Recently, I leveled up a second Witch Doctor with the intent of providing her with all my spare gear that my original Witch Doctor had obtained. My goal for my second Witch Doctor was to act as a bank alt but also to experiment with other gear builds beyond the high end Jade Harvester build. This blog talks about my experience so far with the Pet Doctor build that I’ve been working on.
For Witch Doctors, there’s pretty much only two viable high end builds: the Jade Harvester DoT/Nuke build and the Pet Doctor build. I managed to get enough Jade Harvester gear to do reasonable damage and survive but I honestly am not a huge fan of this build. On the other hand, the Pet Doctor build has intrigued me for some time and the play style is pretty fun thus far. I think the main thing with Pet Doctors is that there’s a pretty flexible gear path that you can undergo as you start out.
For myself, I managed to obtain the Mask of Jeram early on as a well as the CarnEvil mask. Also, I had a few pieces of the Zunimassa’s set and Ring of Royal Grandeur. With those items, I was able to get permanent Fetish Army up early on and start hitting Torment 3 rifts. The main thing is that the Pet Doctor build even before patch 2.1 allowed Witch Doctors to hit Torment 6 pretty easily. I figured that with a few more crafted pieces of gear I could do at least Torment 2-3 without any issue.
Pretty much I was able to zerg Torment 3 without problems. Torment 4 too is simple without resorting to a Unity. However, I managed to pick up a Dagger of Darts which synergizes with the CarnEvil mask very well. So I decided to switch out my Mask of Jeram (I had a really bad Gidbinn before) and move to a CarnEvil poison build. With those items and a poison based Stone of Jordon lying on one of my followers, I pretty much was nuking things down pretty hard. I don’t run a typical CarnEvil type of build since I prefer having tons of pets (I use dogs and a permanent gargantuan) since it gives me a little more tankiness and allows me to be slightly lazy at times. Nonetheless, I’m having a blast with this build, far more than the Jade Harvester build.
Eventually, I want to go for the “standard” pet doctor build once I am able to find a Starmetal Kukri and Tasker and Theo gloves. Once I find those (especially the SMK), I want to swap out the Zunimassa set for the normal Aughild 3 piece and aim for a Tallman’s Finger and eliminate the Ring of Royal Grandeur altogether. Right now, I’m going with a 2 piece Blackthorne’s amulet/legs while I’m hoping to get the belt. I managed to find an intelligence Unity as well so I can theoretically solo higher rifts. Eventually, I want to replace Blackthornes with a Witching Hour, Ice Climbers and some other pants (maybe Depth Diggers for the bonus damage to generator attacks) for my ideal gear.
Overall, I think the point I want to make here is that it’s pretty cool that you can see the evolution of this build. In some ways, it reminds me of the M6 Demon Hunter Mauraders set. The thing is that you really have a fair amount of flexibility in going for high end build through the various gear you find. Obviously, this build suffers for really high Greater Rifts but the lower ceiling still allows for a generally fun playing style where you can swap things out and see a nice growth curve as opposed to the more constrained Jade Harvester type of gear setup.