Goal: a setup that is more efficient than others based on real gameplay/numbers, with higher survivability, that requires far less gear than others.
Hello, I'm a long time "hard-core" gamer from other games and I love math (tho this game keeps turning up hidden mechanics). There are two ideas to keep in mind! Less kiting = more dpsing. Ability to cast across screen and past walls is better uptime than using short range, mana limited spells.
This was originally inspired by my attempts to take down Maltheal on Torment 6. I lucked into The Furnace very early (but this build isn't based around that) which does a great job of pushing him to low health quickly, but then it took several minutes to finish him off in which you are easily insta-gibbed by clouds put under you and his stunning charge (I had low dps and just 4.5M base toughness at the time). I decided to treat this problem like I do any heroic encounter -- ask yourself how to mitigate every major event.
For normal rifting I was doing a poison damage + zombie bears build for quite a while, but found the build listed here much faster. Zombie bears seem like great damage on paper, but have such limited range (and high mana cost) that their dps uptime is severely limited. Also this setup allows you to slot +20% damage and not have mana issues. I clear T4 very speedily with this setup with essentially 0 chance of dying. T5 is also safe feeling, but slower so I usually don't bother. I have cleared whole act bounties, bosses, and rifts in T6.
Talents/Skills:http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#geUlhX!fWSV!bZabaY How to get free zombie dogs - The 4th passive is optional - I often use circle of life to get 3 dogs then change it to either fetish sycophants, grave injustice, jungle fortitude, or bad medicine (for groups) The dogs do not despawn when the talent is changed. Spirit vessel is quite useful for a super high torment boss you're challenging yourself on.
* I use locusts: pestilence because they spread so much faster, and often are able to spread to places searing locusts will not if eg monsters are coming from several directions. Since my dots proc weapon abilities for me with eg furnace/TF pestilence tends to kill things much faster for me than searing.
* I prefer spiritbarrage-phantasm for several reasons. See math section 4 posts down.
*Pirhanas - frozen pirhanas is as good or better in some situations now that we're not running grave injustice.
The main idea
Mitigation
Between Spirit walk (3s immunity) and Horrify (8s of around +60% toughness) -- you have very high uptime on super high mitigation. EG horrify would toss me from 9.5M me up to 15M toughness, and you can optionally use a talent that lowers CD like grave injustice. Your dogs are also soaking part of your damage w/offhand. The spells used also crowd control with cold slows, and fear.
Damage
Math* -- look a couple posts down from this one, and throughout thread there are good posts.
I find that kiting less/none makes things die far far faster than they do for myself or friends who put in 150k more damage in exchange for half their toughness. They are slaughtered in T4+ while I can stand in fire, chuckle, and dps while they run around trying to stay alive until their health potion is up again.
Open with pirhanas (otherwise dots do not get the 15% unless recast), cast locusts if there are 5monsters+ (otherwise haunts first), haunt everything you can, keep your x3 phantasms down. If you have a weapon that procs damage like thunderfury/odyn, then haunt spam procs extremely high amounts of weapon damage procs. Phantasm can also proc your weapon's more than once per cast, and locusts have a chance to proc every time they spread. Furthermore Dots have a chance to apply the ability from a weapon like "The Furnace" on every tick.
This leads to a fairly instant cast playstyle where you can put up your dots + phantasms on the main pack, then proceed to haunt enemies around the room. If you are feeling overly tanky you can always swap out one of your two mitigation abilities to put in more damage.
Items - most useful (still a great setup without this).
1. Quetzalcoatl hat - double locust/haunt damage
IMO it is still a decent setup without this, but you will be limited in torment, the hat is a 40%-60% damage upgrade. Kadala is RNG, but fortunately this has a similar chance to drop to most WD hats.
Very useful items, that you can craft!
Craftables: +cold-weapon (Utar's roar), legs, feet, gloves, wrist, chest, shoulder, belt, off-hand.
1. Ashera's set (gloves/boots/legs): 100 resist, 20% life, all 3 followers appear often even in multiplayer. The followers contribute buffs (+3% damage on crit, +1.8% crit, +3% attack speed, +3%damage taken by monsters in puddle), furthermore they heal you, CC, distract monsters, do damage, and proc legendary powers from their items. Also elites hexed by Enchantress stay hexed the full 5seconds. I would use hex instead of attack speed aura due to dot mechanics.
2. Aughild's set (shoulder and wrist): -7% melee/ranged damage taken, +15% elite damage -15% elite damage taken
3. Other set such as craftable Demon's or Blackthorne (chest, belt): kadala gives out blackthorne, it is very common.
Other great options
Weapon: The usual Odyn/thunderfury, The Furnace, Azurewrath, Shard of Hate.
*Rhen'ho flayer (now that we get fetish, exploding toads have a super high proc rate with flayer and high damage even without +fire on gear. I would replace phantasm with toads if Rhen'ho flayer were your best available weapon).
Offhand: Ukhapian serpent (sends 25-30% of damage to zombie dogs). Thing of the deep (+20yd pickup radius) nice for high torment that dogs just can't survive on and will help buff your grave injustice and ability to pickup health globes. Homonculus will summon dogs for you as fast as they're killed on T5-T6, and at least they provide some distraction.
Belt: String of ears belt (large melee mitigation, ultra useful), or hwoj (locust swarm slows enemies 60-80%), or Lord Harrington/Witching-hour.
Neck: +Cold + crit + cd etc. Depending on your gear 10% crit may be better than +20% cold in this slot (and both of those two better than other stats), weapon procs like thunderfury will scale with your crit but not cold.
Ring1: of royal grandeur - set bonuses count as you having one more item, from horadric caches in Act 1
Ring2: stone of jordan +cold +elite etc. Tall Man's Finger is worthy of note for high torment (see below).
Gloves: Frostburn can be amazing with +10-15%cold and 35-45% chance to freeze enemies instead of chill them (most of our spells chill). Very rare drop.
Feet: Ice Climbers - immune to jailer/freeze. Very rare drop.
*Best mitigation pieces for Torment 6, if you didn't care about losing some ring damage, are likely to be string of ears + ukhapian serpent + tall man's finger ring. Because the mega zombie dog has 1.6million health vs. the 60k of normal dogs (summon via circle of life then swap passive), I've found this dog does survive on T6 for me against most monsters. The mega zombie now does more than triple the combined damage of normal dogs.
Fun facts about Dots
1. They don't scale with attack speed, at all, except for increase how fast you can cast them on more targets. Thus you can safely roll attack speed off your items into more useful stats like vitality or crit/crit-damage.This applies to many other spells too like grasp of the dead because it does "weapon damage" not based on sheet damage.
2. Crit chance and crit damage are averaged then multiplied by base dot damage. Eg 1+ (40%crit * 400%cd) = 2.6. So with 40% crit and 400% crit damage your dots do 260% more damage.
3. All damage from haunt/locusts/phantasm add up and shows one damage number once per second.
4. Since they don't scale with attack speed, they do more damage with a good 2hander than a 1hander+offhand. But offhand +10% crit and +skill bonus usually make 1handers equal-ish. Especially at lower gear levels a 2hander may be better.
6. Phantasm, haunt, and locusts all seem to follow this mechanic.
Upsides
Items are easier to come across than other builds, and mostly craftable.
I clear T4 very fast with this setup. And now clear T5 very quickly with the fetish sycophant change. I do have an amazing starmetal kukri (and carnevil mask), or 4set zuni that can be used -- but find both of these to be slower, clunkier,and less secure builds for my items. Think about how phantasm and haunt can be cast literally at the edge of your screen and often through some gates/walls - high dps uptime and low kiting means you do more damage than you might assume.
Vampire bats in pet build has the same drawbacks of zombie bears -- short range and obnoxious to use. Also pet builds do not benefit from area damage, whereas phantasm/locusts/haunt do.
You can feel good about rerolling attack speed into vitality or other damage stats ;).
Caveats
My own gear/setup changes (like anyone's).
Edit: even with some of the proper gear pet build seems to do worse in many situations - not that I wouldn't replace spirit-walk or horrify with fetish army for faster clears if I had Zuni 4piece that did not require losing quetzcoatl.
To quickly clear Torment6 you need special set items of course, but even without them you can do T6 with good gear for this build (more than half of which can be crafted). There are comments in this thread attesting to this =D.
Pet build is very strong though for single target since the minions benefit from attack speed -- I do find dot build to be better overall, but pets are better at zerging down a couple lone elites. If you have all of the good items for a specific set like pets, that will be better of course.
Hey I didn't link profiles because people always change them (there's a little note about it in that wall of text up there) -- every build I see on here mentions gear a person no longer uses. EG my gear hops btwn my wizard and WD and is definitely not perfect. I will suggest pieces though.
EDIT: the gear suggestions are now in opening post.
Math*. 1: Why phantasm is better than well of souls.2: Cold-dots vs pet spec damagePart3: How to calculate if a weapon is an upgrade, and the value of +elemental damage.
Part1: Why spirit barrage phantasm is better than well of souls.
This part needs editing and testing as I am now uncertain as to the exact mechanic, but in play I personally find phantasm much much faster. And I have tried both on multiple occasions. Here is the general logic.
Phantasm does not scale with attack speed as well, but it does similar damage as well of souls at 2 monsters (when are there less than 2 monsters around? we are talking about for average fastest clearing speed). Phantasm is an aoe slow. Phantasm only needs to be cast 3 times per 5 seconds (takes 2.1s with a 1.4aps weapon), meanwhile you can move around and cast more dots without losing any dps. Since you cast phantasm less often, mana is not an issue. Well of souls uses more mana than most players regenerate and can lead to small downtimes in casting - thus not giving you the full 100% of its damage while casting. Phantasm is an area effect slow on all monsters in it. Well of souls glyph extra 3 spirits seem to have slightly less range than the main spell and can fall short of far monsters.
Part2: Cold-dots vs pet spec damage
NOTE: this was done before the fetish change. now fetish sycophants are great for this build too.
Some parts of this are very napkin and may have some errors, but should illustrate some ideas of where this originated from. Assuming no elemental bonuses.Pet and cold builds could all pick up big bad voodoo and +20% passive, so let's leave that out for simplicity. I do not want to spend an additional two hours researching and doing numbers right now to make this part perfect =|.
Cold build (quetzcoatl):haunt 666%, Locust 270-370% (poison or fire). Phantasm 405%.PIrhanas 50% (+15% that never expires)
Pet build: Vampirebats 425%, 4xFireDogs 128%, FProtectorGarg 215% (862% while active), sycophants360% (assuming avg of x2), Fetish army240% (1440% while up). (passives: fetish sycophants, +20% damage, +50% dogs/garg, GI)
Poison/zombie bears: didn’t bother since this is a clunky non contender imo.
Cold total: 1714% x1 haunt, if haunt hits x2 targets on one cast then 2480%.
Also area damage* and you can cast multiple haunts*, If you assume 70% area damage and an average of 2monsters within 10yards, that's already 14% more damage (pet spec would only get about 2.2% damage increase since only firebats procs area damage).
Real total: much higher with more than 1-2 monsters around.
Pet total: 1368 %, w/ Jeram w/85% is 1744%, w additional theo+tasker (w/45% pet attack speed) = 2529%.
Mostly single target. Pet's like to pick their nose part of the time. This does scale with attack speed better. Pets are stronger single target, but at least with dots you can snapshot crit on bosses.
Pet’s with Jeram and Theo (much harder to obtain pieces than x1 Quetz)?
You have GI CD reduction you say so your Garg/Army will be up more? Sure yes, but you probably don’t cast them on CD and furthermore pets are dumb and stand around a lot. You may have more than 2+ fetishes than mentioned, but even if you have 5 up they still don't aoe - and I'm aiming for average number here.
Your main nuke has a super limited and obnoxious range and you can be oomed by knockback monsters etc. Effective uptime on this is often much lower than 100%
Pets are mostly single target, even burning dogs aura is basically melee range – this is a game that thrives on aoe.
Pets do not scale with area damage statistic. EG it’s typical to have 50% of this from paragon and 15-20% on shoulders (no other viable dps stat for shoulder), etc. Easy to have 80% or more. Even 3 grouped monsters at 80% would net a bonus 32% area damage, if 6 monsters are gripped together then it’ll be +80% damage.
In this setup’s favor:
Every haunt cast is another 666% out there working for you. It will hop to a nearby monster when that one dies.
Can have essentially 100% dps uptime since dots don’t fall off, and phantasm only has to be cast x3 every 5second - meanwhile you can DoT more.
Haunt + Phantasm can literally be cast across the screen and past many walls/ wallers.
Cold spec procs more weapon procs if you have a special weapon.
In summary: this game is about speed aoe clearing, for which I often find pet builds to be overall unappealing unless you have all the exactly right gear.
Part3: How to calculate if a weapon is an upgrade, and the value of +elemental damage.***** MATH FOR WEAPON DAMAGE, +COLD, other *****
How to figure out what 100% weapon damage is for you, and if a weapon is an upgrade. Also how to see if +cold is worth the loss of another stat (it usually is).
Base weapon damage: (Weapon damage+OffhandDamage+OtherDamage) x (1 +(INT/100).
That is the damage on weapon NOT modified by its attacks per second (the number right under your "dps" on the tooltip), do not use the "dps" stat listed.
example: A 1.4aps sword that, rolled very well, has around +1330 - 1450 damage on it, and 1400-1850 total damage per hit (this number right under the "dps" number). But it will show 2275 dps. Use the 1400-1850 number, average these two to get 1625. Then add your offhand damage and any other damage, let's act like we have a fantastic offhand with +340 damage. Our total is now 1965.
So if your base weapon damage is 1965, and you have 8000 INT. It is 1965 x 81. ~160k is 100% weapon damage. So spells that say "I do 300% weapon damage" do around 480k baseline per hit before talents/buffs/etc.
This is why slower hit harder.. because they do more "base" damage. Most spells that do "1000% over 8seconds" like grasp of the dead, do not scale with attack speed at all as a result. Cooldown reduction is the attack speed for cooldown spells.
A strong 2hander may have 2650 base damage vs the ~1965 of 1hand+offhand. Though offhands do bring many other buffs too like bonus crit and skill damage, that greatly help to make up the difference.
When doing math on what item is best you really have to do the entire equation for both items or changes you're thinking about because like 20% cold isn't a straight 20% buff if you already have +30% cold from other sources. Also not 100% of damage is from cold.
*This may be wrong, feel free to correct me*. attack speed/aps removed for dots: ( Make sure you add those +1s in the crit and int part, this is to reflect that even with 0 INT you still do 100% normal damage.)
You can do something like
weapon damage(from all sources) * (1+(INT/100) * (1+(Crit x critdamage)) = basedamage
Then figure out how much of your damage is from each source
Cold = cold spells base damage * skill bonus * elemental bonus. Example: (phantasm + haunt (405+666)) * skill bonus (both of mine have around +28% to haunt/phantasm, making this part easier). * cold skill.
My numbers are 1071% * 1.28 * 1.19 = 1631% weapon damage per second from cold
Poison locusts = 270%
total: 1901%.
Using that example from earlier of 160k base damage for 100%, we didn't multiply it by crit. If you have 40% crit and 400% crit damage thats 1+ (0.4 * 400%) = 260% average damage buff from crit. Crit2.6 * 160k base damage = 416k average damage per hit.
This is 416,000 * 19.01 = 7.9M damage per second average before talents like pierce the veil - which would bring that up to 9.5M average per second. ALSO multiply by +elite damage for elites (eg +30% stone or jordan and +15% from aughild's brings this up to 13.7M). You can also snapshot crit-dots on bosses for better damage.
You pretty much need to re-do the whole equation to figure out if something is really an upgrade =|. Takes quite a while... like this post. Though it is usually not necessary.. it's helpful for analyzing weapons and +cold vs other stats.
PS: I did my 2hander vs 1hander --- the 10% crit on offhand made the 1hander come out even. If you add in that offhands can have more +skill to haunt, and that a 1hand Utar's has +cold.... the 1hand+offhand do higher "average" damage. This varies greatly based on your gear, EG 10% crit is much less valuable if you are a fresh 70 with only +200% crit damage. Someone with great gear often has +400-500% crit damage after paragon points.
Alas it seems dots, including phantasm, do not scale with attack speed (except for you being able to cast them faster). Leading to a strong 2hander actually making your dots hit harder than 1hand+offhand. Though I am sure that is somewhat mitigated by what special ability your weapon has. It is hard to give up the Ukhapian serpent buut it's interesting digging up these mechanics that blizzard fails to mention.
Offhands can have another 10% crit and bonus damage that does contribute to your dps though (as well as other abilities). But this generally means that slower weapons will do more damage for you in this setup. -- On consideration it's hard for any slow 2handers to beat out the bonus crit and ability bonus an offhand can offer, except for the very slowest base of 1.00second weapons (2hand mace).
Alas it seems dots, including phantasm, do not scale with attack speed (except for you being able to cast them faster). Leading to a strong 2hander actually making your dots hit harder than 1hand+offhand. Though I am sure that is somewhat mitigated by what special ability your weapon has. It is hard to give up the Ukhapian serpent buut it's interesting digging up these mechanics that blizzard fails to mention.
Are you sure about this? I was under the impression that abilities like this work the same as pets in the fact that they have a base proc rate or attack speed and the amount of damage each proc or hit does is based upon an average of your weapon damage and attack speed. For instance if you had 1.00 aps with your weapon and a tick did 1 million damage, than the same weapon with 1.50 aps would cause a tick of 1.5 million atleast this is what i've been lead to believe and I may be wrong it just seems silly to me that an ability would completely ignore a stat.
I'll try this build, I've yet to create a witch doctor, but I have EXACTLY the gear you suggested on my Wizard (Frozen Orb Build), Except for Head and off hand.
I've never played a WD before, and I thought the best builds were poisons, never imagined Cold was viable and that good
I'll try it because I'm tired of my nerfed cold wizard damage, and don't really like Fire (wich I have Cindercoat), Archon or AT build.
Yes Fitsu you can google it. I couldn't find other people's testing to confirm the non weapon speed scaling with phantasm, but there are threads about this with haunt. You are right that pets work the way you mentioned.
I still personally much enjoy this setup and the numbers/mechanics still work out well in its favor for me personally.
Since I'm back to having my gear on my WD most of the time: tho the main hands swap btwn thunderfury / mojo and the furnace depending on torment. 1hand + offhand for torment 3 or lower, 2hander for T4 or higher atm just due to the procs. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/justus-1571/hero/118874
Aye let me know your feedback Oni. Since attack speed doesn't scale the dots you'll def find some more use likely out of Ashera's in those Cain's slots.
If you don't have a strong proc weapon like Thunderfury/Odyn that makes you want to spam Haunt, you may find it beneficial to locusts, haunt, and put down x3 phantasms --- then watch the number ticking to see if your haunt was a critical and reapply if not. EG this will put the haunt alone (at least for me) from 2mil-ish to 9million ticks. Though I really just do this when it's down to one or two elites left. All of the dots phantasm/locusts/haunt add up and show a number just x1 a second, but you'll get to know your numbers.
Great read on the build. I was looking for a non-pet oriented build to start off my WD, and this looks like a great idea. However, I did read a bit of misinformation. You said that at high levels of gear, 20% cold damage is less valuable than 10% crit. For your current gear profile, here are some relevant numbers. Keep in mind they will be *slightly* different because I don't know your paragon point expenditures:
20% Cold Damage = 148,596 DPS increase
10% Crit (only available on glove/amulet) = 129,548 DPS increase
6% Crit (available on Helm, Rings) = 77,729 DPS increase
100% Crit Damage (available on amulet) = 146,892 DPS increase
If you are paragon 400 and max both crit chance and crit damage, these relationships don't actually change at all - 20% cold jumps to ~173k. 10% crit jumps to ~150k. 50% crit damage jumps to 85k, and 100% crit damage jumps to 171k.
Cold damage is a multiplicative stat and is *always* worth more than any other relevant DPS stat. Since you can effectively ignore attack speed (even more so than everyone else in the game can), you have much easier gear decisions to make. Cold > Crit Chance >= Crit Damage. Always.
And once you have a base level of damage to handle a given torment level's trash mobs, you can then add that Elite Damage % > Cold % > Crit Chance >=Crit Damage (1:10 ratio).
In case you were curious, your profile DPS shows up as 742k, your elemental DPS is 891.5k, and your elemental elite DPS is 1.28m. 44% (29 soj 15 aughild) elite damage is a *massive* increase in DPS.
Awesome, thank you I appreciate the feedback. Did you include that not 100% of your damage is cold, and a proc weapon like thunderfury scales with crit but not cold?
Curious, the profile dps shows differently on its face to me, are you taking out attack speed?
**
Schnub, at least for me I would go with
movement speed until you have 25% total (from all sources), then int
crit damage, then crit
whatever defensive
area damage -- this stat is quite useful for clearing clumped packs quickly.
Those numbers are straight off Diabloprogress so only apply to cold damage specifically. Depending on the proportion of your damage that is not cold, that number changes. If only 80% of your damage is cold, crit chance is already ahead of cold damage ( 118877 dps for 20% cold VS. 125229 dps for 10% crit). The breakpoint is around 90% Cold damage, though someone could math out the exact percentage.
Edit: This breakpoint also shifts depending on the existing cold damage you have. At around +50% cold damage, 10% crit is just flat out better, even with 100% of your damage being cold damage. This is because cold damage is additive with itself, where as other dps stats are increased in value by your added cold damage. +20% cold damage has the same dps value at 0% and 2000% +cold damage, but CC/CHD/AS all increase in value as you gain more cold damage.
Hi Pao! Thank you also, that's what I was thinking (along with crit scaling weapon procs).
And honestly if you're lucky enough to get a decent Thunderfury or other - for me it procs every 1-2seconds rapid fire as long as you're chain casting. Another part of what made me come up with this was looking at proc rates on different spells after I got TFury and realizing haunt has 1.0, and then that phantasm can proc multiple TF bolts.
Even without such a weapon I think it's a superior setup to most. Even now that I have a great starmetal kukri(nearly always fetish army and big bad voodoo) and jeram's hat (no gloves yet), in pet spec things still die much slower overall than they do for me in cold setup... and trying to get close to monsters with a ton of adds or arcane while channeling firebats... yuck. You're standing there channeling firebats to tickle monsters and summon fetishs, when you could be dot-ing things all around the room that are being tanked by your pets/followers/friends, or standing out of range of the vortex/arcane monsters range and still able to attack them.
So I do hope people get more out of this, with less gear required, than some other setups.
Yeah having Quetzalcoatl helps a lot, and this build is moreso about higher "overall" dps (and great survival). It def won't do quite as much burst in a 15second window vs blowing all our class cds. And of course it helps to have all items with +cold and +haunt/+spirit barrage.
I'm very glad you're liking it, even without the double damage dots.
I added a note about crit damage snapshotting in the original post. You may want to do this for bosses, rift bosses, or high health elites.
Even with +0% cold/poison/skills (though with quetzcoatl) if you snapshot locusts/haunt as critical with +450% crit damage. They will be ticking for 4212% of weapon damage every second. Then you can just keep your x3 phantasms down and profit. All of this multiplied by the 15% from pirhanas.
So the damage from this can also be very high single target. Snap shotting dots is also the reason people are able to do in the billions with Jade Harvester set.
Just one doubt here, you name Uhkapian Serpent as the best off hand for this build, yet I don't understand how do you get the dogs that soak your damage.
Great build anyway, I'm farming the leg mats atm to craft a few things and get it going. Thanks!
This is definitely an interesting build in terms of how "Circle of Life" gives you decoys.
I also do play Haunt (just for excessive infinite mana pool), my use is just spam Haunt to everything I see, and yeah I use Creeping Death as well. I was still trying to figure if I should bring in Locust Swarm Pestilence, however I do not use Pirahnado unless I'm asked to do so for Goblin Rifts, I also usually use Big Bad Voodoo Jungle Drums instead of the current Slam Dance, I use Jungle Drums because of situational awareness that we often move a lot (more than before, and I've always believed that we should be constantly moving ---hence the "Orbiter affix" came about, so did "Thunderstorm affix", in my opinion, is that we should be somewhat "constantly be moving to avoid things instead of "tanking up everything for almost any class", and I mean some people really don't move "at all".
Here's what I use and I use the Frozen Ground rune (Frozen Pirannas) to "amplify" and stall-away while you get DoTs going via Haunt, I also use it because it allows me to cast it more often on things I want to control.Yeah the skills I use is just really excessive mana supply, I realize that I could be doing a lot more with some of what you have there.
Good job writing up everything in such detail, will definitely try to implement some of your stuff into what I am currently using:(again, I don't really main WD, so I am not taking any build as for my own)
Those are some of my items on screenshot, I just didn't want to seem to post profile for irrelevance over with my other characters.
Pickup Radius from your Locket is amazing. I also, generally play with around 3 to 11 Pickup Radius as best I can for any class. I love reaching for Health Globes whenever I am fighting (ever since 1.0.3+ I valued highly on Life Regeneration and Health Globe Bonus, and I used to not be able to play with less than 10 Pickup Radius, just a habit)
The current setup I have is around 5k LoH, 13.5k LIfe Regeneration [after Paragon Points, still yet to be maxed on either of those two lines in its respective Points-tabs].
Tromp: it's in there, circle of life dogs do not go away when you change the passive. If you don't like changing passives this is a pretty good one, TBH I find that having 3 dogs is better than 15% mitigation, they tank the majority of monsters for you.
Lotware: thank you btw. I think you see this already, but I have some advice - in this setup, since dots do not scale with attack speed (except in how fast you cast them), big bad voodoo is less helpful than it seems since the 20%AS adds 0 damage to spiritbarrage-phantasm,locusts,haunt (tho obviously it buffed your well of souls).
I think you'll like this also because of the no mana problems, and you can slot resentful spirit to haunt twice as a time. Sure well of souls does 490% weapon damage and scales with speed better, but phantasm allows you to slot +20% damage. Adjusting for attack speed in any given 5seconds with 1.4attack speed WellOfSouls will do 3430% over 5seconds, whereas phantasm will just do 2430%(including 20% talent) - on the upside phantasm is an aoe damage/slow, you aren't casting wellofsouls 100% of the time but phantasm can be up while dot-ing (higher uptime/use), the 20% damage is buffing other spells you have too, it only takes about 2seconds to put down x3 phantasm.. in the meantime you can dot more things,
I like frozen pirhanas too, they seem to be an 80% slow. I don't find I personally need that though since phantasm aoe-slows, and I can spirit-walk or horrify away monsters who catch me in a corner, But if you just want to make sure your 15% damage from pirhanas gets on a lot of targets, your best bet is zombie pirhanas. Either way pirhanas is very low damage (50% per second) comparatively to the other abilities so I usually use it for the CC and/or making sure the 15% debuff is up. I mainly had pirhanado in there because I tend to use grave injustice and things that are gripped die faster(due to area damage), and I play a lot of multiplayer with a wizard who loves things gripped together.
Hey Vid, yeah it takes some gear to fast clear any high Torment o'course. Though I just have +20% cold myself, I have great weapons and good overall gear.
If you find or know of a setup that is overall faster at baseline without niche gear, I'm very interested. As far as I could tell/math this is the most overall optimal I've come up with without various special items (tho quetz definitely helps). Though there is a lot of attempt here to take into account the realistic average situation while gaming by things like dps uptime, mana limitations, time penalty due to death, etc (eg zombie pile on looks great on paper if you had unlimited mana and monsters never moved from one place or attacked you with arcane/walls/etc, but alas =|).
Like if you assume someone has 0 special legendary abilities on gear, are there better setups when dealing with realistic conditions? There are a lot of variables there like fight length , elite/monster abilities and preferences for melee range or being far off...whether you like some challenge or just want to 1 shot every monster.. etc
And Creeping Death - monsters are either in combat with you or not. If they drop out of combat, aka stop chasing you, all debuffs are removed from them. Otherwise we could teleport into a zones, cast locusts on a group, then teleport somewhere else and repeat -- go back to all of those zones 5 minutes later and collect our loot =|. If they are still in combat the dots last 5minutes.
Hello, I'm a long time "hard-core" gamer from other games and I love math (tho this game keeps turning up hidden mechanics). There are two ideas to keep in mind! Less kiting = more dpsing. Ability to cast across screen and past walls is better uptime than using short range, mana limited spells.
This was originally inspired by my attempts to take down Maltheal on Torment 6. I lucked into The Furnace very early (but this build isn't based around that) which does a great job of pushing him to low health quickly, but then it took several minutes to finish him off in which you are easily insta-gibbed by clouds put under you and his stunning charge (I had low dps and just 4.5M base toughness at the time). I decided to treat this problem like I do any heroic encounter -- ask yourself how to mitigate every major event.
For normal rifting I was doing a poison damage + zombie bears build for quite a while, but found the build listed here much faster. Zombie bears seem like great damage on paper, but have such limited range (and high mana cost) that their dps uptime is severely limited. Also this setup allows you to slot +20% damage and not have mana issues. I clear T4 very speedily with this setup with essentially 0 chance of dying. T5 is also safe feeling, but slower so I usually don't bother. I have cleared whole act bounties, bosses, and rifts in T6.
Talents/Skills:http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#geUlhX!fWSV!bZabaY
How to get free zombie dogs - The 4th passive is optional - I often use circle of life to get 3 dogs then change it to either fetish sycophants, grave injustice, jungle fortitude, or bad medicine (for groups) The dogs do not despawn when the talent is changed. Spirit vessel is quite useful for a super high torment boss you're challenging yourself on.
* I use locusts: pestilence because they spread so much faster, and often are able to spread to places searing locusts will not if eg monsters are coming from several directions. Since my dots proc weapon abilities for me with eg furnace/TF pestilence tends to kill things much faster for me than searing.
* I prefer spiritbarrage-phantasm for several reasons. See math section 4 posts down.
*Pirhanas - frozen pirhanas is as good or better in some situations now that we're not running grave injustice.
My profile: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/justus-1571/hero/118874
The main idea
Mitigation
Between Spirit walk (3s immunity) and Horrify (8s of around +60% toughness) -- you have very high uptime on super high mitigation. EG horrify would toss me from 9.5M me up to 15M toughness, and you can optionally use a talent that lowers CD like grave injustice. Your dogs are also soaking part of your damage w/offhand. The spells used also crowd control with cold slows, and fear.
Damage
Math* -- look a couple posts down from this one, and throughout thread there are good posts.
I find that kiting less/none makes things die far far faster than they do for myself or friends who put in 150k more damage in exchange for half their toughness. They are slaughtered in T4+ while I can stand in fire, chuckle, and dps while they run around trying to stay alive until their health potion is up again.
Open with pirhanas (otherwise dots do not get the 15% unless recast), cast locusts if there are 5monsters+ (otherwise haunts first), haunt everything you can, keep your x3 phantasms down. If you have a weapon that procs damage like thunderfury/odyn, then haunt spam procs extremely high amounts of weapon damage procs. Phantasm can also proc your weapon's more than once per cast, and locusts have a chance to proc every time they spread. Furthermore Dots have a chance to apply the ability from a weapon like "The Furnace" on every tick.
This leads to a fairly instant cast playstyle where you can put up your dots + phantasms on the main pack, then proceed to haunt enemies around the room. If you are feeling overly tanky you can always swap out one of your two mitigation abilities to put in more damage.
Items - most useful (still a great setup without this).
1. Quetzalcoatl hat - double locust/haunt damage
IMO it is still a decent setup without this, but you will be limited in torment, the hat is a 40%-60% damage upgrade. Kadala is RNG, but fortunately this has a similar chance to drop to most WD hats.
Very useful items, that you can craft!
Craftables: +cold-weapon (Utar's roar), legs, feet, gloves, wrist, chest, shoulder, belt, off-hand.
1. Ashera's set (gloves/boots/legs): 100 resist, 20% life, all 3 followers appear often even in multiplayer. The followers contribute buffs (+3% damage on crit, +1.8% crit, +3% attack speed, +3%damage taken by monsters in puddle), furthermore they heal you, CC, distract monsters, do damage, and proc legendary powers from their items. Also elites hexed by Enchantress stay hexed the full 5seconds. I would use hex instead of attack speed aura due to dot mechanics.
2. Aughild's set (shoulder and wrist): -7% melee/ranged damage taken, +15% elite damage -15% elite damage taken
3. Other set such as craftable Demon's or Blackthorne (chest, belt): kadala gives out blackthorne, it is very common.
Other great options
Weapon: The usual Odyn/thunderfury, The Furnace, Azurewrath, Shard of Hate.
*Rhen'ho flayer (now that we get fetish, exploding toads have a super high proc rate with flayer and high damage even without +fire on gear. I would replace phantasm with toads if Rhen'ho flayer were your best available weapon).
Offhand: Ukhapian serpent (sends 25-30% of damage to zombie dogs). Thing of the deep (+20yd pickup radius) nice for high torment that dogs just can't survive on and will help buff your grave injustice and ability to pickup health globes. Homonculus will summon dogs for you as fast as they're killed on T5-T6, and at least they provide some distraction.
Belt: String of ears belt (large melee mitigation, ultra useful), or hwoj (locust swarm slows enemies 60-80%), or Lord Harrington/Witching-hour.
Neck: +Cold + crit + cd etc. Depending on your gear 10% crit may be better than +20% cold in this slot (and both of those two better than other stats), weapon procs like thunderfury will scale with your crit but not cold.
Ring1: of royal grandeur - set bonuses count as you having one more item, from horadric caches in Act 1
Ring2: stone of jordan +cold +elite etc. Tall Man's Finger is worthy of note for high torment (see below).
Gloves: Frostburn can be amazing with +10-15%cold and 35-45% chance to freeze enemies instead of chill them (most of our spells chill). Very rare drop.
Feet: Ice Climbers - immune to jailer/freeze. Very rare drop.
*Best mitigation pieces for Torment 6, if you didn't care about losing some ring damage, are likely to be string of ears + ukhapian serpent + tall man's finger ring. Because the mega zombie dog has 1.6million health vs. the 60k of normal dogs (summon via circle of life then swap passive), I've found this dog does survive on T6 for me against most monsters. The mega zombie now does more than triple the combined damage of normal dogs.
Fun facts about Dots
1. They don't scale with attack speed, at all, except for increase how fast you can cast them on more targets. Thus you can safely roll attack speed off your items into more useful stats like vitality or crit/crit-damage.This applies to many other spells too like grasp of the dead because it does "weapon damage" not based on sheet damage.
2. Crit chance and crit damage are averaged then multiplied by base dot damage. Eg 1+ (40%crit * 400%cd) = 2.6. So with 40% crit and 400% crit damage your dots do 260% more damage.
3. All damage from haunt/locusts/phantasm add up and shows one damage number once per second.
4. Since they don't scale with attack speed, they do more damage with a good 2hander than a 1hander+offhand. But offhand +10% crit and +skill bonus usually make 1handers equal-ish. Especially at lower gear levels a 2hander may be better.
6. Phantasm, haunt, and locusts all seem to follow this mechanic.
Upsides
Items are easier to come across than other builds, and mostly craftable.
I clear T4 very fast with this setup. And now clear T5 very quickly with the fetish sycophant change. I do have an amazing starmetal kukri (and carnevil mask), or 4set zuni that can be used -- but find both of these to be slower, clunkier,and less secure builds for my items. Think about how phantasm and haunt can be cast literally at the edge of your screen and often through some gates/walls - high dps uptime and low kiting means you do more damage than you might assume.
Vampire bats in pet build has the same drawbacks of zombie bears -- short range and obnoxious to use. Also pet builds do not benefit from area damage, whereas phantasm/locusts/haunt do.
You can feel good about rerolling attack speed into vitality or other damage stats ;).
Caveats
My own gear/setup changes (like anyone's).
Edit: even with some of the proper gear pet build seems to do worse in many situations - not that I wouldn't replace spirit-walk or horrify with fetish army for faster clears if I had Zuni 4piece that did not require losing quetzcoatl.
To quickly clear Torment6 you need special set items of course, but even without them you can do T6 with good gear for this build (more than half of which can be crafted). There are comments in this thread attesting to this =D.
Pet build is very strong though for single target since the minions benefit from attack speed -- I do find dot build to be better overall, but pets are better at zerging down a couple lone elites. If you have all of the good items for a specific set like pets, that will be better of course.
EDIT: the gear suggestions are now in opening post.
1: Why phantasm is better than well of souls. 2: Cold-dots vs pet spec damage Part 3: How to calculate if a weapon is an upgrade, and the value of +elemental damage.
Part1: Why spirit barrage phantasm is better than well of souls.
This part needs editing and testing as I am now uncertain as to the exact mechanic, but in play I personally find phantasm much much faster. And I have tried both on multiple occasions. Here is the general logic.
Phantasm does not scale with attack speed as well, but it does similar damage as well of souls at 2 monsters (when are there less than 2 monsters around? we are talking about for average fastest clearing speed). Phantasm is an aoe slow. Phantasm only needs to be cast 3 times per 5 seconds (takes 2.1s with a 1.4aps weapon), meanwhile you can move around and cast more dots without losing any dps. Since you cast phantasm less often, mana is not an issue. Well of souls uses more mana than most players regenerate and can lead to small downtimes in casting - thus not giving you the full 100% of its damage while casting. Phantasm is an area effect slow on all monsters in it. Well of souls glyph extra 3 spirits seem to have slightly less range than the main spell and can fall short of far monsters.
Part2: Cold-dots vs pet spec damage
NOTE: this was done before the fetish change. now fetish sycophants are great for this build too.
Some parts of this are very napkin and may have some errors, but should illustrate some ideas of where this originated from. Assuming no elemental bonuses.Pet and cold builds could all pick up big bad voodoo and +20% passive, so let's leave that out for simplicity. I do not want to spend an additional two hours researching and doing numbers right now to make this part perfect =|.
Cold build (quetzcoatl):haunt 666%, Locust 270-370% (poison or fire). Phantasm 405%.PIrhanas 50% (+15% that never expires)
Pet build: Vampirebats 425%, 4xFireDogs 128%, FProtectorGarg 215% (862% while active), sycophants360% (assuming avg of x2), Fetish army240% (1440% while up). (passives: fetish sycophants, +20% damage, +50% dogs/garg, GI)
Poison/zombie bears: didn’t bother since this is a clunky non contender imo.
Cold total: 1714% x1 haunt, if haunt hits x2 targets on one cast then 2480%.
Also area damage* and you can cast multiple haunts*, If you assume 70% area damage and an average of 2monsters within 10yards, that's already 14% more damage (pet spec would only get about 2.2% damage increase since only firebats procs area damage).
Real total: much higher with more than 1-2 monsters around.
Pet total: 1368 %, w/ Jeram w/85% is 1744%, w additional theo+tasker (w/45% pet attack speed) = 2529%.
Mostly single target. Pet's like to pick their nose part of the time. This does scale with attack speed better. Pets are stronger single target, but at least with dots you can snapshot crit on bosses.
Pet’s with Jeram and Theo (much harder to obtain pieces than x1 Quetz)?
Part3: How to calculate if a weapon is an upgrade, and the value of +elemental damage. ***** MATH FOR WEAPON DAMAGE, +COLD, other *****
How to figure out what 100% weapon damage is for you, and if a weapon is an upgrade. Also how to see if +cold is worth the loss of another stat (it usually is).
Base weapon damage: (Weapon damage+OffhandDamage+OtherDamage) x (1 +(INT/100).
That is the damage on weapon NOT modified by its attacks per second (the number right under your "dps" on the tooltip), do not use the "dps" stat listed.
example: A 1.4aps sword that, rolled very well, has around +1330 - 1450 damage on it, and 1400-1850 total damage per hit (this number right under the "dps" number). But it will show 2275 dps. Use the 1400-1850 number, average these two to get 1625. Then add your offhand damage and any other damage, let's act like we have a fantastic offhand with +340 damage. Our total is now 1965.
So if your base weapon damage is 1965, and you have 8000 INT. It is 1965 x 81. ~160k is 100% weapon damage. So spells that say "I do 300% weapon damage" do around 480k baseline per hit before talents/buffs/etc.
This is why slower hit harder.. because they do more "base" damage. Most spells that do "1000% over 8seconds" like grasp of the dead, do not scale with attack speed at all as a result. Cooldown reduction is the attack speed for cooldown spells.
A strong 2hander may have 2650 base damage vs the ~1965 of 1hand+offhand. Though offhands do bring many other buffs too like bonus crit and skill damage, that greatly help to make up the difference.
When doing math on what item is best you really have to do the entire equation for both items or changes you're thinking about because like 20% cold isn't a straight 20% buff if you already have +30% cold from other sources. Also not 100% of damage is from cold.
*This may be wrong, feel free to correct me*. attack speed/aps removed for dots: ( Make sure you add those +1s in the crit and int part, this is to reflect that even with 0 INT you still do 100% normal damage.)
You can do something like
weapon damage(from all sources) * (1+(INT/100) * (1+(Crit x critdamage)) = basedamage
Then figure out how much of your damage is from each source
Cold = cold spells base damage * skill bonus * elemental bonus. Example: (phantasm + haunt (405+666)) * skill bonus (both of mine have around +28% to haunt/phantasm, making this part easier). * cold skill.
My numbers are 1071% * 1.28 * 1.19 = 1631% weapon damage per second from cold
Poison locusts = 270%
total: 1901%.
Using that example from earlier of 160k base damage for 100%, we didn't multiply it by crit. If you have 40% crit and 400% crit damage thats 1+ (0.4 * 400%) = 260% average damage buff from crit. Crit2.6 * 160k base damage = 416k average damage per hit.
This is 416,000 * 19.01 = 7.9M damage per second average before talents like pierce the veil - which would bring that up to 9.5M average per second. ALSO multiply by +elite damage for elites (eg +30% stone or jordan and +15% from aughild's brings this up to 13.7M). You can also snapshot crit-dots on bosses for better damage.
You pretty much need to re-do the whole equation to figure out if something is really an upgrade =|. Takes quite a while... like this post. Though it is usually not necessary.. it's helpful for analyzing weapons and +cold vs other stats.
PS: I did my 2hander vs 1hander --- the 10% crit on offhand made the 1hander come out even. If you add in that offhands can have more +skill to haunt, and that a 1hand Utar's has +cold.... the 1hand+offhand do higher "average" damage. This varies greatly based on your gear, EG 10% crit is much less valuable if you are a fresh 70 with only +200% crit damage. Someone with great gear often has +400-500% crit damage after paragon points.
Offhands can have another 10% crit and bonus damage that does contribute to your dps though (as well as other abilities). But this generally means that slower weapons will do more damage for you in this setup. -- On consideration it's hard for any slow 2handers to beat out the bonus crit and ability bonus an offhand can offer, except for the very slowest base of 1.00second weapons (2hand mace).
I've never played a WD before, and I thought the best builds were poisons, never imagined Cold was viable and that good
I'll try it because I'm tired of my nerfed cold wizard damage, and don't really like Fire (wich I have Cindercoat), Archon or AT build.
My profile: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/theoni-1389/hero/9794418
I still personally much enjoy this setup and the numbers/mechanics still work out well in its favor for me personally.
Since I'm back to having my gear on my WD most of the time: tho the main hands swap btwn thunderfury / mojo and the furnace depending on torment. 1hand + offhand for torment 3 or lower, 2hander for T4 or higher atm just due to the procs.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/justus-1571/hero/118874
If you don't have a strong proc weapon like Thunderfury/Odyn that makes you want to spam Haunt, you may find it beneficial to locusts, haunt, and put down x3 phantasms --- then watch the number ticking to see if your haunt was a critical and reapply if not. EG this will put the haunt alone (at least for me) from 2mil-ish to 9million ticks. Though I really just do this when it's down to one or two elites left. All of the dots phantasm/locusts/haunt add up and show a number just x1 a second, but you'll get to know your numbers.
Great read on the build. I was looking for a non-pet oriented build to start off my WD, and this looks like a great idea. However, I did read a bit of misinformation. You said that at high levels of gear, 20% cold damage is less valuable than 10% crit. For your current gear profile, here are some relevant numbers. Keep in mind they will be *slightly* different because I don't know your paragon point expenditures:
Cold damage is a multiplicative stat and is *always* worth more than any other relevant DPS stat. Since you can effectively ignore attack speed (even more so than everyone else in the game can), you have much easier gear decisions to make. Cold > Crit Chance >= Crit Damage. Always.
And once you have a base level of damage to handle a given torment level's trash mobs, you can then add that Elite Damage % > Cold % > Crit Chance >=Crit Damage (1:10 ratio).
In case you were curious, your profile DPS shows up as 742k, your elemental DPS is 891.5k, and your elemental elite DPS is 1.28m. 44% (29 soj 15 aughild) elite damage is a *massive* increase in DPS.
nice work on the buld! tryin it out right now, works great, what paragon points you recommend?
regards
schnub
Curious, the profile dps shows differently on its face to me, are you taking out attack speed?
**
Schnub, at least for me I would go with
movement speed until you have 25% total (from all sources), then int
crit damage, then crit
whatever defensive
area damage -- this stat is quite useful for clearing clumped packs quickly.
Edit: This breakpoint also shifts depending on the existing cold damage you have. At around +50% cold damage, 10% crit is just flat out better, even with 100% of your damage being cold damage. This is because cold damage is additive with itself, where as other dps stats are increased in value by your added cold damage. +20% cold damage has the same dps value at 0% and 2000% +cold damage, but CC/CHD/AS all increase in value as you gain more cold damage.
And honestly if you're lucky enough to get a decent Thunderfury or other - for me it procs every 1-2seconds rapid fire as long as you're chain casting. Another part of what made me come up with this was looking at proc rates on different spells after I got TFury and realizing haunt has 1.0, and then that phantasm can proc multiple TF bolts.
Even without such a weapon I think it's a superior setup to most. Even now that I have a great starmetal kukri(nearly always fetish army and big bad voodoo) and jeram's hat (no gloves yet), in pet spec things still die much slower overall than they do for me in cold setup... and trying to get close to monsters with a ton of adds or arcane while channeling firebats... yuck. You're standing there channeling firebats to tickle monsters and summon fetishs, when you could be dot-ing things all around the room that are being tanked by your pets/followers/friends, or standing out of range of the vortex/arcane monsters range and still able to attack them.
So I do hope people get more out of this, with less gear required, than some other setups.
Yeah having Quetzalcoatl helps a lot, and this build is moreso about higher "overall" dps (and great survival). It def won't do quite as much burst in a 15second window vs blowing all our class cds. And of course it helps to have all items with +cold and +haunt/+spirit barrage.
I'm very glad you're liking it, even without the double damage dots.
Even with +0% cold/poison/skills (though with quetzcoatl) if you snapshot locusts/haunt as critical with +450% crit damage. They will be ticking for 4212% of weapon damage every second. Then you can just keep your x3 phantasms down and profit. All of this multiplied by the 15% from pirhanas.
So the damage from this can also be very high single target. Snap shotting dots is also the reason people are able to do in the billions with Jade Harvester set.
Great build anyway, I'm farming the leg mats atm to craft a few things and get it going. Thanks!
I also do play Haunt (just for excessive infinite mana pool), my use is just spam Haunt to everything I see, and yeah I use Creeping Death as well. I was still trying to figure if I should bring in Locust Swarm Pestilence, however I do not use Pirahnado unless I'm asked to do so for Goblin Rifts, I also usually use Big Bad Voodoo Jungle Drums instead of the current Slam Dance, I use Jungle Drums because of situational awareness that we often move a lot (more than before, and I've always believed that we should be constantly moving ---hence the "Orbiter affix" came about, so did "Thunderstorm affix", in my opinion, is that we should be somewhat "constantly be moving to avoid things instead of "tanking up everything for almost any class", and I mean some people really don't move "at all".
Here's what I use and I use the Frozen Ground rune (Frozen Pirannas) to "amplify" and stall-away while you get DoTs going via Haunt, I also use it because it allows me to cast it more often on things I want to control.Yeah the skills I use is just really excessive mana supply, I realize that I could be doing a lot more with some of what you have there.
Good job writing up everything in such detail, will definitely try to implement some of your stuff into what I am currently using:(again, I don't really main WD, so I am not taking any build as for my own)
Those are some of my items on screenshot, I just didn't want to seem to post profile for irrelevance over with my other characters.
Pickup Radius from your Locket is amazing. I also, generally play with around 3 to 11 Pickup Radius as best I can for any class. I love reaching for Health Globes whenever I am fighting (ever since 1.0.3+ I valued highly on Life Regeneration and Health Globe Bonus, and I used to not be able to play with less than 10 Pickup Radius, just a habit)
The current setup I have is around 5k LoH, 13.5k LIfe Regeneration [after Paragon Points, still yet to be maxed on either of those two lines in its respective Points-tabs].
Thanks!
1) CMWIZ PL91, [EU]PL62 Crit NatsHelm; 2) 0-CD Dogs since MID-FEB 2013 PL44;
3) "Stunball Barrage" (Tball+F@W) Vengeance DH PL43 (1slot for H.Globe + PUR slot);
4) Lazy-Dbl-LS Monk PL48
5) Fundamental Barb (least played)
Lotware: thank you btw. I think you see this already, but I have some advice - in this setup, since dots do not scale with attack speed (except in how fast you cast them), big bad voodoo is less helpful than it seems since the 20%AS adds 0 damage to spiritbarrage-phantasm,locusts,haunt (tho obviously it buffed your well of souls).
I think you'll like this also because of the no mana problems, and you can slot resentful spirit to haunt twice as a time. Sure well of souls does 490% weapon damage and scales with speed better, but phantasm allows you to slot +20% damage. Adjusting for attack speed in any given 5seconds with 1.4attack speed WellOfSouls will do 3430% over 5seconds, whereas phantasm will just do 2430%(including 20% talent) - on the upside phantasm is an aoe damage/slow, you aren't casting wellofsouls 100% of the time but phantasm can be up while dot-ing (higher uptime/use), the 20% damage is buffing other spells you have too, it only takes about 2seconds to put down x3 phantasm.. in the meantime you can dot more things,
I like frozen pirhanas too, they seem to be an 80% slow. I don't find I personally need that though since phantasm aoe-slows, and I can spirit-walk or horrify away monsters who catch me in a corner, But if you just want to make sure your 15% damage from pirhanas gets on a lot of targets, your best bet is zombie pirhanas. Either way pirhanas is very low damage (50% per second) comparatively to the other abilities so I usually use it for the CC and/or making sure the 15% debuff is up. I mainly had pirhanado in there because I tend to use grave injustice and things that are gripped die faster(due to area damage), and I play a lot of multiplayer with a wizard who loves things gripped together.
If you find or know of a setup that is overall faster at baseline without niche gear, I'm very interested. As far as I could tell/math this is the most overall optimal I've come up with without various special items (tho quetz definitely helps). Though there is a lot of attempt here to take into account the realistic average situation while gaming by things like dps uptime, mana limitations, time penalty due to death, etc (eg zombie pile on looks great on paper if you had unlimited mana and monsters never moved from one place or attacked you with arcane/walls/etc, but alas =|).
Like if you assume someone has 0 special legendary abilities on gear, are there better setups when dealing with realistic conditions? There are a lot of variables there like fight length , elite/monster abilities and preferences for melee range or being far off...whether you like some challenge or just want to 1 shot every monster.. etc
And Creeping Death - monsters are either in combat with you or not. If they drop out of combat, aka stop chasing you, all debuffs are removed from them. Otherwise we could teleport into a zones, cast locusts on a group, then teleport somewhere else and repeat -- go back to all of those zones 5 minutes later and collect our loot =|. If they are still in combat the dots last 5minutes.