogs max and if you will pop multiple confused enemies there is a high chance that the respawn wave starts to hit that 4 dog hard cap.