Season 3 Witchdoctor team plans/theorycraft - Discussion and Feedback

[joes]

Because previous thread (http://www.dual-boxing.com/threads/52101-Season-3-Witchdoctor-team-plans-theorycraft) went into automation and got locked, creating new thread to discuss the build itself.

[thedevilyouknow]

copy paste build so we dont have to refer to old thread

[Yelgis]

Here is a link to a build for my Tiki Zuni WD for the team:
http://ptr.d3planner.com/187529503

My other three Docs will run the following build:
http://ptr.d3planner.com/780791157

So no talking about keyboard and software macros this time around. I assume we can still discuss Isboxer keymaps as long as they don't automate gameplay.

[Cmoidudu]

Double post sorry

[Cmoidudu]

Dude I don't know, your theorycrafting is good, but still at GR40+ the rift guardian hit like a truck... and your characters seem a little weak there.

Some rift guardians will just ignore your pets, teleport, and one-shoot one of your characters, if not the whole team. -_-

[Yelgis]

Dude I don't know, your theorycrafting is good, but still at GR40+ the rift guardian hit like a truck... and your characters seem a little weak there.

Some rift guardians will just ignore your pets, teleport, and one-shoot one of your characters, if not the whole team. -_-

I'm not sure you read the original thread entirely or if you did you missed the part about the new Homonculus mojo allowing the three jade builds in this team to round robin Black Blood Sacrifice to keep the RG stunlocked the entire fight.

The whole point behind this team setup is toughness. Just like every leaderboard group pushing grifts uses a lock doc to keep elites locked down to make progression easier, my team will build on that and then use the other 3 docs to lock down the RG's and other annoying mobs as well. That is something a lock doc cannot currently do (outside of zero cooldown zdog specs using legacy gear in non-seasons).

[Cmoidudu]

Oh I'll be very glad to be wrong. At the moment, my zDPS locks elites properly, but RG is another matter. It would be cool if that "Summon a dog every 2 seconds and then it explodes and stuns stuff for 3 seconds" works, but...

We'll see in 2.2 how it really works.

[Magicme]

Plenty of other class combos can perma-CC rift guardians. I hadn't noticed the Homunculus change, but it's a really good idea and the 0.9s stun * 3 covering the 2 second respawn for dogs is sound.

I had survivability issues in the past when multiboxing WDs at 36-37+ Grifts, even with a Tiki doc. My gear wasn't super good and I didn't practice it very much, so I'd be interested in seeing the potential with this setup in 2.2.

[Yelgis]

Indeed it is sound Magicme. I have a zero cooldown zombie dog WD on non-seasons using some legacy gear from my time at release. Using zerodog there is no issue locking down a RG with Black Blood Sacrifice. Now with the new Homonculus the same can be done by multiboxers using at least 3 characters without legacy gear.

You are also right about other classes being able to do it, but I think WD still is the best because it requires no CDR whatsoever. The other two classes that can stunlock the RG (Wiz with freeze and DH with actual stun) require high amounts of CDR (59% for Wizard and I believe even more for DH). The other two classes that can CC the RG (Sader and Monk) use blind which still allows the RG to move around a little so it is a bit more annoying thatn hard stuns/freeze. Barb gets the short end of the stick in the fact that they have a great 4 second stun for the purpose, but like DH/Wiz it takes a lot of CDR to round robin and it has an additional flaw in that it requires the Barb to actually do an animation to use the skill. This means Barb multiboxers can't cast it while running without desyncing their characters (Saders have this same issue and theirs is directional without the shield for Shield Glare).

Utlimately, I feel WD will have the best option for CC round robin in 2.2. DH and Wizard are probably the next best two classes with Monk falling just after them. Sader and Barb are probably the worst in that regard. The main issue with Barb is not having a dps spec that can integrate the stun very well. All the other classes can use the stun much more reliably in a decent spec.

[Cmoidudu]

WD is a very good class for locking AND adding damage to the 3 other dudes...

+30% from Big Bad Voodoo (100% uptime)
+20% from Haunt / Poisoned Spirits (100% uptime)
+15% from Piranhas / Piranhado (100% uptime with Creeping Death passive)
+20% from Mass Confusion / Paranoia (~70% uptime)
+20-30% from Strongarm bracers with Piranhas / Piranhado (~60% uptime)

[Yelgis]

Exactly Cmo, I will be using everything on that list but Mass Confusion in my team in season 3. The big thing to remember from that list is all of those bonuses stack from multiple WD's with the exception of BBV. Also in 2.2, there is now the 15% damage from all sources rune for Zombie Dogs, which also stacks with multiple WD's.

[Devile]

Have u guys found a party damage calculator? That would be AWESOME for us multiboxers cause it's really hard to find what's best in terms of PARTY DPS. Sure, we can always follow a rule of thumb of adding more damage buffs and debuffs but that may not always be the best for the party in terms that we might get more party damage overall by using certain buff instead of certain debuff. Gems, skills, items, etc. Would be amazing to have a calculator that considers all classes buffs, debuffs, items, gems, etc. so it's a lot easier to decide what gives us more party damage.

[joes]

Have u guys found a party damage calculator?
I doubt there are any, unfortunately. Even single-player tools are scarce and I never heard of d3planner before as well.

I had idea of writing genetic algorithm for D3 that'll find most efficient build ever for a class, but never had chance to get past preparational stage due to lack of time (and interest, honestly).

On other hand, I might look into it. Having open source project that can help theory-crafting would be good to have for sure.

[Yelgis]

Yea I don't know of any. D3 planner is something I just recently found and I think it is rather new. How it currently looks is different from just a week or so ago when I first found it, so I think the author is still improving it.

Writing something that could take all the variables in to question would be pretty complicated I would imagine. Even character sheet stats like D3 planner gives you isn't an accurate representation of how a build will perform. You need to do actual testing and such.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Even character sheet stats like D3 planner gives you isn't an accurate representation of how a build will perform. You need to do actual testing and such.Agreed. The temporal aspect is the hardest to understand as there are so many stacking variables, not the least of which is your keyboard inputs. ;)

[Cmoidudu]

Also in 2.2, there is now the 15% damage from all sources rune for Zombie Dogs, which also stacks with multiple WD's.
Interesting.

On my zDPS, I might want to give up Mass Confusion for this, because I can't have the 20% debuff from Mass Confusion up 100% of the time (so 15% all the time is better), and also, as stated elsewhere, the character can't cast Mass Confusion while moving. He stops for maybe half a second, and then resumes moving, which is an annoyance in terms of multiboxing.

[Yelgis]

Indeed and since my build is using Homonculus anyway it is easy to include the cold Zdogs to get the 15% buff. I feel it is better than mas confusion myself. Extra pets doing some minor extra damage but the buff they add is the real reason to use them.

[Las]

Yelgis have you tried this build out at the PTR an if so how high did you reach at Greater rifts?

[Devile]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU40gV5tPb0

Uses some of the ideas here and does pretty good solo. Imagine with a group.

[Shodokan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU40gV5tPb0

Uses some of the ideas here and does pretty good solo. Imagine with a group.

Looks like it'd be possible to get REALLY high with quad doc setup, the only problem is that it will be very mob type dependent. If you get exarcs you'll get wrecked if horrify doesn't stop them mid charge.

[Yelgis]

No I haven't tried this in practice. I only tested out some basic functionality like set bonuses and mechanics of skills and buffs. The theorycraft is sound, but actual playtesting still needs to be done.

One advantage the multibozer has over a normal lock pet doc group is the ability to CC from range with Sacrifice. Not sure how much of a difference that will make in practice, but it will be worth play testing.

[Cmoidudu]

I might switch my interest to Witch Doctors after all. I have a couple of questions...

- Is Haunt + Poisoned Spirit bonus stacking with 4x Witch Doctors ? Which means 20% x4 = 80% damage increase ? The tooltip says "An ennemy can only be affected by one haunt at a time", but is this one haunt per Witch Doctor, or one haunt per ennemy ?

- Any chance that the Fetishes are sending a dagger from a Sash of Knives every time they attack ? Yes I want to use that belt :D

- Or I will want to use some Haunting Girdles, depending on the answer to the first question ;)

I did some more theorycrafting, and I noticed that a Crusader can reach 1B+ dps from Shield Bash + Pound but this is very hard to achieve (I know what I'm talking of), when in the meantime a Witch Doctor can achieve about 2B+ dps while sitting ducks, from Fetish Army + Legion of Daggers plus summoned Fetish Sycophants (and 6p of Zunimassa).

Then I'll see how I can manage the survivability of the team.

[Yelgis]

To answer your questions.

Yes Haunt stacks from multiple WD's. Both the dot, the damage buff from the poison one, and the 2p proc work across all the WD's in the group using it. The same is true for almost every single WD damage buff. So Cold zdogs, Piranha damage buff and Mass Confusion all stack. The only ones that don't are BBV (neither the attack speed or the damage bonus of Slam dance will stack) and I am not sure about Hex since I haven't tested it (the damage buff only works while the enemy is hexed into a chicken so I am not sure if multiple hexes can apply to a single target).

Pets don't trigger Sash of Knives or any other item proc for that matter. If you are going 2p Jade and using Poison Haunt as your main spam ability you probably want the belt that makes it hit two targets. 2p Jade Haunt is extremely strong at single target but relies on the belt and area damage to be able to make up for it's poor aoe. That said Area Damage does work with the 2p set bonus, so it is very strong with Haunt.

You can't really fit 6p Zuni into a WD team very well. You should probably want to use the Homonculus mojo on any WD team and that means you can't use the Zuni mojo which makes it much harder to hit 6p Zuni. FnR rings are probably going to be the best thing you can wear as well so that means no Zuni ring or Rorg. So your best bet is to focus on 2p Jade and use supporting items like Quetz helm, Swamp Land Waders, etc.

To make my team tougher, I have an idea of using the Homonculus on all 4 of them instead of just 3. Yes you can get away with only 3 of them needing it, but with it on all 4 you can go from casting Sac every .7 seconds down to every .5 seconds. That may make it easier to keep large groups controlled. The other part of the idea is to swap bracers out to Ancient Parthan Defenders and somehow work Spirit Walk back into my builds.

The goal would then be to SW into the pack and start stunning in order to get the APD defense buff.

I don't have the new mojo's on live right now to be able to test the team effectively from a stunlock perspective. I will most likely play Wizards in season 3 because I don't have any geared Wizard teams atm. I have a partially geared WD team already on non seasons and there is nothing locked into season 3 that would really benefit a WD team, so I will start over with something new for S3.

[Cmoidudu]

There's a WiseyGaming dude streaming 4x WD on Twitch.

I would have done a different setup, but still it's nice to see how a lot af Zuni WD can do. With about a hundred fetishes, it seems that less than a third of them are hitting, while the rest are sitting ducks....

[Devile]

Same old story. Fetishes AI suck. Open maps are fine, but once u have close corridors, half of them will do nothing reducing their effectiveness.

[Yelgis]

Which is why my plan only had Sycophants passive in it and was more focused on a lock doc + 3 Jade 2p haunter's for single target damage. I will still try it later, but right now I am having a blast with my Wizard team.

[Devile]

That kinda kills the WD fun for me. Sure Jade does a ton of damage and is prolly the best build, but I really like the petdoc relaxed playstyle and sucks that we can't multibox it efficiently. U hit a wall in GR really fast and sadly that is still the case in 2.2. All this stuff they add to improve pet builds but the AI is really stupid. Makes no sense to me.

[Ellay]

So I've been working on WD's, was overall really happy with them but running into some problems now. I have 0 Dagger of Darts, which makes their main build so much less powerful.
I can probably do grift 35, maybe a little higher but it's just brutal without it. Let alone needing 4, and on top of that needing ancient to really be effective. It's frustrating when you can jump on a different class and already hit grift 40+ without the dependence on such a rare item.

Rift Guardians go down very fast, but trash clearing is not as smooth.

BBV stacks if you use different runes, can get it up to a 3 stack using health regen / mana regen / damage bonus, giving your team +60% attack speed. It turns the entire situation silly, sheet DPS should double but the damage you start putting out is insane. The drawback is popping the totems together the buff doesn't show up sometimes for 5 seconds, sometimes never at all for me. I think it's a problem with trhowing down multiple- I've tried to space them out but still it's not consistent.

Probably shelving this team for now.

[Devile]

I'm doing 37-38 quite easily with crap gear. 1 tiki WD and 3 WDs with junk items, just 2 parts of Jade, Quetzalcoatl, T&T and DEX/STR F&R. That's it. I just poison Haunt the whole screen and watch them die. Oh, also some Fetishes to help around, but that's about it. I'm farming the new Homunculus so I can permastun the RG but so far is fairly easy to do 35+. Only 1 SMK non ancient and the rest have random ancient swords just for the damage.

Gizzard is a must tho cause they die very fast whenever something jumps u. I'm using Haunt + Poison Dart (the one that stuns) on all. 2 piece Zuni on the Tiki WD but it's far from a decent setup. F&R does the trick I guess cause Haunt melts everything. I'm aiming for something like this:

http://www.d3planner.com/682771651

Obviously change BBV runes so they all stack. Not too convinced about Creeping Death passive, may change it to something Fetish Sycophants and go with Hauting Girdle or Witching Hour for belt . Tiki WD uses Zuni, not really zDPS. I'm sure I can do 40. Higher will require decent items.

[Ellay]

I guess I don't understand the build, it's 0 AE, besides piranha which isn't really ae damage anyways. The dogs blow up but I would hardly say that's a damage dealer.
Maybe your F&R is making Haunt do insane single target dps?

I don't think this can scale as well as other builds is another concern, but interested to see!
Was close ot getting 6 piece harvester on all, and was planning on running jade to farm for items. I think other classes deserve a shot though instead of trying to "make" this one work.

[Devile]

I'm not much of a theorycrafter but I like to check what others do, test ingame and improve it. Yelgis did a nice work on this post (http://www.dual-boxing.com/threads/52101-Season-3-Witchdoctor-team-plans-theorycraft) and I can see leaderboards are using something similar. Several GR50+ have been achieved with similar builds. The 2 piece Jade set bonus is very strong and the debuffs stack with multiple WDs. Combined with other buffs, debuffs and F&R, u deal a ton of damage. Add Fetishes and CC Tikidoc and u do pretty good.

[Ellay]

What is your Haunts hitting for?
My Carnevil poison darts are doing from 30-100+ mil per shot, depending on what buffs are active. Trying to compare that to haunt which I think would need to be pumping out close to a billion damage per haunt to even compare.

The only way to maximize the fetishes for damage is to get them to shoot darts, otherwise up to 50% of them just stand there.

[Devile]

Hard to tell but with some buffs/debuffs I can see 40+ mil ticks. That's Haunt alone, Fetishes do their own damage. Now, Haunt jumps to other targets once they die and u dont need to keep Haunting the same target, so AoE is fairly decent. They keep getting damage even offscreen. I dont need line of sight for Haunt, nothing blocks it, so overall its better skill than Poison Dart. Don't need to worry much about position like with Poison Dart and your dumb Fetishes being in weird angles not benefiting from piercing effect of the dagger. I just dont care whatever fetishes do, I haunt once each target and only worry about positioning for my survivability.

That's why I only have Fetishes as passive or with the belt and not wasted as a skill. They are high bonus damage and distraction. Main damage/debuff is Haunt. Now, something is hitting pretty hard cause I just did 42 fairly easy and again, my gear is not great ... just 2 piece jade set, tnt and quetzal mask. The rest are random legendaries that dont even have secondary effects ... cain pants with aughild bracers :P whatever I had so they weren't naked.

PS: GR37 Rift Guardian dies in like 1 minute.

[Zwizm]

That play style sounds pretty relaxed Devile. I may have to try that while I try to catch up on some episodes. Of course I would love to have DoD/Carnevil be viable one day since the potential is there for some 50+ GR's, but not until they fix the death lag.

[Devile]

The main problem with Carnevil again are Fetishes. They are too damn stupid and u can't benefit from it if they are so close to the target or around corners and a lot of their attacks are blocked by objects or hit 1-2 targets. Pets AI is broken still. That's why I rather use something like this where I'm more in control and Fetishes are secondary ... they still deal crazy damage but I'm not relying 100% on them. It's kinda relaxing with trash, but with elites its all about positioning your tiki WD. U can't just chill and forget about it since u are so damn squishy ... 1 mistake and its a full team wipe.

[Ellay]

Tried out just doing haunt, and hilariously it does better than Carnevil. I think it's the focus/restraint giving it that extra boost.

[Yelgis]

Good to see you guys are actually working with actual teams of this instead of just my theorycrafting.

I started a team of Docs and was gearing them using the shards from my Wizard tea, but I still need a tiki helm for one of them and a few other gear options before I plan to really play them. Busy with the semester wrapping up atm, so I haven't really been playing anything lately and even my wizard teams is languishing.

[Ellay]

I don't understand how the build does the damage it does. It's still subpar but I'm sure can be refined further.

[Yelgis]

A couple of things Ellay.

First, almost all of the WD damage buffs stack. So using 4 WD's with Poison Haunt and running cold zombie dogs is a 140% overall damage increase for the party. Then you have BBV Slam dance (which doesn't stack so only one doc needs it). and Hex (not sure if this one stacks as I haven't tested it, for even more damage buffs.

I added it all up in earlier posts and the damage bonus from just toxin gems and class skills can get into percentages in the 200%+ range. Adding things like Quetzcoatl helm with 2p Jade and FnR rings gets the multipliers pretty crazy. Using D3planner.com I was able to estimate damage in a full party using all stacked buffs over 900 million from 2p Jade proc alone.

The only downside is it is mostly single target (2 if you use the Haunting Girdle), but the upside is that it does work with area damage.

[Ellay]

Are we 100% on the cold zombie dogs? I did some limited testing and it seemed like my damage was the same using 1 set of dogs vs 4 sets of dogs.
I ran out into the field in act 1, let the dogs hit stuff - noted highest damage after about a minute, did the same with 4 sets of dogs and it seemed the exact same.

BBV does stack, just need to use different runes. The totems that stack are Slam / Rain / Ghost. It adds 60% IAS as well as the 30% increased damage. Popping it on a boss is silly sauce and makes for amazing RG kills.

I only have 2 char with the quetz, but all have at least 2 pc jade and the damage seemed pretty good. The AoE pack clears are just brutal and there is not much defense that this build offers for affix's. If somehow able to speed up trash clears we could get this build to be a high contender.

[Ellay]

Also wanted to note. I tried out 3 WD and a Delsere's Wizard for the S3 energy twister clumping of monsters as well as all the slow time bubbles for stuns which gives the build it's ranged defense.
Spamming out poison darts from far away worked quite well. It needs Dagger of Darts to be very effective which I do not have any of currently. Ergo making the build frustrating compared to others :)

[Yelgis]

Hmm I will test out the BBV stacking as I was under the impression only the extra effects from the runes stacked with different ones, not the base attack speed.

In my testing with Zdogs they did stack, but I may have misinterpreted something and I will do the testing again.

[Ellay]

do the triple BBV stack !! :) the power you have for those 20 seconds is glorious.

[Devile]

Yeah, always known the attack speed stacks unless they changed something.

[Pazgaz]

@Yelgis: your tiki doc doesn't seem to include horrify. Am I missing something here?
http://www.d3planner.com/187529503

[Yelgis]

Yea sorry that was an old build. Horrify should have replaced Spirit Walk. If Zdogs doesn't stack than it can replace those. It was never a fully finalized build, rather it was just a concept I was working on.