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Zombie King

Despite initial preconceptions, this build isn’t a pet build, but rather a build that plays up a particular theme – the use of spells with human zombie effects! The idea is to create the ‘feeling’ that you are commanding a legion of undead humans without actually having any pets.


Zombie Charger is the bread-and-butter of the build, taking the Wave of Zombies rune for more damage and extra zombie-ness.

Acid Cloud with the Corpse Bomb rune keeps in-line with the Zombie theme while giving us a reliable way to deal significant damage to enemies at ranges which Zombie Charger can’t deal with.

Grasp of the Dead is runed with Desperate Grasp. I really wanted to take Rain of Corpses, but since we have no pets, we need all the crowd-control we can get, and are slows will always be useful. Fortunately, it still feels like a zombie spell since it’s zombie hands that are coming out of the ground!

Wall of Zombies is runed with Pile On for zombie-death-from-above – 800% weapon damage in a linear area-of-effect sounds too good to pass up on, with a modest cooldown as the spell’s only mitigating factor. Pile On should still be available often enough to deal with those special circumstances which warrant it.

Horrify is runed with Face of Death – the lack of pets means that we need this panic button if badguys get too close for comfort.

Spirit Walk is taken because we need more than one panic button, especially for harder difficulties. It is runed with Honored Guest so that even when we are not in danger, we can use the spell to top up our mana (this build is fairly mana-heavy).


As this build doesn’t use pets and relies on two fairly mana-intensive spells as its primary sources of damage (Wave of Zombies and Corpse Bomb), we need Gruesome Feast and Spiritual Attunement to help ease our mana costs. We don’t take Vision Quest because Desperate Grasp is a little anti-synergestic with it. Instead, we take Spirit Vessel, which makes our two panic buttons more reliable AND gives us a ‘get out of jail’ card.

I've also been following D3's development since Day 1. It's not the first time I've done this either, I've followed the development of quite a few games since their announcement, even WarCraft 3's.

None, however have had a wait quite as long as Diablo 3's, I think!

D3's development has been particularly curious...it's rare that developers do so many about-faces in terms of design. It's certainly been amusing to hear of the number of times in D3's development where some new innovation is heralded as great forward-thinking design, only for Blizz to do a double-take and revert that innovation (like the idea of the player not going back to town so often to keep the pace of action up).

It can sometimes be a little worrying because of how some of their earlier systems had really GLARING problems (such as the attuned/unattuned Runestone system) - it makes me wonder how they did not spot those flaws and felt comfortable sharing that particular idea with fans. Even the current system isn't perfect. They had gone and lovingly made all the skill icons colour-coded back when there were only three categories, and it was a really easy way to identify which skill belonged to which category.

Now it looks like a mess, and the names of the categories can be very unintuitive. I know that if I were a total newbie, I'd EXPECT a spell called 'Hydra' (that summons an elemental Hydra) to be under 'Conjuration', and a spell called 'Storm Armor' to be under 'Defensive'.

I know that Blizzard's been using this system for quite some time now, maybe even around half a year, but it still feels like it's lacking polish. I can't get over how sloppy the categorisations of skills feel.

Still, interface-fighting aside, at least the core gameplay of combat will remain unchanged, and that's where D3 will really shine.

4-player co-op is fine, IMO. The game being very visually 'loud' was not an uncommon fan complaint back in the day, and Blizzard themselves acknowledged this. Having more than four players running around and throwing skills all over the place is going to be confusing enough as it is :P.

I know if may seem like a small change to allow even 1 more slot for all 5 classes to be represented, but then what when they add expansions? What if there are 4 more classes over two expansions? I'm glad they picked 4 and stuck with it. It'd also make the game much easier to tune in terms of difficulty throughout all Acts/Difficulty levels.

One option could be that Inferno will always scale based on what your current level is. And since you need to beat Hell to access Inferno, there'll always be a certain lvl threshold that you need to be at.

Another option could be that the current Acts in Inferno don't go beyond lvl 70, but whatever new Acts are added in the expansion will be scaled harder in the expansion's Inferno mode.

For example, let's say that in the first expansion, the level cap is raised from 60 to 70 and a fifth Act is added. Inferno for Acts 1-4 will still be lvl 70 max, but Act 5 Inferno will be up to lvl 80.

That option is unlikely though, since I think Blizz wants to give you reason to play ANY part of the entire game in Inferno, not just the latest Act.

Prior to this patch, Blizzard said that you could assign a 2nd skill to your right-mouse-button (or possibly left-mouse-button), and pressing a certain key would allow you to alternate between your two RMB skills.

In this way, even with a dedicated potions slot replacing one of your previous slots, you would still have access to 7 skills.

However, with this new interface, it looks like we're only going to have access to 6 skills - that's possibly even more detrimental to those of us who may want to use a build that relies on basic attacks, since we'll have less support spells to make up for the fact that we're relying on basic attacks.

In the case of a petless Witch Doctor (yeah I keep going on about this :P), running out of mana is a much more real problem, and it'd be comforting to know that I'd have at least some form of attack to use if I'm out of mana (the latest patch notes seem to have significantly nerfed the mana sustainability of the WD).

I'm kinda confused by some of these changes o_0.

On one hand, it sounds like they are nerfing the free-spell build HARD. Personally, I think that the 'free spell' build (mainly stuff in the old Spirit tree and Gold-runed Poison Dart, etc) was really cool. It had clear strengths and weaknesses (the former being unlimited spells, but the latter being reduced damage and crowd-control compared to other builds).

Now it feels like they're nipping it in the bud by reducing the amount of mana returned from Golden Runes (or their new equivalent) and even changing the WD's masteries to be less effective at restoring mana.

And on the other hand, they do something as wacky as making Plague of Toads cost NO MANA with a particular rune? o_0 That has to be a typo - it seems so bizarre to restrict the 'free-cast' quality to just ONE spell in the WD's arsenal.

I'm really keen on playing a pet-less Witch Doctor. I know that I'll never compete with a Wizard in terms of raw damage output, but these nerfs are saddening as I'm wondering how viable a petless, vermin-based build is going to be now :S. I saw myself struggling with mana before, but with these nerfs to mana recovery, it looks like I'm going to need to wait for my mana to recharge every 8 seconds or something.

In any case, thanks for your work putting this list together! I was looking for something just like it!

The beta is probably even less than 1/3 of Act 1. I think that the whole "One-third-of-act-one" thing was a Blizzard quote, but many fans believe that the beta is even less than that.

This is because there seem to be certain elements missing...like I think you were supposed to have found the Mystic (yeah I know she's gone now) before the Skeleton King encounter, yet you never meet her in the beta (back when she was still in the game).

I'm pretty sure that there are other plot elements removed from the beta to not spoil too much. For instance, remember how we see the beheaded ghost of Leoric's wife in some of the pre-beta gameplay videos? There is surely much more atmosphere in the lower depths of the cathedral that was omitted for the sake of keeping the beta succinct.

Well, it can't be TOO hard, because after all, there are people out there who want to beat the game on Inferno while playing in hardcore mode. I'm sure Blizzard is allowing that to be possible, otherwise, the hardcore crowd is going to be pissed that they essentially can't get to the 'top' while playing that most hardcore of settings. Besides, wasn't there some achievement for beating the game on Inferno in hardcore mode? o_0

Fortunately, D3's difficulty is not entirely like D2's. D2's difficulty was almost exclusively just how hard the monsters hit you. The type of monsters themselves didn't require a great amount of tactics to defeat. In D3, however, it looks like the monsters are designed to require more variety in tactics to overcome efficiently, compared to D2. Sure they'll straight-up do more damage and potentially instagib you in Inferno, but I'm expecting that there'll be more involved in overcoming them besides raw item power on your character.

Well, I assume that they'd want to test server stuff on their EU side, as well. Even if they don't need to, I think that they'd provide beta keys to EU just because it makes them happy :P. I don't understand why sometimes, when Blizzard does something just for the sake of being nice, people say that they're wasting resources, and when Blizzard doesn't do something they don't NEED to, people complain about Blizzard being unfair.

It's like a lose-lose situation for them :S.

I don't think this'll really cut down on trading. After all, there'll be tons of items out there now with +rune affixes. More so than just a generic Rank 3 Crimson Rune. Now there'll be like a WD bracer that gives +2 ranks to a specific rune for one of his skills.

If anything, I'm a little staggered at the thought of the number of items there are going to be in D3 @___@.

The new system helps sorting your items, too, since tying +rune modifiers into regular armour/weapon items will let you know which one is for which class at a glance, unlike the previous system where all you see is the icon for an alabaster rune and you have no idea what class/skill it's for.

I doubt that there'd be an open beta, but even if there were, it wouldn't really affect my personal excitement. After all, it's still going to be the same content and I'll be running through it solo either way. At most, I'll do the multiplayer version with a couple of friends, but my experience isn't going to be very different even if it were an open beta.

Somebody in another thread suggested getting to choose which rune effects you unlock as you level up - I think that that's a brilliant compromise!

In any case, I do think that solving the problem of there being a deadzone between lvls 30-60 is really good. It really will make the leveling process feel more meaningful, though I agree that it sucks that we'll have to beat Hell before we actually have access to the full suite of rune effects (especially since a particular rune effect may be a very important component for a build we have in mind...we wouldn't be able to use that build until Inferno or something T_T.

However, it IS a good way to motivate casuals to play the game beyond Normal. I know that when I first played D2, I didn't really feel compelled to try Nightmare. However, the lure of new effects/alterations to your skills will compel a good deal of casuals to advance to Nightmare once they beat Normal :).

Keep in mind, also, that the wait only seems 'bad' because we are the hardcore fans who follow the game's development on a daily basis.

The average gamer will be more like: "yeah that game's taking a while to come out", but they're not as invested in its development as we are. From our perspective, it may seem like the whole community is turning against Blizzard, but really, it's just a tiny subset of disgruntled people.

It takes a certain kind of character to be passionate enough about the game that they post on fansites in the first place, after all.

You should see the League of Legends forums. It's lose-lose for the developers there. If they don't say anything, the fans whine: "why are you being so quiet??? What happened to transparency on the development process???" And if they give fans insight on stuff during development, then a couple months down the line, fans still complain: "what's taking so long with this thing???"

Yeah, it's always a bit of a juggling act. You're never going to be able to make everyone happy.

I think that this is an awesome and simple idea! It seems like a good start in finding a compromise between a degree of commitment to a character build, and more open customisation.

Also, because you choose what runes you want to unlock as you level up, there's still that feeling of making important customisation decisions with each level, while not permanently hamstringing you, since you will eventually unlock all options when you're 60, anyway. And you'll unlock all the ones you really want before then, too.

How is finding runestones to increasing the power of your skills different from finding items with +rune affixes to do the same thing?

Rank 1 & 2 runes were available throughout Normal, so it probably wouldn't be hard to have all the rune effects for all the skills in the game by the time you reach Hell. All that would be left for you to do is find higher-ranked Runestones, which isn't really different from finding the right item with the appropriate +rune affix.

As for your concerns about difficulty, it's only the beta...which is the first part of Act 1 of NORMAL. It's SUPPOSED to be D3's equivalent of a tutorial. If you still don't 'get' that by this point, then, well, I dunno.

I agree with your other points, though. There's definitely going to be less community interaction, but it's not a big a deal for me. I always planned on playing with my friends, and that was the way it was for me with D2 as well.

The new UI *is* a little clunky, and I'm surprised that that's what Blizzard is rolling with at the moment. Customisation, however, is going to be big in D3. I think that it's definitely going to be bigger than in D2. And I don't get your point about having nothing to do after you 'beat' Inferno. How is that any different from D2? You'll always be chasing after that best possible gear, and it'll take quite a long time, don't worry.