Theorycrafted WD build - advice please!

[nintes]

Thanks soulwolf and magicrectangle for your useful responses.

I like the idea of the mana regen rune for locust swarm. It would give me more haunts. which in turn slows enemies more. Im getting rid of horrify and putting in grasp of the dead. Ilike PTV, as i am running away a lot of the time anyway, so the mana regen rate is less important. BBV also doesnt synergise well the idea of beiing able to run away. I would put bears on, but I dont have the mana or room for it. Its good to see that it works in hell/inferno though!

[TheDarkSide]

Ive yet to find a safe WD build as I killed several of them so far the latest was level 57 and was doing nicely in Hell Mode till the lagg monster ate me.. I was using a Vision Quest based build and doing pretty good actually --> http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...jQT!ZcU!ccabZY .. I havent got around to rebuiling him yet though as Im currently trying to level al Wizard...

[magicrectangle]

VQ seems too dangerous to me in HC. You've got 4 of your skill slots tied up, leaving you only 2 skills to use. One of them has to be your damage skill (bears, acid rain), so you have exactly one escape skill (spirit walk most likely) that you can use on-demand. Add to that the fact that you apparently left spirit vessel out of your build and goddamn you are asking to die.

No thanks. I'll take a lower damage build that actually lets me use multiple tools to survive. Once I start to feel like I'm gear-checking the content I might do a VQ build. I used VQ acid rain to farm hell act 3 for a while, and that was a laugh. I may do that again for inferno act 1 once I have some better gear, but so long as the content poses a real threat I just can't see using a VQ build.

[Solwolf]

THedge 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.

Try swapping Hex for Fetish Army - Legion of Daggers. They do moderate damage, but more importantly tank basically everything for you for what, 20 seconds? Good long cooldown skill.

[Dethklok]

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.

Anything that causes a monster to gain life with Vampiric can also be reduced with Resolve, Concussion, Threatening Shout.. or Bad Medicine. I am certain this is true with Plagued (I gave Resolve to my monk without changing gear and noticed a huge difference against Plagued), and I suspect it's true with the others.

Horrify reduces the need to break jail and if you get frozen you did something wrong.

I think the point of a good hardcore build is that it's forgiving. Asking someone to always, always avoid frozen, and then the first time they miss they go back to level 1... is setting someone up to go back to level 1.

[magicrectangle]

I think the point of a good hardcore build is that it's forgiving. Asking someone to always, always avoid frozen, and then the first time they miss they go back to level 1... is setting someone up to go back to level 1.

Definitely this. If your gear, spec, and play style don't allow for recovery from mistakes, you're screwed. You might not even make a mistake, you might just get a little lag spike for the same result.

[MoUsE_WiZ]

I think the point of a good hardcore build is that it's forgiving. Asking someone to always, always avoid frozen, and then the first time they miss they go back to level 1... is setting someone up to go back to level 1.

Indeed. But you're only 'wasting' SW at the very start of the fight. As such you only need to avoid being frozen for the first 7 seconds of the fight. You need to be able to do that much dodging anyway otherwise you'll get in trouble every other time SW is on CD. Additionally, at the start of the fight you should be at or close to 100% HP so even if you do get frozen you shouldn't be in too much trouble.

Besides, if frozen is actually *that* dangerous to you, since you're only wasting SW at the start of the fight, you can spot the frozen affix before you engage and just not engage.

I'm not trying to say it's ok to waste SW; if I thought that I wouldn't have it on my bar. I'm saying that for the amount of SWs you get throughout a fight, wasting it once at the absolute safest part of the fight (save for when the fight is effectively won), you won't get yourself into trouble.

[omgChubbs]

My new WD just got up to lvl 50, just facerolling everything so far (in act1 hell now) with the following build:

M1: Poison Dart / Splinters
M2: Grasp / Unbreakable Grasp

1: Spirit Walk / Jaunt
2: Soul Harvest / Life return
3: Locust Swarm / Mana return
4: Gargantuan / Big Stinker

Passives: Spirit Vessel, Gruesome Feast and Peirce the Veil

It's very much a glass cannon build, occasionally when the content got rough I would swap PtV for Jungle Fortitude for the dmg reduce, but the sheer dps boosts that you get from 5stacks of SH, and 5 stacks of GF at the same time is pure rediculous, i need to crunch the numbers, but I think I can get up to almost double my dps when buffed.

At lvl 50 i just killed NM diablo with 4.5k dps buffed and somewhere around 22k health.