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I got cooldown on dogs to 0 on my wd (offhand, rare helm, and 8s reduction soj). Build works extremely well. Imo it is much better than zombie bears variant, cause we are dealing tons more damage, and don't need to care about mana at all.
With decent items, we can carry 4 player pub game, one shot all trash including large and tough targets, and few shot elites. It is better dps that very well geared glass cannon demon hunter, while wd is not a glass cannon, can even tank most of elites in melee. Downside of this build are expensive legendaries, especially jewelery, which is not just expensive, but very rare and there is often 0 with reduced zombie dog cooldown. So might take days before you even find one.
After many tests, finally settled at something like this:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...VUd!hdY!aYZcaY
the only question is: gruesome feast vs pierce the veil
2nd one is constant 20% damage passive (mana penalty does not affect us). In the other hand 50% int bonus is much better damage, and bonus to resists. Problem with that skill is, that it lasts only 10 seconds, so often when we approach new monsters, or especially elites we don't have the bonus. Of course we could just spam dogs before fight and grab 5 health globes, but it is bit annoying to do that too often. So I'm undecided which of these is better. With my current gear, I'm at 77k dps with pierce the veil, and with gruesome feast charged to max, it breaks 100k.
I explain in detail my other skill choices:
Zombie Dogs - Final Gift: our healing source, spammed dogs = lot of free health globes. We also use about 20 pickup range from gear (about 3 items with that), that makes us insta-grab health globes whenever they appear. This approach allows for very interesting gear stup, that focuses on very high health pool. Unlike other healing surces (mainly +flat life), health globes are perfectly fine with high hp, cause they heal %. Gear with more vit/life is always cheaper than same stuff with high all resist, so keep that in mind.
What is important, philosophy of this build, based on 0 cooldown dogs, means, we don't really want dogs to respawn. We can get full 4 with 35% respawn dog rune and passive that spawns them on kill, but that happens only vs trash, which already dies to 4 dogs. Vs elites if you chain sacrifice, we actually hurt our damage output, because first we detonate 4 dogs, then for example 2, then 1, sometimes several times. Imo with ability to recast all 4 dogs, it is better to do that, and hit again for full 4x275% damage. And saves us a very powerful healing rune, and one passive.
Sacrifice - Provoke the Pack: As stated before, don't want dogs to respawn, cause i can just recast all of them. There is other very strong rune "for the master". 6k health per dog, insane. But this requires rather high resist setup and lower hp, cause if we hit for example 80kish hp, that 25k heal is not that impressive vs our entire health pool. So if you go for high health, globes from dogs rune are more than enough for healing. And provoke the pack = 20% more damage (5 per dog, capped at 4). Very nice bonus.
Also 1st rune is worth noting, 60% slow, works well on builds with grasp of the dead.
Mana rune is good for builds that use mana, just there is very little to no point to do so, as sacrifice is just better than normal damage skill that use mana in my opinion.
Sould Harvest - Soul to Waste: Massive damage boost. Rune choice is rather easy, we don't need few k health heal, as we heal much faster from globes, we don't need mana, we don't need to deal 230% damage vs massive damage we deal via sacrifice, and finally slow comes from other skill, but if any, that rune would be most useful. Having comfortable 60s 5 stack bonus is really hard to not take.
Spirit Walk - Jaunt - same as before, healing is weak vs globes, don't need mana, and damage runes are insignificant vs sacrifice. 1s longer duration, is really handy.
Grasp of the Dead - Unbreakable Grasp - damage runes are inferior for this build, imo 80% slow > 2s shorter timer and 60% slow, and finally the rune that increases chance for health globe in the area, seems pretty small bonus, considering it doesn't affect globes we get from dogs, just from dead enemies. And most enemies are outside range of that spell. Didn't find it that effective to say the least.
Horrify - Frightening Aspect - most popular rune, 100% armor, and our 2nd panic button next to spirit walk, useful when affected by vortex for example. Very important survival skill.
Passive: Tribal Rites - reduction of cooldown, if we don't have perf setup of jewelery, we need this (not sure if it is worth to ever skip this, cause unique jewelery usually sucks for this build (vs rares), and only has cooldown reduction. So whatever we gain by not using this passive, we might lose via poor unique jewelery.
Zombie Handler - 4 zombie, 25% more total sacrifice damage, obvious choice.
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Originally Posted by zemickey
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