Ben's Blog

May 24

Witch Doctor Build Update

I’ve made significant progress in Diablo 3 now, so I thought I’d share how my build turned out, and what I’m currently doing. I’m level 51 and have just begun my Hell playthrough.

Skills

• Soul Harvest remains from my Normal & Nightmare mode builds, as one of the essential Witch Doctor casts. It buffs DPS immensely with 5 stacks. This time around, however, I’m using the “Siphon” rune which heals for every soul harvested rather than replenishing mana. There is a huge focus on health in the later difficulties, more so than on dealing damage (I’ve found).
  
  
• In the place of Haunt I’m now using Firebats with the “Dire Bats” rune. Firebats was previously in a hot bar slot but due to its high damage I’ve found it a serviceable secondary skill. Combined with the stacked Soul Harvest buff it certainly clears a path when things get hairy.
  
  
• My primary remains Firebomb, alongside “Roll the Bones” which allows the bomb to bounce twice. I did briefly return to using Poison Dart runed with “Fire Dart” but I’ve found the area damage provided by Firebomb more effective than the slightly higher damage but single-target dart.
  
  
• Mass Confusion now makes an appearance, with the “Unstable Realm” rune to reduce its cool down. Charming enemies into attacking one another is invaluable, allowing me to pick them off from safety while they dwindle one another’s health.
  
  
• I now use minions! I’d said in my last post that I didn’t like to micromanage pets, and this is true, but I’ve found that having minions around to take damage and provide some themselves is pretty essential in the higher difficulties. Better them than me! So I’m using Zombie Dogs runed with “Burning Dogs” which has them explode and deal some damage upon death, and the Gargantuan equipped with the “Restless Giant” rune which has him turn into an enormous tank with significantly increased damage and speed when confronted with either a unique or more than five enemies. 

Passives

• Spiritual Attunement remains from the last build. The Witch Doctor has a pretty limited mana pool, so any extension on it and increased regeneration is a boon.
  
  
• Jungle Fortitude reduces all damage taken by you and your pets by 20%, a pretty useful passive especially in Hell
  
  
• Zombie handler enables four zombie dogs to be summoned, and increases their health and the gargantuan’s by 20%

This is how my rotation currently works. As before they’re mapped to W,E,R and Spacebar. Dogs and Gargantuan are pre-cast before encounters, but I otherwise run in and cast Harvest and Mass Confusion before making my escape with Dire Bats and then hurling Firebombs from afar while my pets take the focus of damage.

Gear

Armour has been all about vitality and damage. My DPS was actually higher in early-nightmare but the importance of vitality meant swapping some gear out to increase my health pool and survivability. I’ve amassed a little bit of coin over last night, so I’m going to be trawling the auction house to improve my gear further. I’ll probably update once I’ve done that.

I need pets!

So my plan to not use minions fell in on itself when faced with the higher difficulty of late-nightmare and Hell. It was perhaps pretty inevitable that I would eventually need someone to mitigate the insane amount of damage that gets thrown around in the later difficulties, but at least I have a good deal of direct attacks in combat, meaning it’s certainly not a case of sitting back and watching the pets do all the work as I had feared.

May 18

My Witch Doctor Build (So far)

Just as a point of interest, here’s how I’ve built up my Witch Doctor so far. I’m currently level 30 in act III on my first Normal play through.

Skills

• Soul Harvest x 5 makes my DPS jump from 307.02 to 522.36 and with Siphon rune equipped to regain 343 life for every soul harvested. An effective way to quickly heal. If your mana pool is unsatisfactory you might want to use “Swallow your soul” which gives 27 mana for every harvested soul to a maximum of 135. I found this to be less useful than the health injection given my relatively quick rate of mana regen and pool size of 528.
   
• Haunt & Locust Swarm dealing 288% weapon damage over 2 seconds (Restless Spirit rune) and 360% weapon damage over 8 seconds respectively. Locust Swarm jumps to two targets instead of one (Pestilence Rune)
   
• Firebats (dire) for when things get too hectic, travelling up to 40 yards with 220% weapon damage dealt.
   
• Firebomb as primary left-click skill with negligible mana cost of 7 and dealing 85% weapon damage as fire to all enemies within 8 yards
   
• Poison Dart on skill bar, also with negligible mana cost of 7, with Spined Dart rune equipped to gain 17 mana every time a succesful hit is landed. Useful for stepping out of the thick of combat and picking enemies off to recoup lost mana.

Diablo III is gorgeous.

May 17

Diablo III

I got Diablo 3.

The servers were sketchy at the start. What online game doesn’t have some issues when millions of people are barging down the front door upon launch? Right now, they’re smooth, and I’m having the best gaming experience of 2012 so far.

Here’s how Jay Wilson addressed the complaints surrounding D3’s online requirement: They don’t see diablo as a single player game. It’s a game focused on co-op and multiplayer, the ability to drop in and out of each other’s game at a moments notice, interaction with the community at large. Swapping items, showing off your new skills to wow your buddies. It can be solo’d, but that’s not the focus of the game. It’s about slaying demons with your friends.

I think that’s an enormously fair line of argument. I’ve never played Diablo alone for any great period, and wouldn’t particularly care to either. The co-operative experience makes it. Would people complain if Left 4 Dead didn’t allow you to play through the campaigns offline with those terrible AI?

This is another example of the gaming community reacting to the boogieman of online play. Yes, we’ve been burned before, but that doesn’t mean we should react with knee-jerk outrage whenever a game requires a connection to play.

Diablo 3 allows you to pause when you’re in a server by yourself. That’s more than Diablo 2 via Battlenet ever allowed you to do. The online features of D3 have made the process of getting into a game extraordinarily easy, and if that means occasionally, at 3am, the server will go down for maintenance and I have to do something else (perish the thought!) then I’m okay with it.

I don’t like this article’s suggestion that everyone finds online play to be evil incarnate, and its attempts to stir the pot instead of giving a balanced, reasoned argument.

Also, there are some reports that various features aren’t working in Europe. Achievements are working, as are friends lists and all social features. Only the Auction house has yet to be activated. It’s a completely functional, brilliantly made game. The cinematic are ridiculously good, even for Blizzard.

It’s a shame that because it requires online, some people will be unable to or unwilling to play it. But it requires an adjustment of your perception of what Diablo is. It’s, by Blizzard’s definition (and their word is final because, hey, they’re making it) an ONLINE game.

You can’t play “Online Shooter 2″ at the caravan because the connection is weak? Same idea for Diablo 3. It would be ludicrous to boycott an online-only FPS because of the inability to play it offline, and the same applies here.