Team composition for Season 3

[Las]

Just started multiboxing 4 accounts after a while and have been playing with 4 demon hunters in season 2. I was wondering with the new patch what teams you would try to experiment with.
4 Barbs with IK seems nice if they can be in sync, also have been thinking about going with 1 WD and 3 DHs
What are your plans for season 3?

[Devile]

I'll prolly go with 4 DHs or 4 WDs. Don't think I'll go thru the torture of leveling 4 melees again. If I decide to go with Barbs, I'll still go with ranged just to save time and use them to gear the Barbs. I'm not convinced yet with Barbs. I'll wait for 2.2 to come out and try it. I'm already farming Barb sets and will test it as soon as 2.2 is live.

[Yelgis]

I with Deville. I will probably do DH and WD teams next season.

[joes]

Carnevil WDs for me too. DH - maybe.

[Samefudge]

Four DH's, once you get to T4, makes getting M6/Rucksack/Ancient xbow much easier than trying to similarly gear any other 4 classes, IMO. I did that this season; 4xDH to T6/GR30, then geared 4xCrusaders with 6pc Akkarat/BoP/FW for condemn builds into T6 / GR25+, then started 4 wizards for fun, won't have time to finish the wizards though.

That fact that you can easily farm crafting mats, and craft an ancient xbow and not rely on drops, just can't be overlooked.

[Devile]

Not doing melees again unless its a new class and I really wanna learn by myself from 1 to 70. Multiboxing melees is really slow and boring. Did it on S2 with monks and almost died of boredom. Solo or group leveling, melees are fine, but when u multibox 4 melees, it's plain torture. Leveling 4 DHs is smooth and fast and u can use them to gear those melees way faster than starting with the melees from lvl1.

[Yelgis]

My plan for S3 is to start with 4 DH for ease of leveling and to go for the Strafe build for them once they are level 70. I also plan on a 4 WD team with one of them running a Tiki helm/pet build with 6p Zuni and a Starmetal if I can get it to by my BBV machine, while the other three wear 6 p Jade with Quetz helm and the new Obsidian Ring to be able to spam Soul Harvest more frequently.

Barb is still on my list as a possibility, but I probably won't start with a team of them.

[sibs]

Carnevil WDs for me too. DH - maybe.

did you try the carnevil wds before? what grift did you get to?

i really want to try 4x wizard the problem is the new bracer vs krelm. krelm is such a huge deal when boxing imo just makes the runs super smooth. but the newbracer for energy twister seems to good to pass on :< i really wish it was something else than a bracer

[joes]

did you try the carnevil wds before?
Never tried, but in 2.2 they buffed carnevil significantly. I have non-seasonal 4x zoomancers (gargantuan, fetishes, dogs, etc) and didn't like WD much, decided to switch to crusaders.

Reason why carnevil - solved problem with pet pathing, lots of lazers pew-pew, generally fun to play. Plus I saw some PTR videos where guy was doing GR44 without significant problems. Also, this - http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo3witchdoctors/comments/2z3ioe/carnevil_is_tops_in_22_ptr_heres_how_the_build/

Also, there are other viable WD builds, so class should be viable in S3.

[Yelgis]

While I agree that Carnevil builds got a nice buff with the Zuni set on the PTR, I don't think they are the best for multiboxing or even solo Grift.

For solo the top build currently seems to be a Pet build using 2 piece jade and 6p zuni. Spamming Haunt procs fetishes really fast due to its high proc coeff., gives a 20% dmg buff and activates 6p zuni and with 2p Jade it does decent damage. I not entirely sure of all the specifics on this build, but it is what a lot of testers are talking about.

Niether carn or the pet build are good for multiboxing in my opinion though. Pets have the collision issue and poor aoe and Carn has the problems of pet positioning and all 4 of your characters have to be perfectly synced to deliver optimal dart spam.

My pick for a WD group is a Tiki doc built for dps (pet build, SMK for BBV Slam Dance spam, possibly running 6p zuni for more pet damage) and then for the 3 dps alts I would run Jade.

The problem with Jade build is survivability. That problem is partially taken care of by the lock doc keeping elite packs and most affixes in check.

The other reason I would go with jade is that the aoe is better and positioning/syncing isn't as important because haunt is a semi homing skill (as in it hits something near where you cast it) and Soul Harvest is a decent sized aoe. Jade DPS in a good spot now because since you are forced to wear Rorg to get the 6p bonus with the Quetz helm you only have one ring slot left. Obsidian Ring is a no brainer here because it procs every time you cast haunt (which you are spamming now because it does good damage). This makes you have Soul Harvest off cooldown much faster without having to stack a ton of CDR.

For instance running Spirit vessel, soul harvest has a 13 second cooldown. With 33% CDR (12.5 diamond, 8% shoulder, 8% gloves, and 10% paragon) that yields cooldown of about 8.71 seconds. Every time haunt lands it lowers the CDR by 1 sec with ORoZ (assuming it is the only skill on cooldown). With 2 APS, that is 2 seconds of additional cooldown per second for a total of 3 seconds every 1 second. So ORoZ would be off cooldown every 3 seconds in the optimal case.

Another reason to go Jade instead of Carnevil, is that Carn needs to use the Zuni offhand to be able to have all the other gear it needs. This means you miss out on probably the coolest item a WD multibox team has at its disposal... The new Homunculus Mojo. This thing causes your WD to spawn a zombie dog every 2 seconds now. Let me just start off by saying Blizzard must not have considered multiboxxers when designing this. It is clearly meant to provide WD's the ability to sacrifice a zombie dog every 2 seconds for the Provoke the Pack buff from the Sacrifice skill, but they totally ignored the other side of it.

The Black Blood rune is a 3 second stun. I won't cover all the details, but just know that a 3 second stun translates to a .9 second stun on even rift guardians at full CC resistance. That means to successfully round robin and stunlock you need to Sac a dog every .9 seconds which is impossible for a solo Doc since they quickly run out of dogs. Yet .9 x 4 = 3.6 or better illustrated lets assume this:

Doc 1 Sacs at 0 seconds
Doc 2 Sacs at .9 seconds
Doc 3 Sacs at 1.8 seconds
Doc 4 Sacs at 2.7 seconds

Now when it comes back around to doc 1's turn to Sac again it 3.6 seconds have passed. Since the new Homonculus mojo spawns a dog every 2 seconds all the witchdoctors in that rotation will always have a dog ready to sac when it is their turn. In fact the way the mojo works is a dog will summon immediately after saccing a dog if one hasn't been sacced in over 2 seconds. It spawns a dog immediately if it hasn't recently and then start a 2 sec timer before spawning another.

In fact the WD's can go down to saccing the dogs as fast every .67 seconds and still maintain enough dogs indefinitely. For latency purposes it is probably best to set your RR up to a dog saced between every .7-.8 seconds. The greatest part about all of this is the Sac is ranged and has decent aoe and this setup requires zero CDR to accomplish. Stun is great because it works on Rift Guardians and makes them trivial to fight. It isn't as good at locking down elite packs though which is why you run the Tiki doc. Between the two CC effects most everything should be locked down and the range of the Sac skill allows you to also lock down strays outside of your tiki range.

[joes]

While I agree that Carnevil builds got a nice buff with the Zuni set on the PTR, I don't think they are the best for multiboxing or even solo Grift.
Quite possible. But it is excellent "relaxing" farming build, where fetishes are doing most of the work, there are tons of them and they're not melee.


Another reason to go Jade instead of Carnevil, is that Carn needs to use the Zuni offhand to be able to have all the other gear it needs. This means you miss out on probably the coolest item a WD multibox team has at its disposal... The new Homunculus Mojo. This thing causes your WD to spawn a zombie dog every 2 seconds now.
Oh, nice. Seems like it will be new "auto-cast sweeping wind" with ISBoxer round-robin delay of 0.7 seconds.

Anyway, what's cool about WD - there are plenty of builds that are viable or, at least, fun to play.

[Cmoidudu]

A pet WD team is tempting, however this might end the same way as in 2.1.2 : above GR 36-38 they are constantly one-shot by "jailer" abilty. I noticed that there is a damage reduction on the Zuni set however. We'll see. I might want to try a combo of Zuni and Asheara, in order to benefit from the followers' DPS, buffs and debuffs.

I'll probably switch my current best team (3x Condemn Crusaders and 1x zDPS WD) to 3x "Roland" Shield Bash + 1x zDPS WD. Since they probably will be running with a permanent Iron Skin, this might compensate for the loss of the permanent Akarat's Champion. And, from what I saw on videos, Shield Bash will probably do more damage than Condemn currently does.

[Cmoidudu]

I have been looking for a template that only uses resource generators. It is now possible to gather those three babies...

- 2.2 Shash of Knives :
1435

- 2.2 Spirit Guard
1436

And the obvious Simplicity'Strength :
1437

So now I have to build something with Physical Damage. I'm keeping a Crusader with a Roland set, and I'm using Sweep Attack only to keep the timers from my defensive skills up. Punish should be cast at an incredible speed, and I have to insert a Sweep Attack every 4 Punishes to keep everything up.

http://ptr.d3planner.com/726582694

Of course this is just theorycrafting. Maybe it's going to fail miserably in-game :D

[Yelgis]

The only problem with relying on item procs is they are inherently weak on their own. 650% on the Knives belt sounds strong until you realise even your Sweep in a Roland's build is going to be doing 480 x 6(buff Rolands give is 500%) = 2880% if you then add FnR to that it becomes 2880 x 2.25 (FnR buff is 125% multiplciative) 6480%.

FnR would also boost the knife proc though so it ends up being 1462%. Still procs don't go crazy unless you have some way to scale them. Outside of FnR and elemental damage sources, the only classes that have sets that can buff item procs are Barbs with IK 6 and Wizards with Tals 6.

In the previous scenario an IK6 barb would have a knife from the belt that would hit for 2925% with FnR up. The Wizard on the other hand would have a knife that hits for 10,237%. The reason the wizard is so high is that Tal's offers a 600% buff when at full stacks of the 6p (so a x7 modifier to damage) that applies to everything. If you are looking to make a character that relies on item procs, your best bet may be a Wizard.

[joes]

So, apparently WD is no longer FOTM and wizards are?

[Cmoidudu]

(...) add FnR to that it becomes 2880 x 2.25 (FnR buff is 125% multiplciative) 6480%.
I assume that FnR is Focus and Restraint... but whatever buff they provide, there is no way i will multibox GR40+ without Unities.

What I'm trying to do here is finding a balance between damage and survivability. I already guess that I'll probably break the 10B+ crit barrier with my shield-bash Crusader team (with the zDPS WD buffs). But if I get constantly killed by the rift guardian, 10B+ crits won't help much.

With that Crusader build I suggest, they will have a 50% damage reduction from permanent Iron Skin, plus another 30-40% from the bracers. But, I admit, the build might not work. I'll try. What I also know is that the 2.2 is a huge damage buff for all classes, so I will most certainly trade a dps epic gem for a defensive one in my 2.2 setups.

[Yelgis]

Oh Cmoi, I didn't look at your build close enough. Spirit Guards are only for monks. Your Sader's won't be able to benefit from them because Saders don't have Spirit Spenders.

I completely understand your idea about being tanky and such. Unity doesn't really work that well in multibox though. Unity will only spread the damage effectively if it is only 1 character getting hit at a time. If all 4 are getting hit they will share the damage and it will be like all 4 are still taking 100% of the damage. Now on situation that only a single one gets hit then yes the damage splits 4 ways so all 4 take 25% of it.

Unity's biggest flaw is that the damage is calculated on the person hit. The damage number is determined and then it is split and shard to others wearing it. That means all 4 characters wearing unity have nearly identical toughness or the damage sharing become unfair. If a squishy wearing unity gets hit he will share the damage at his mitigation level. Meaning even a full toughness stacked tank would take the same damage as the squishy would. This is why you don't see the 4 person meta using them.

If the dps wear unity and take a hit the ZDPs will take a much larger hit than they would if they had taken the hit directly due to toughness differences.



My way around toughness problems is control. You cite Rift guardians being a problem. If you can manage to apply a 3 second stun/freeze/blind every .9 seconds or a 4 second one every 1.2 seconds, you can permanently CC even Rift Guardians. That is just the way the CC mechanics in this game work in a nutshell (I can explain them in depth if needed, but I have done that in the past in other threads).

In my WD team toughness is given by the Tiki Doc fearing everything that can be feared. This locks down most elite packs. The only challenge is getting to the pack to get it locked down before they activate stuff. Everyone who has played or played with a Fear doc knows they don't do much when it comes to the RG. That is because fear has no effect on bosses.

That is where the new Homonculus mojo comes in and why it is included in my builds on the 3 dps WD's in my team. I won't go over exact details on how it works, because I already did that in another thread. Basically though with that mojo I will be able to cast Sacrifice Black Blood in round robin once every .8 seconds on those three characters. That is enough to permanently stun even a RG. This makes the entire RG fight easy, they literally become a big hp statue you just beat on until dead. This works with only 3 WD's with the new Homonculus mojo.

I know this works because I have done it in season 2 with my Monks (they use blind which has the problem of letting the CC'd mob move a little so you are always having to reposition to keep them in the effect... stun and freeze don't have that problem).


For the Wizards, they use Frost Nova Cold Snap with 53.5% CDR or more. This makes the cooldown of the nova low enough on all 4 characters to be able to cast it every .9 seconds or faster in round robin. Once again it is permanent lock on even RG's. The advantage of the freeze is it works with Ancient Parthan Defender's to provide a large buff to toughness and since nova can be cast while moving it is easier to use than Sacrifice from WD's. The down side is wizards can't completely lock down elite affixes like a Tiki doc can. That is why I use APD's to make up some toughness in all my freeze builds.

[Cmoidudu]

Oh Cmoi, I didn't look at your build close enough. Spirit Guards are only for monks. Your Sader's won't be able to benefit from them because Saders don't have Spirit Spenders.
But you are right. Silly me :mad:


If the dps wear unity and take a hit the ZDPs will take a much larger hit than they would if they had taken the hit directly due to toughness differences.
At the moment my zDPS has far more toughness than the Crusaders. She's wearing Strength gear (meaning Armor), tons of Vitality and Life %, good resist all. Still, I tried SoJ's in place of Unity's and I don't like it.


If you can manage to apply a 3 second stun/freeze/blind every .9 seconds or a 4 second one every 1.2 seconds, you can permanently CC even Rift Guardians.
A Crusader team might be able to achieve this with 2p Roland bonus + spam Shield Bash. It needs testing.


In my WD team toughness is given by the Tiki Doc fearing everything that can be feared. This locks down most elite packs.
Yes that works really well ! :cool:

[Shodokan]

But you are right. Silly me :mad:


At the moment my zDPS has far more toughness than the Crusaders. She's wearing Strength gear (meaning Armor), tons of Vitality and Life %, good resist all. Still, I tried SoJ's in place of Unity's and I don't like it.


A Crusader team might be able to achieve this with 2p Roland bonus + spam Shield Bash. It needs testing.


Yes that works really well ! :cool:

A zdps WD and 3 roland crusaders should be able to do upwards into the low 50s with ease. Mannercookie talked about using that setup to get a quick para 600 and speed clear 40-43s.

[Devile]

Yeah, I'm going to try 4x crusaders and 3x + 1 WD to see how strong they are. Roland's seems to be doing insane damage. Tiki WD will take care of trash and elites, and round robin Shield Glare of RG. I'll record my findings :)

[Yelgis]

I would think playing Rolands in a mixed class situation would lead to all kinds of desync. Since Shield Bash causes your characters to dash forward and all.

[Devile]

Completely unrelated but I'll post this here, hope it doesn't get patched. Not a big deal, but now that Ramaladni's Gift stacks, there's a fun trick to make them tradeable again and extend the trading time. Just stack them on top of a gift that has the highest time. If u split the stack, every single one will be tradeable and have the same time as the first one. Even if u stack one that is already account bound, if u stack it with one that has time, it will "inherit" that and will be tradeable again. It will prolly even make "solo" gifts, tradeable with anyone as long as u have a gift that is tradeable with that person.

Doesn't really break the game or anything but dont think it was intended. Still, kinda helps specially in those cases were u forgot to move that gift to a mule and its just sitting there and cant be traded with other accounts when it's needed .

As for Roland's im worried about the dsyncs too, but is worth trying. Farming wizards right now tho.

[Cmoidudu]

I would think playing Rolands in a mixed class situation would lead to all kinds of desync. Since Shield Bash causes your characters to dash forward and all.
Yes it's exactly what happens.

I'll even consider playing 2 Crusader teams, one with Rolands for high level GRs, and another with a Condemn build for low level GRs, trials, and fast cleaning of Torment VI. Roland is a mess when monsters have too little life : I'm one-shooting everything in front of my characters, and then I waste resource while hiting the thin air.

Let's see if a better team spec appears, like Wizards s or WDs.

[Yelgis]

Thanks for the follow up Cmo. I saw your video too, definately looks like a hassle to play as a multibox team.