Season 3 Witchdoctor team plans/theorycraft - Discussion and Feedback

[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

- 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.