Minion-based soloing builds are useless in Hell difficulty
#21
Just killed Diablo on hardcore hell difficulty and thought I should update this. I used the same build for all of Act 3 and Act 4. Both of which I did both in groups and solo. I like to make sure I can solo an area before I move on to soloing something later. Just to be on the safe side since I am playing hardcore. Don't want to get in over my head. So all content was soloed at some point and I was actually the first of our group that I am aware of to kill Diablo in Hell and I did that solo as well. This is all with never having touched the AH as well if people are curious about that.

The build I used was Firebomb, Leeching Beasts, Bruiser, Healing Journey, Legion of Daggers, and Paranoia with the passives Spirit Vessel, Fierce Loyalty, and Jungle Fortitude.

Act 3 I've always generally found to be easy to solo with a build like this. I'd say that it was tougher when grouped than it was solo. This is actually a trend I've noticed though. Solo is easier 80% of the time, 10% of the time a group will speed things up due to me not having to run around as much, then the last 10% a group will change a pack of champs from something I'd have to run from/reset to get past to something we can kill. We've yet to run into anything we can't kill as a group. So grouping is a bit of a trade off for me. On average it is tougher, but the values put into that average are less spiky and thus safer.

Act 4 tends to be rougher for this build, but still doable. There are a lot of mob types there that just chew through pets. I still found that I preferred having the pets than not having them even with them being more situational in their use. They tended to buy me just enough time. Though there would occasionally be a champ pack that just straight destroyed them as well.

That brings me to another thought I've had. The game is built so that melee have trouble with some types and ranged have trouble with other types. This is a generalization of course, but it is basically true. So one reason that people often find pet builds bad is that it is giving their class a vulnerability it wouldn't have otherwise. A pure ranged build should have a decently easy time with the types built to kill melee. Whereas a pet build makes it so that those types kill their pets and then the Caster Hero is left to kill them with less abilities than the pure ranged has. This builds in a bias such that when somebody changes out of a pet build into a pure caster build they feel like they are stronger because they now have less trouble with those anti-melee types.

The counter to this is that the pets should make anti-ranged types easier. So by using a pet build you open yourself up to being more vulnerable to anti-melee, but in exchange become less vulnerable to anti-ranged. The trick is making it an even trade which I don't think people are finding it right now. It needs to be such that what you give up against anti-melee you gain back in like proportion against anti=ranged. Thus a pure build becomes a spiky style of play where some packs you destroy and some packs you have trouble with whereas a pet build becomes a more consistent build where every pack is tougher than the easy for ranged ones, but easier than the hard for ranged ones.

This may all be obvious to people, but it is a slightly more abstract way of looking at things that I thought was interesting and so decided to share. I'd say that right now the proportions aren't right, but that with a ton of work you can get things good enough such that pets are viable in Hell if you prefer that play style and so have a bias toward it to make up for the lack.
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#22
A blue post gives us hope for more minion survivability!
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5...age=19#366

Quote:While the intent is for witch doctors to re-summon Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan fairly often, we agree that pets aren't living long enough in higher difficulty levels. Of course, the harder difficulties are supposed to be more challenging, but we don't think it's fun gameplay to cast Zombie Dogs, watch them die almost instantly, wait for the cooldown to reset, re-cast Zombie Dogs, watch them die almost instantly...etc. And this is happening even when players are wearing pretty reasonable gear.

We're looking into ways to improve witch doctor pet survivability at later levels, but we don't have any clear plans to share just yet. One thing we're considering, though, is having pets scale with your Vitality (which they currently do not do).
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#23
I hope that pets scaling with Vitality is only one among several fixes they'll implement, because by itself it'll do very little to fix the actual problem.

The way I see it, two things need to happen. One: pet stats simply need a pretty considerable buff in general. Not just hit points and defences, but life regeneration as well. Playing a pet WD should not mean having to pick pretty much all of your skills and equipment with the explicit intent of making your pets more survivable, only for them to melt anyway the instant you run into an elite pack with at least one AoE-type affix. Pets deal negligible damage already; when I'm also forced to select items and skills solely for their defensive properties to ensure something approaching reasonable pet uptime, thereby reducing my damage potential even further – well, that doesn't make for fun gameplay.

More importantly, though: minions (I'm including followers and other summons as well here because they suffer from the same issue) need to be highly resistant to any kind of attack or damage source a player character would be expected to actively avoid. This obviously includes plague puddles, mortar shots, Fire Chains and the like, as well as things like Blazing Construct fire pools and Accursed poison clouds; it also includes the charge-up/telegraphed attacks of Dark Berserkers and Mallet Lords for instance, as well as other sources of extreme burst damage. Complete immunity would probably be a bit too much, but I'd seriously like to see a 75% damage reduction on top of regular resistances at the very least.

There's some success to be had currently assembling plenty of "chance to cast" affixes on your items, coupled with as many sources of DoT as you can. It is hilarious because, as long as your pets can pile on a single monster or two, said monsters spend 90%+ of the battle being frozen, or stunned, or feared, or knocked back, conditions generally characterised by a lack of their sufferers' ability to do anything else. Unfortunately, this approach falls entirely flat as soon as any kind of fire-and-forget AoE damage comes into play, and guess what elites (and even some regular monsters) just love to use? Yeah. Again it means not dealing good damage as well, but if that was the only issue I could certainly live with it; no one expects summoning classes to clear an entire screen in the blink of an eye.

Blizzard want to avoid turning the WD into the Necromancer v2, and that is perhaps understandable (although I don't really agree with their being so opposed to the idea of "slow and steady wins the race"). If they want the various summoning skills to be legitimately useful, though, especially without the WD having to bend over backwards to get her pets not to die to any old mob that comes along, they've got a bit of work to do first.

(Of course, the WD arguably ranks #1 among all current classes in the "way too much gimmicky crap" department, anyway, with summons being just another example, so maybe that's to be expected.)
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
____________.Not shaking the grass.
-- Ezra Pound, "And the days are not full enough"
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#24
Yeah, my biggest WD complaint is that going petless means I have several skills (Soul Harvest, Hex, Mass Confusion) which are just about or entirely useless against act end bosses and reduced effects on any enemy that actually matters. Yeah, I can switch skillsets (and do) but later on that means avoiding act bosses altogether because changing skills = losing NV stacks. Yeah, I know, I'm not "supposed" to do act boss runs because that's not the way Big Brother wants me to play, but I personally think Diablo is the most enjoyable fight in the game.

Sure, the first form is basically a jobber, but the second and third forms have varied and interesting attacks, and the fight is difficult but so far doable for everything I've run past him. He's also probably one of the few fights specifically stacked against ranged characters (his melee is awful and he knows it - he'll back up to use his ranged attacks) and thus makes me relish the fight all the more. For as cliched as fighting clones of yourself is in game, I think it works well here - Diablo himself will be easier the more overgeared you are, but you run the risk of pasting yourself horribly in phase two. In D2 where you could have rejoined the fight at that point, it wouldn't have mattered, but for fighting him solo where screwing up means starting the whole fight over...that's a pretty serious threat.

(Still, I'd much prefer to be able to run some kind of pet build. Much as I enjoy the other WD skills, almost all of it is stuff I can do in other classes. Keeping a zoo would be nice. Hell, playing a Zoomancer in an ARPG was a large D2 selling point for me.)
Finally satisfied that this, in fact, a game in the Diablo series.
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#25
(07-07-2012, 06:16 PM)MMAgCh Wrote: ...pet thoughts...

Wall of text inc! Smile

The necromancer was my favorite class in D2 and the most fun I had was with a skeleton-based build, so I got it stuck in my craw to make an attempt at doing the same with the Witch Doctor. To that end I assembled a gearset focused on armor, all resists, chance to cast stun/freeze/blind, and thorns, all of which is dirt cheap on the AH. I don't think I paid over 100k for a single item except for my weapon, often much less. I am currently at 8800dps, ~475 all resists, ~63% DR, and 13500 thorns damage. My max health is only at 17k but honestly I don't get hit much, and if I do I regen it back in a second or two if I have some pets around doing damage. This will become a problem though, no question. The build I'm using is here.

I've now made it a decent amount into Act 2 Inferno and am just now seeing the end of the road for my minion-based build. The problems you mention have been surmountable so far, but the monsters in Act 2 just do too much damage. Even white mobs will whittle down my pack of dogs. I did run into 1 pack of elites in Act 1 that I couldn't handle- a 3-pack of those thorny hulk guys in the dungeon leading up to the Butcher. It didn't matter what mods they had, my dogs pretty much instantly splatted upon being hit.

I tried to think about what would make the build work past A2:

1. Better gear (duh). Finding appropriate gear is actually pretty tough- the list of mods you want is so long (+armor, +thorns, +all resists, +stun/freeze, optimally +int & +vit) that the AH interface fights you. High thorns damage is tough to search for also- 999 is the highest you can enter into the search box and some pieces can have up to 2500. I am not convinced of the long-term viability of a thorns build, however. The maximum amount of thorns you can get is close to 20k (from here) and with the big increase in health pools in later acts, I don't think the pets will stay alive long enough for thorns to be effective unless I start rocking some seriously top-tier armor & resists. Finding gear like that along with high thorns damage is going to be both expensive and difficult, which is the same boat everyone is in post A2 Inferno.

I've considered dropping the whole thorns thing and go life regen, but I think I'll run into a similar problem where incoming damage will outscale the regen. Honestly thorns + chance to stun/freeze/blind kind of fight against each other, and if I stop focusing on thorns then I can swap out the Fierce Loyalty passive for something more damage-focused, or maybe Bad Medicine to reduce damage. Considering the fact that the whole build is more or less based on the pet auras proccing various effects, I think I will wait to rejigger my whole gearset until I see if that is a bug or a feature. Smile

2. Reducing the cooldown on pet summon skills. 1 minute is a loooooong time. Tie it in to the Zombie Handler passive, makes perfect sense.

3. Give pets immunity/great resistance to AoE ala WoW, as MMAgCh mentioned. Straight-up vitality scaling would be helpful too. I would also like one million dollars.

4. A way of controlling the pets. I imagine a pet bar like WoW's would go beyond the scope of what they want to do with D3, but a 'recall minions' button that ports all your pets to you would be tanfastic. Tie it in to Zombie Handler, makes perfect sense. Wink


Despite all of the above, I think the build is great fun. It is an incredibly effective single-target build (stunlocking bosses is pretty hilarious) and works well in many Act 1 areas. I may just leave him in Act 1 to farm for now while I focus on other characters.
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#26
BTW, increasing your vit is currently the only stat that doesn't help your pets at all. Of course, you still want to, but pets do get benefits from your str/dex, so gearing towards either of those will increase your pets' DR/dodge accordingly. I don't know if you can afford to gear so many stats or if it's even worth the effort, but it's the only think I can think of off-hand that might more readily permit progress.
Finally satisfied that this, in fact, a game in the Diablo series.
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#27
(07-09-2012, 01:52 PM)RTM Wrote: Wall of text inc! Smile

I just finished act 1 inferno with a very similar build, but I've gone more offensive with Sacrifice and Fetish Army instead of defensive skills. Also I have 14K DPS -- I'm amazed you made it so far with just 8K. And I have enough DEX for 20% dodge (dodge is much more useful than DR if the dogs are still getting one-shot killed after DR is applied). build link

Which follower are you using? I've gone with enchantress to support my offensive focus, and she has that handy 15% armor and slow buff.

(07-09-2012, 01:52 PM)RTM Wrote: 2. Reducing the cooldown on pet summon skills. 1 minute is a loooooong time. Tie it in to the Zombie Handler passive, makes perfect sense.

Sacrifice is already huge burst DPS, if they reduced the cooldown on zombie dog summon much it would become insane. I can kill anything if I have room to run around and not die while I wait for zombie dog cooldown and another four dogs for Sacrifice.

(07-09-2012, 01:52 PM)RTM Wrote: Despite all of the above, I think the build is great fun.

Yes, indeed Smile
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#28
(07-12-2012, 06:19 PM)Jaffa Tamarin Wrote: I just finished act 1 inferno with a very similar build, but I've gone more offensive with Sacrifice and Fetish Army instead of defensive skills. Also I have 14K DPS -- I'm amazed you made it so far with just 8K. And I have enough DEX for 20% dodge (dodge is much more useful than DR if the dogs are still getting one-shot killed after DR is applied). build link

Which follower are you using? I've gone with enchantress to support my offensive focus, and she has that handy 15% armor and slow buff.

My low DPS is mostly due to gear (or lack thereof). I sacrificed a lot of stats looking for gear with high +thorns and low buyout. To be fair, the 13k thorns damage doesn't add to your DPS listing but it does help. Its effect varies based on the type of mob wailing on your pets of course.

I'm running with the Templar for another meat shield, but considered looking into one of the other follower types. I'll check out the Enchantress next time I play the build, that 15% armor buff would be quite handy.
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#29
Belial is dead Smile

I've finished act 2 inferno and haven't given up on my pets yet. They die a lot (I die a lot too, if I'm honest), and a lot of the time I'm reduced to kiting with splinters, but I've cleared every area in act 2 at least once.

Belial was a bitch. I picked up some cheap +vit +life% gear in the AH to give me some margin of error in dodging his attacks, but I was repeatedly getting him down to 10% life, hitting the enrage timer, and dying to his mega green meteor spam. But then I realised I could swap out the Fierce Loyalty passive and replace it with Pierce the Veil, bringing my DPS up to approx 30K, which was easily enough to get Belial down in under the 3 minutes. I may stick with Pierce the Veil and see how that works out, because I really don't have enough thorns or life regen to matter.

So, yeah, on to act 3!
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