Theorycrafted WD build - advice please!

[nintes]

After my level 53 monk and level 36 barb died, and my wiz got boring, i decided to re-roll a WD. WD was the class I played on my first run through on softcore, and it seemed like a great class in terms of experimentation and variety. Its also a very unique class to play ( i would highly recommend giving one a go!).

When crafting this build, i focused on survivabillity. My barb had just died from my own overconfidence, and i am determined to get to inferno. On the surface, the WD seems bad for this. It has no passive/active damage reduction abillities like the other classes do. Barb has war cry, monk has his mantras and wiz has force armour. The demon hunter lacks these as well, but has great damage output and good movement buffs. Knowing this, I knew that there would be some gimmick that the WD could exploit. This turned out to be Damage over Time and Croud Control.

The idea of the build, bear in mind it is only a theory build, is to abuse the DoT's as much as possible.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...SXR!VZW!aYacYa

The idea is to run up reasonably close to an enemy, then jaunt when I am nearly in range. Quickly fire off some locust swarms and use the movement speed to get of there. Turn around and haunt ALL the things, then run away. If I am safe, I turn around and fire off some splinters. These are meant to be doing bonus damage, and i try to avoid taking the risk. Of course, this could just be me overestimating how difficult late hell and inferno will be.

The advantage of this build is that you are doing around 108% weapon damage per second WHILE RUNNING AWAY. With a big two-hander and some good +damage rings and amulets, that should be some good damage. Or it might not be. Which is why im making this thread.

If someone has tried this build, I want to know how it went and how it could be improved. Playing it (with lower level runes), it feels pretty good apart from hex, which seems a bit redundant. If you tried it and it sucked, then please let me know so that I (and people who read this thread) can learn from your mistake.

Help would be really appreciated!

[mrmud]

It seems incredibly risky to use your get out of jail skill (spirit walk) as an initiation.
Also, jungle fortitude (that you have in your build) is a passive damage reduction skill.

[nintes]

I agree that it is risky to use spirit walk. The point of the thread is to get the build better. Pointing out problems is great, but only if you have a valid solution.

Also, jungle fortitude is not an active skill, which was what i meant when I said passive/active. In case people didnt understand, I listed active skills such as war cry, mantras and force armour and not passive skills such as tough as nails, nerves of steel, seize the initiative and blur. If there was still confusion, then I am sorry.

[diablomasterOO]

Just trust your you ability to surpass the level and everything will be alright.

[flint]

Nintes - the witch doctor has quite a few powerful damage reduction skills. Jungle Fortitude just straight up gives you 20% damage reduction (any other class would kill for this) and Bad Medicine essentially gives you 20% more because it is quite easy to keep nailing your enemies with poison damage. Horrify also has a rune to double your armor. That's not even counting skills that prevent your enemies from attacking you such as Fetish Army and Mass Confusion. Fetish Army is pretty much 20 seconds of invulnerability if you use it right.

[mrmud]

Nintes - the witch doctor has quite a few powerful damage reduction skills. Jungle Fortitude just straight up gives you 20% damage reduction (any other class would kill for this) and Bad Medicine essentially gives you 20% more because it is quite easy to keep nailing your enemies with poison damage.

This probably wont work against monster abilities like arcane sentry, plagued, molten... At least the monk damage reduction on hit abilities like resolve and concussion dont.

[MoUsE_WiZ]

Unbreakable grasp seems better than hex.
Faces of death seems better than armour, particularly since the armour boost is largely wasted while both you and they are running away.
I'm not sure about your mana situation; I have trouble with splinters + locusts w/ devouring swarm + grasp some times using PTV... I imagine throwing haunt in and losing devouring swarm just makes things worse.

[Solwolf]

That build may be able to get you to Inferno, but you'll get crushed once there.

I see three problems for you based on your build and posted playstyle:

1) Using Spirit Walk to initiate fights is totally fine in normal and nightmare, but by hell, you need to save it for defensive purposes. Its ability to break jailer/frozen will save your life - I use Healing Journey as my rune, but if Jaunt is your thing, cool.

2) Mana. You have Pierce The Veil passive, increasing your mana costs by 30%. Locust Swarm is a great, great damage spell, but it's also intensely mana hungry. Add in Haunting all of the monsters and you will be OOM before you can Haunt 3. Change Locust Swarm rune to the mana generating one and that should help. Or use Blood Pact instead of PTV - damage goes down, but mana cost goes way down and you get 1% passive life regen.

3) Slows/Snares - no Zombie Wall, no Grasp of the Dead. I see you're using the snare rune for Haunt, but that means you'll need to lead with Haunt to slow elites down, instead of Locust Swarm, lowering your damage. If you lead with Swarm, you'll have non-slowed monsters beating on you. This problem will be compounded if you use a 2h weapon, cause your casting animations (esp for Darts but also for Swarm/Haunt) will be so slow.

Here's a similar build I used to clear through Hell without much problem. The key differences are: I dropped Haunt in favor of Grasp of the Dead, and I use Zombie Bears + Big Bad Voodoo (mana regen rune) for bosses and/or unkitable, gotta-kill-now champions like any with Fast affix, or Teleporters, or Phase Beasts. Some life leech and life-on-hit, then tank and spam bears. Let your templar charge in, drop a Grasp on a Pack, get close enough to Locust Swarm, back off and Splinter them - if anything gets close, a couple Bears should finish it off.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...ZSQ!VZX!accaZZ

[MoUsE_WiZ]

1) Using Spirit Walk to initiate fights is totally fine in normal and nightmare, but by hell, you need to save it for defensive purposes. Its ability to break jailer/frozen will save your life - I use Healing Journey as my rune, but if Jaunt is your thing, cool.

Eh, the CD with vessel and jaunt is fast enough that you can get away with it. Horrify reduces the need to break jail and if you get frozen you did something wrong. After initiating the fight you'll probably have to save it for when you're in trouble, but "when you're in trouble" typically involves having monsters in locust range anyways so I find it works out.

[magicrectangle]

This isn't too different from the build I used in hell and am using in inferno now as well:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...SeR!ZXV!aaZZYa

The key difference is my build actually has enough mana

Seriously burning locusts may seem awesome, but the mana drain is pretty heafty, and then you want to spam haunt on top of that, all with pierce the veil? Your mana situation will be abysmal. I still run out of mana occasionally with blood ritual instead of pierce the veil, and devouring swarm instead of burning locusts.

My basic strategy is to drop a few haunts to pull, drop grasp in front of them so I can run in and locust swarm without getting mauled, then drop some more haunts as I'm running away. Splinters as possible.

Hedge magic is the only part of my build I'm kind of iffy on. Sometimes I swap that for horrify or mass confuse. Sometimes when I group with a barbarian friend I swap it for BBV: slam dance and pop it when he pops wrath for annihilating elite packs.