I made a 10 million gold purchase to replace my old helmet on my witch doctor, which boosted his DPS to near 180k unbuffed (slightly less according to diabloprogress.com), hitting around 220k buffed. The results? Monster Power 2 Inferno is like a knife to melted butter. I probably can take down rares and champion packs within roughly 20 seconds.
I might give Monster Power 3 another try but I feel that the exponential growth of rare and champion pack life might slow my farming down a bit, since it’s recommended that efficient clears should be within 10-20 seconds per rare/champion pack mob. White mobs go down reasonably well at 160k unbuffed DPS but I’ve found myself kiting things around for quite a bit at Monster Power 3, which slows my overall farming progress down quite a bit.
If anything, I think if I can boost my DPS by another 30k unbuffed, Monster Power 3 should be at or near the ease of Monster Power 2 right now. However, getting over the next 30k DPS hump is pretty hard without some major investment. Most of what I can do is do incremental increases for key stats on gear. This is where the game really slows down since you end up focusing on single pieces of gear for a large amount of gold or real money. However, getting the gold for that kind of investment is pretty hard without incredible luck and spending real money beyond $3-5 just isn’t worth it (unless you’ve got an incredible amount of spare capital lying around). So in my case it might be a while before I get a reasonable upgrade.
One thing I will say is that the witch doctor has slowly become one of my favorite classes. It’s not popular nor as potentially efficient as a barbarian but I find that the class is pretty fun, can be flexible on the skills and gearing is not horribly expensive (unless you do something like a Zombie Dog/Sacrifice build). I’m not saying getting to 170k unbuffed DPS is going to be completely cheap, but you can gear up pretty quickly and be effective. Then as you progress in gaining paragon levels and accumulating gold, the upgrades are plentiful and can get you pretty close to where you need to be to clear Inferno and Monster Power 2 effectively.
I do think I can push my guy another 30k but I don’t think at this point it’s worth sacrificing certain elements like survivability and my 20 yard pick up radius off hand. But outside of uber bosses, there might be little point in making those upgrades just yet.