Witch Doctor

Vega

Vega

Full Member
Anyone playing one of these as their main?
Having played a necro to death on D2, the WD was the first class I jumped to when I started D3 assuming it to be a zookeeper character.
Well we all know now how badly pets level, I may as well be summoning kittens.
Trying other strategies now to make them workable and enjoying the challenge.
As an experiment I am playing a WD and Monk in parrelel through nightmare one area at a time.
Monk flies through like a lawnmower spamming crippling wave and tail kick...
Same area for WD, soul harvest, loc swarm spam, spirit walk the hell out of dodge, repeat...and it's taking two to three times longer.
I'm persisting in the hope a future patch beefs them up.
But this is clearly not a pet class, even my Monks mystic ally is a stronger pet than any on the WD which is pretty funny actually.
 
Agravaine

Agravaine

Professional Slacker
I have a 60 Witch Doctor in Inferno but I rarely play him.

I dislike the mana mechanic compared to other classes and the pets are woeful. The Monk pet is so much better than Witch Doctor pets, it's a joke.

The Garg make be able to take a few hits but the Mystic Ally does more damage, has more utility and can be recast at will.

Every other class has primary abilities which are free and/or generate resource for secondary abilities. The Witch Doctor's abilities all cost mana, even the primary abilities. Granted, they have several abilities, runes and passives which generate mana or reduce the cost but it still feels totally off to me, especially given the cost of secondary abilities.

Having said all that, if you can stick it out until level 54, variations of this build hit like a truck:

http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#afRdUT!UVT!acaZZZ

My gear is nothing special and I get 70k crits in Inferno Act 1.
 
Artanix

Artanix

Full Member
I had pretty much the exact same build in HC, but swapped out hex for horrify and jungle fortitude for grave justice. I used firebats until getting the famed zombie bears
 
Zed

Zed

Rogue Chimp
having switched my abilities around i find if i can manage mana (ie have things triggerign regen all the time) then i can go through normal mobs on nightmare fine. Rares and champions though are another matter.

WD needs some luvvin
 
Pictelf

Pictelf

Mistress of Forums
/sad admission
After hearing that I am tempted! Though tbh I probably need to be stuck at big D with Shug, getting my DH's arse handed to me finely sliced on a platter, displayed on a bed on my own entrails on a regular basis which will make me sulk and start a fresh char which will probably be a Witch Doctor or a Wizzy. I will get round to playing a Monk at some point probably once they have nerfed it *grin*. Stupidly I think its the Monk from Neverwinter nights that is putting me off. Irrationality rules...ok?
 
Artanix

Artanix

Full Member
Infact looking at this, my WD was quite different (before it died).

Here's the build:
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#afQdXU!ZVb!acZZbZ

With big bad voodoo, drop it when you face an elite/rare pack, and you have unlimited mana for the duration. Soul harvest if you need it, and spirit walk can also have a healing rune put in i think.

WD's are one of the strongest choices in HC at the moment, thanks to spirit vessel and the zombie bears, with BBV you can practically drop anything if your gear is good. I don't think they need a buff, but maybe some of their other skills could be given some love, as nothing even remotely compares to the DPS output of the bears.

Oh and you could probably switch out horrify, but its a HC build, a dead HC character does 0 dps :)
 
Zed

Zed

Rogue Chimp
decided to try this build. Lovely! even at level 42 and no bears this build can tear through everything without too much trouble.

Just have to keep mana regen at maximum though
 
Agravaine

Agravaine

Professional Slacker
I like the totem abilities and summoning loads of festishes but always find myself having to use them on trash just to get 4 skills on cooldown for the mana regen.
 
3

30ftSmurf

Full Member
The zero punctuation review inspired me to play a witchdoctor and name it yahtzee. Playing with no auction house use through normal atm & really enjoying it. I'm getting regular upgrades & occasionally using the blacksmith for fun.

I've stuck with poison dart as a main attack due to other abilities all costing mana (I have dire bats on an elective key to spam beefy single targets and run out of mana). I have been surprised by the cooldown on the zombie dogs given their survivability at times, sounds like I should probably ween myself off them anyway if they suck in later difficulties. Groping Eels, Spirit walk & Gargantuan are rounding out the build atm (not hit 30 and unlocked everything unruned yet, so not going to bore you with a build link).

Given some of the patch notes/comments coming out of the blizzard devs regarding item drops I may just run all the classes through normal untwinked and then start nightmare, though I do want to get more of a feel for how avoiding the auction house changes playstyle, so maybe I'll take the wd through nightmare/hell first.
 
Swither

Swither

Full Member
30ftSmurf said:
Given some of the patch notes/comments coming out of the blizzard devs regarding item drops I may just run all the classes through normal untwinked and then start nightmare, though I do want to get more of a feel for how avoiding the auction house changes playstyle, so maybe I'll take the wd through nightmare/hell first.
Click to expand...

What are they planning with item drops then? Worse? or better?
 
3

30ftSmurf

Full Member
Better. At the time of writing that there were two things on my mind that I'd read some blue posts on:

1. Buffing legendary drops
2. Concern over the rate of upgrades being dropped ('you must use the AH zomg!@!@!'-based whine) and also that bosses in nightmare/hell weren't dropping rares like they did in normal.

The patch 1.03 notes address both when it comes to late hell/inferno: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6262208

There was also this AMAA which (amongst other things) addresses issue 2 with respect to gearing from normal to hell: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6317360 - specifically http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6317360#misc & http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6317360#dropratesah

My rerun experiences have been that upgrades are coming at a fair clip regardless, but at the time I was thinking perhaps I'd park after normal & wait for 1.03 and collect 'leet rarez' off the act bosses in nightmare/hell. No such concerns or cares at the moment.
 
Artanix

Artanix

Full Member
makes sense, I found it strange when I killed Diablo in NM and then the butcher in Hell, that I got a total of 7 blues between the two. When I killed Diablo in normal, man, it was like christmas 10 times over!
 
Legs

Legs

Full of PvP Goodness
i may be wrong but i think yellows are a cert when u 1st meet a boss (which would be on normal) after that its just a random chance, i dont seem to get any yellows from any bosses and get them out of chests .....
 
3

30ftSmurf

Full Member
Got my witchdoctor to 60 & through hell this weekend. Big thanks to both Aggy & Artanix's builds in this thread, they really helped me begin to 'get' the witchdoctor & stop being both slow and giantly lame at the class.

I just had some fun smashing through the first few quests in act1 inferno (up to spiders now). Somewhat amusingly, the first elite pack I faced dropped me Manajuma's Ritual Cutter. I'm really enjoying how things are playing & have run all the side dungeons, melting all of the elites & boss packs I've met so far. Massive disclaimer: my monk had farmed up a fair amount of passable act1 int/vit/resall/mf loot which allows me to melt easy packs and kite without getting destroyed. I'm also regularly finding upgrades, which is novel.

Build/Items atm (all found on wd or monk):

http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Matranga-1478/hero/11536115

I must admit the mid 40s/early 50s were a really tough time. I really didn't like that the way I perceived the WD *should* play wasn't working. I wanted to sit behind a combination of pets & cc and just plink at stuff. With the 1.04 patch this may end up being possible & fun, but for right now it seems that the most enjoyable way for me to go about stuff is to go full out short-range burst with decent enough defenses/regen to stay toe to toe for a while and then get out & survive the cooldown kite. I imagine as my dps rises I can reduce defense again, I also imagine that the latter acts in inferno will hand me my behind.

General boss fights follow a pattern hinted at by Artanix. Drop big bad voodoo, spam bears, while using fear & spirit walk to position. Some packs mess with bears due to AI or abilities (fleeing mobs, waller, arcane, sheilding affixes etc) so I am using splinters to clear that up (or when out of mana). Chaining packs requires a bit of clever ability weaving/dancing/health globe use, but everything has been manageable so far. If everything messes up, spirit vessel tends to save my arse.

Given the kite-y nature of some fights, I've actually found the lack of pickup range pretty good, which is in contrast to my monk who really enjoyed having 6-12 yards of the stuff. Also finding health regen useful & would like to pick up a bit more, we'll see what happens.

It is a frustration that pets aren't too hot atm, and as the difficulty ramps up I can see the current strategy failing hard due to low dps, but for now I'm enjoying bulldozing through packs that made my monk soil himself. (though, as above, the wd has significantly better gear than the monk did at the start of a1!)
 
Agravaine

Agravaine

Professional Slacker
Patch 1.04 actually has me looking forward to playing D3 again and, more specifically, my Witch Doctor.

A pet class with pets that are actually useful, it's crazy but it might just work.

Until the patch is out I'll just have to content myself watching all the emo whiners crying about how the patch changes will ruin their build.

Damn you, Blizzard, for changing skills in a build which I have been forced to use and enjoy because my class is fundamentally broken. I don't want you to change my build, because I love it and I don't care that the changes will make lots of other builds viable or that my build will most likely still work with some minor adjustments. It doesn't even matter that I haven't even seen all the changes or tried the patch; you've made some numbers smaller, you've nerfed my class, you've ruined my life and this is the internet so I must cry like I've been captured by homosexual mountain men and made to squeal like a pig.
 
3

30ftSmurf

Full Member
I am eagerly awaiting the magic find changes blog post. Not for the changes, but for the delicious nerd tears that should come along with it :D
 
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