Hey all,

After buying my WD a bunch of shiny new items, I'm still feeling pretty frustrated with him. Either I have no idea how to play the WD, or there's something just nagging me in the back of my mind. Regardless, I'm tempted to build up my monk or barb, but I'm currently limited by everything decent being so ridiculously expensive.

I see that Metta has a BiS thing going for monks, and I'll poke around at it, but I just wanted to get an idea as to which of my 2 level 60 characters you guys think will be easiest / cheapest to start running in inferno.

(Also, if you have any obvious critiques on my WD, please let me know. I tried upgrading some more gear today, but any useful rare is massively expensive).

Thanks!

How much gold do you have? I can see some "cheap" upgrades you could get but cheap depends on your budget.

With reflects damage being nerfed on pets, you may want to keep your WD. Unsure how much DPS your dogs, bears, and jumbo doll thing do but it may just be worth it.

Well, you doc does about 2x the damage I do, so I'm a bit surprised you're having "issues" ... granted, I'm "happy" that I can do MP2 and you may not be happy at that level, but from what I can tell if you wanna roll its gotta be a barb.

Just like d2 there was hammerdin and all others its basically the same way here.

I played a skelly man there and was content to go a bit slower than the others with my army in front of me. Closest way of being a skellymancer here is the witchy doc ... kinda like i'm "used" to it.

To get the WD advice, you should mention what's causing the frustration. Are you having survival issues, or want to do more effective DPS? I'm no WD expert, but it would help to know what the problem is.

As far as deciding whether to be a Monk or Barb, what are you looking to get out of a character? For solo farming efficiency, WW barbs are tough to beat. The throw or hammer barb builds can also be fun. A tanky sword and board barb would probably be the cheapest to gear since you don't need any specific gear at all.

There isn't as much variety in the popular monk builds, but FoT + sweeping wind is still a great. If you want to be useful in a team, nothing beats constant overawe for DPS boosting. There's also the build with infinite tempest rush + bells, but I'm not sure if that gets expensive or not viable at high MP levels.

As far as a cheap build to farm low level MP inferno, I think either the barb or monk have options. You don't need to have crazy IAS or crit unless you go for a specific build or high MP levels, so gear can be found relatively cheap.

I guess the biggest thing I have right now on WD is the conflict between how I imagined the class and how it's evolved. Right now it seems that the game encourages strong AoE up-front damage. The favorite build I've found many people using right now is similar to what I have now (Bears + grave injustice), but this is what I imagined playing a WD would be like: (not a perfect example)build Basically, strong pets with a focus on ranged attacks and damage over time. But then you move and kill slow, which affects farming speeds, and you get what I have now. I suppose the biggest thing right now that's making me bummed about it though (@sabin) is that my survival up-close is awful, and my DPS without bears is laughable.

Every time I try to swap up my skills a bit (drop bears for Well of Souls, for example, or swap out jungle fortitude) it ends up being a horrible mess.

@methrin I have about 11 million gold total.
@Khan and yeah, reflect damage is definitely my least favorite affix now. Every time I run into one, I just fall over and die a lot.

I also just think my biggest annoyance right now is that I want my hellfire ring to make farming more efficient, but I can't solo crap over MP3 with the bears build.

Anyways, thanks all for your help. I'll definitely keep plodding along.

@Jhonka Do you feel like the 4th dog is necessary? I found that jungle fortitude worked out a lot better for me so my WD also got the benefit. The combination of that with health link dogs basically gives you the same 30% reduction to all damage that the melee classes have so it should be quite a noticeable difference.

Have you played much with dire bats? If you get used to the way they fly, they do almost as much dps as bears but you can have some really nice distance. The AoE range isn't nearly as large as bears, but I prefer keeping distance, and they cost way less mana.

Really though, if what's bugging you is that you can't play higher MP levels with a build based on what skills are interesting rather than efficient, you're probably going to run into the same issues on the other classes.

Well, here's a couple of suggestions for your limited budget:

My witch doctor

If you grab a manajuma knife WITHOUT a socket, you can get one with almost one thousand dps for 2-3 mils. It should be a great dps upgrade for any WD and it gives you precious life steal.

Next I would tell you to ditch the Zunimassa helm, it's worthless. A mempo with in is only about 1.5 mil and it gives guaranteed resists and % life, on top of the int, attack speed and socket.

Last but not least, if you truly want to make a summoner build, you might want to consider investing in life regen gear AND using the life regen rune on spirit walk as it benefits your pets and is the only way to "heal" your pets in a pinch.

I have been running a bears/grave injustice (absolutely petless) wd for the last week now and have been quite happy with it, but after reading ths thread, I kind of agree, it is missing that WD pet class feel. Then reading Sabin's post, I switched a few skills around and went with dire bats over zombie for a few runs (a3 mp2 only).

If you have the pick-up radius (mine's currently 38) dire bats do some great damage. They also cost less mana so its easier to use Pierce the Viel, than compared to bears. (Though I still prefer gruesome feast for the larger potential damage, plus I'm eating all those health globes instantly anyways). I notice, with bears I am always in the action getting 4/5 stack soul harvests, and with bats I need to run in and usually get a smaller amount of enemies.

They also cost less mana I also tried using the passive that gives zombie dogs with pick-up radius and that left a spell slot open for something more defensive like zombie wall or horrify.

A nice little change to feel more "witch doctery" but I still enjoy the upclose style of the bears (maybe because I've just played a lot of ranged with my dh?)

@methrin I'm a bit concerned about swapping to a Mempo; after using a dps/ehp calculator, I'd get a 5% boost in dps, but a 8-9% reduction in EHP (including the 55 all resist from the 3set). I'll look into the manajuma knife as well. thanks!

@sabin I'll give another go with dire bats (they're how I leveled).

I may consider swapping my follower too. I have a lot of fun with my CC scoundrel, but the templar/enchantress may prove better . Anyone have thoughts on those?

Posted by Jhonka at 11/04/2012 12:16 PM

@methrin I'm a bit concerned about swapping to a Mempo; after using a dps/ehp calculator, I'd get a 5% boost in dps, but a 8-9% reduction in EHP (including the 55 all resist from the 3set). I'll look into the manajuma knife as well. thanks!

I may consider swapping my follower too. I have a lot of fun with my CC scoundrel, but the templar/enchantress may prove better . Anyone have thoughts on those?

Mempo gives 70-80 resist. The only EHP you might actually lose is vit, in which case you can just get a mempo with vit.

@Jhonka

I don't mean to sound like a douche or anything, I enjoyed playing with you alot......

But you might actually not know how to play the WD, Its not even comparable to any other class. What makes me speculate about this is that you were using zombie dogs, which are by all means fucking horrible.

Hit me up and we can try to make you a build you enjoy sometime.

Don't be offended,
Buzz

@Buzzell no worries mate, I'm actually not that easily offended :-P I accept any helpful criticism.

@Jhonka Yeah, I do just want to help, it would be cool to run around with a kick ass witch doctor on my side.

@Buzzell I don't think zombie dogs are a bad thing to use. Well, I think they're a good thing to blow up, I should say.

@Jhonka The streamer cdxliv is going to be showing a WD build tonight at 6pm EST that he says can handle MP5 well, and farm low MPs quickly. The stats seem to be pretty close to what you've currently got on your WD:
http://i.imgur.com/Cyl1h.jpg

You may not even need to re-gear, but maybe you can pick up tips on a better build that would let you play the higher MP levels. If you can't see it live, I think they usually make the videos available afterwards.

@sabin Awesome! I'll try to catch it. Thanks!

@mindlessone , yeah, but as a thing that takes two skill slots, they're shitty.

i don't know much about wd, but judging by your gear, id say get some more crit chance if you can... i see both your rings don't have any... hit me up in game and i'll try to give you something that will hopefully help

Watching that stream now, btw. First part was interesting. No clue why the guy calls himself 444 though. weird.

@euggie I'll add you later this evening if you'll be on! Thanks :-D

Also, since the builds for speed farming and uber fighting are so different for WD, I'm thinking of something similar to this for machine / key runs... Linkage Any thoughts? That's more of a solo key-farming build; I'd probably swap out spiritual attunement for bad medicine to help with party survivability. Might also swap out ghost bomb for haunt, or something like pyrogeist / manitou for DOT while bears.

I'll give you my very opinionated 2c... use it... ignore it your choice. :)

I used to love my D2 necro with hoards of skeletons... and the WD is the closest we have.
That being said, of all the classes the WD bored me the most by far while levelling.
It frustrated me, and I found most builds just didn't work. This was my 2nd char, so probably 1.03 or earlier. So pets in any difficulty after Nightmare was completely useless.

On the other hand, in 1.04 my WD became one of the more fun classes to play.
Maybe not the most effective DPS wise, but I still enjoy him.

I'm bascially using all the pets (Dogs, Gargant and Fetish army), and pet skills (Zombie Handler, Fierce Loyalty)
I also use "The Gidbin" for even more Fetishes.

I have 55k HP, 400+ resist all and 2473 life/s. eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Bort-2619/hero/2210369
In 1.04 there was basically nothing except Mallot Lords that kills the pets.
Yeah, I have total junk DPS at the moment, but I can tank real good so he is very good for co-op.
All the gear he is wearing (Except for Vile Ward which I actually picked up) cost me about 2mil, and that was before 1.05 so should be even cheaper now.

Nothing fancy or new so far. Just took every pet related thing.

But the thing that actually made him fun to play is my primary: Plague of Toads (Afinity) along with Pierce The Veil gives me a good primary attack, if you can target the frogs. And then I use Zombie bears for bursts of damage.
This is obviously a very personal thing, but it was the change to plague of toads + bears that actually made me enjoy him after ages of trying different skills that just bored me.


So there... maybe a different option.

But all in all it depends on what makes your character "frustrating" to start with. :)