Hello!

Recently I got my witch doctor to level 60 (yay!) and spent around 800k on upgrading all my sub-60 items. I am currently sitting at around 32k DPS and ~550 AR, and am just about to finish Act 2. I have had no problems progressing so far, but that will definitely change when I hit Act 3. Before I invest any more time/money into my WD, I would like to know how effective WDs are at farming. I have seen some videos where WDs just cast Zombie Bears 2-3 times and elites just die, but the gear needed to do that seems way out of reach for me. I currently have around 5m thanks to some lucky 6-prop boots crafts, but I do not want to spend money on a decision that I could regret.

My other level 60s are a barbarian and a demon hunter. As far as I know, it is SUPER expensive to get a WW Barb to farm Act 3 efficiently, but once you have that, it's all cake from there. My problem is getting to a point where I can afford the gear to deck out my barb, and I was hoping to use my DH or WD for this purpose.

Please let me know whether or not you are satisfied with your WD farming, and why. A link to your profile would also help a lot, so I could use it as a model for my WD, should I choose to go with him.

Thanks in advance!

i have a level 60 WD, barb, and DH. the WW barb was the cheapest for me to gear and I solo'd inferno with him without much difficulty, after that I sold all my gear for roughly 3 mil. just depends how quick you want to farm. I only had around 600 all res, 750 str, 900 vit, and 40% crit chance. obviously not the best for farming but you could easily improve with a bit better shopping.

thinking about gearing my WD again, since i sold all his gear before 1.04 and want to try again now that they've been buffed. how much am I looking at spending to gear him to survive inferno (roughly)?

WD is bad farming back because it has instant damage.

acid rain only does 110% damage, and is very slow to launch, you would have to have enough damage to make it profitable.

Bears despite being a good power, the legendary necesesitas 20 yards to make decent progress. rings need attack speed.

apart the equipment is very expensive. for how slow it is.

WD personally not the best there is the first on the list are the barbarian and the DH.

I have 300 hours played with my WD I tell you from experience.

I have ~500 hours on my WD and I've found the reliability of damage along with survivability while using LOH + jungle fortitude to be effective. I survive off the damage I do so its not like tanking with a barb, and I never die unlike DH who get 1 shotted by white mobs in act 3...

Blackthorns ammy and pants are a good start

My WD farms Act 2 faster than my Barb, which has 4x the gold spent in gear.
My Barb can do Act 3 though... and my WD dies really quickly.

As I've not played much since pre-1.0.3 days, have the buffs to the WD not been enough? I'd like to finish leveling mine up but don't want to do it unnecessarily.

i bought my WD gear with the intention of magic find in mind and so far its pretty dissappointing. although i can farm a3, its a lot harder than I expected. 500-600k AR, 42k dps, 35k life, 1000 life regen, lots of mf

With your dps and AR you might want to try the GI build. I have about 38k dmg and 500-600 AR, and around 38k life. For this build you'll generally want high crit and crit dmg, and possibly a strong 2h or if you have the gold you should pick up a Thing of the Deep. You'll need at least 17 to gold pickup radius, but once you meet these requirements it's fairly simple to farm a3 with minimal deaths. Personally I take zombie bears, sacrifice with pride(for when i'm oom), zombie dogs with health globes rune (synergizes really well with gruesome feast passive), spirit walk with jaunt for survivability, soul harvest with the damaging rune, and horrify with the armor rune for survivability. Finally the passives are gruesome feast, grave injustice, and the third is really optional, but i prefer spirit vessel as it boosts your survivability by giving you an extra spirit walk for those uh-oh moments. Lifesteal and health regen are good to have, but only one of these is really necessary as most fights consist of horrifying pre-emptively for the buff, spirit walking and soul siphoning, then bear spam to melt everything. Once you run oom, sacrifice the dogs and immediately resummon. Repeat as things come off cd and you're basically set. It's a very fun, largely safe, high-dmg build and it's changed the game for me.

No class is cheap and the witch doctor is no exception to this. The main difference is, you can work with lower end gear on a witch doctor due to the fact that you're a ranged class as long as you play smart. But eventually, a decent geared barb will destroy a extremely well geared witch doctor in terms of farming speed.

In my experience, WD has higher survivability per gold cost of gear. It's not necessarily as fast as farming with some of the other classes (gear being equal), but I find it more enjoyable.