Now that the patch notes have been confirmed I'd like to launch the discussion on what I believe is one of the new potential competitive builds. The low cooldown sacrifice builds
Idea is to lower the CD of zombie dogs so much, that we can sacrifice and resummon at our will. This feeds in two potential ways to build it
1 - Dogs for damage, maximizing dog generation with the new GotD, Sacrifice with Next of a kin rune, new circle of life, Mass Confusion and BBV for dogs. This is likely more thematically than efficient, as the self generation of dogs won't happen a lot on rare/elite/champion fights. Still fun though
2 - Dogs for mana, damage as a side effect. Using the pride rune on sacrifice we have a way to refill our mana at our will, and fuel our high mana spells. This way we spam the spell till OoM, blow dogs (0 mana) and resummon. Rinse and repeat. This one to me has potential to be a competitive build.
To reach the low cooldown after the patch we can use the following
- Zombie dogs is now 45s CD.
- With Tribal rites it will go down to 34s
- Homunculus can chop 20s of that
- Visage of Gyuia can chop another 10
- Looks like Mara's kaleydoscope, stone of jordan and others can chop a few more.
This build is also very flexible to customize, as it demands few skill slots (most of what enables it comes from equipment slots)
Active
- Sacrifice (with Pride or Next of a Kin, depends on build direction)
- Zombie Dogs with any rune (I preffer either the one for health globes or the one for 10% shared damage)
Passive
- Tribal Rites to lower cooldown
For example, the builds bellow are the ones I'll be trying as soon as i can grab the needed itens
If I get a Homonculous I'll do it, but even with tribal rites, 30 seconds is a long time to wait for new dogs. maybe at 15 seconds I can put it in my build with the slow rune so enemies stay away while I don't have my tanks.
Deya, I gave grave some thinking, i actually use it on my gold farming build. I think though, that if I can lower the cooldown enough, which is feasible with the new itens, it will not be needed, which also saves me from picking "gold pickup radius gear" which frankly I find little use.
What sucks is the fact you're going to spend forever to make it that viable with how bad the legendary drop rates are. Maybe people undervalue WD and throw all of those items onto the AH for the cheap but if the sac build becomes a mainstay and is powerful(early on) look out, those prices are going to be retarded.
Are you sure about the order the cooldown reductions are applied? The wording of Tribal Rites makes me think it would be (45-20-10)*0.75=11.25 sec cooldown.
I was thinking the same thing RE: mana regen for the traditional bats build, which should let you replace VQ/SA with something else, not sure yet whether you could go as far as PTV. Would go grasp vs. garantuan though, with follower + 3 dogs, probably more tanking than you need.
I tried something very similar to your first posted build pre-patch, and still had dogs out half the time! Three things on the first build:
1) Damage is everything, attack speed is irrelevant. The faster you kill, the more effective your dog-producing skills are. So you want a slow 2-handed weapon for sacrifice based builds. Which, coincidentally, have just radically improved, making this build now excellent.
2) Pierce the Veil is an excellent skill for a pure sacrifice build. Sacrifice costs no mana, so with Pierce the Veil it still costs... no mana. May be more useful than Tribal Rites, since most of your dogs will come from skills other than the main summoning one.
3) Big Bad Voodoo - Boogie Man is pretty poor for a sacrifice build. Attack speed is useless for a sacrificer, the movement speed buff has a very small area, and 90 - 120 seconds is a fairly huge cooldown.
Your build as posted will definitely work, and very well. Though I would switch Tribal Rites for PTV, and BBV for some other sixth skill.
With every Item perfect that is Homunculus, Visage of Gyuia, SoJ and Maras you can eliminate the cooldown completly without the use of any passives. But apart from bragging rights that doesn't have that much practical usage. Since the zombie dogs spawn at your location they need a little time before you can sacrifice them and do damage.
Second if you have plenty pickup radius with grave injustice and circle of life you can chain-sacrifice the dogs in almost any situation.
I'm just glad I got on the +pickup radius bandwagon before the patch
Tribal rites is only worth it imo for an all out pet build including fetishes and/or bbv. With the buffed white mobs gave injustice instead makes even more sense and the buffed 2% mana/life per kill is really noticeable...
Grave Injustice still only works with lots of deaths, so encountering an elite pack grinds it to a halt. You can round up white mobs with the elite pack, but I find it taking too long to be effective, it's tedious, and only increases the chance for you to get killed.
That aside, using items to lower the CD below 5 seconds, using the mana rune on sacrifice, let's you rinse and repeat your mana onskills like Zombie Bears. I'd love to see someone try this and post a guide or a report of some kind, to see if it works in practice!
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