Season 7 is coming up this week on Friday starting from 5pm PST. While there’s not a great deal of changes for this coming patch/season, the most notable change (at least for me) that will be coming up is the new Witch Doctor meta, where the Ring of Emptiness will open up more diversity in the builds. However, there’s one build in particular that I’m eyeballing and it looks great so far that uses the Ring of Emptiness and Helltooth Set.
One of the previous Helltooth metas involved the boosted Short Man’s Finger where Gargantuans got a significant boost and was made to work with the Helltooth set. I did try out this build and found it awkward and pretty stupid at the end of the day. Your main damage came from your Gargantuans after you applied Wall of Death. The problem with this build is that all the damage is passive and very cooldown focused. With a single miss-click, you could completely fumble your rotation. Also, when you encountered a breakable door, your pets would stupidly stand around and wait for you to smash it down. If your damage dealing abilities were on cooldown, you pretty much were at the mercy of a FUCKING DOOR. And that’s no fun at all.
With the boost to the Ring of Emptiness we’ll see a massive increase of damage with the following changes:
- Haunt and Locust Swarm damage bonus increased from 75-100% to 250-300%
This boost to Haunt and Locust Swarms damage apparently is enough where people are using the Wormwood staff to passively apply Locust Swarms and swap Zombie Dogs: Leeching Beasts for Haunt: Poisoned Spirits. Now, the reason why I’m happy is that by losing Zombie Dogs for Haunt, you move from a passive build to a more active one as well as solving the issue with breakable doors.
On top of these changes, I’ve seen builds that use Henri’s Perquisition and a Witching Hour. I’m guessing the goal of these two items is for CC/damage reduction via the offhand and attack speed/critical hit damage via the belt. You also lose the Ring of Royal Grandeur in place of the Ring of Emptiness, thus sacrificing Tasker and Theo and losing attack speed. But you’re just doing more types of damage overall.
But the interesting thing is that there’s some possible variation depending on the gear you find. For instance, if you don’t have Henri’s Perquisition, you can probably substitute it for a Vile Hive, which boosts your Locust Swarm damage a little but more importantly provides the Pestilence rune. Also, rather than running with a Witching Hour, you could go with a Haunting Girdle which allows you to fire two Haunts. Alternatively, you could even use a Belt of Transcendence just for more minions.
I have seen people suggest using the Uhkapian Serpent but you would have to sacrifice an ability to get back Zombie Dogs. Also, I find Uhkapian Serpent to not be a great combo without using the Tall Man’s Finger since you’ll probably want more damage reduction and output with that type of build. Granted if you lack the Traveler’s Pledge combo, you could make that type of build work.
The thing for me is that I really liked the revamped Helltooth. It felt boring at first, almost like another version of the Marauder build. It had issues initially with the server lag caused by Fire Wall. But the popular abilities with Helltooth still were limited mostly because of the available gear. Last patch, Helltooth got into this weird state with the new gargantuan meta. I detested the more passive play style that had a few really nasty deficiencies that made the meta stupid in a few situations.
However, the upcoming meta looks really good. Even if you’re not completely optimized in terms of gear, you have some good amount of legroom to wiggle around when it comes to the play style and certain gear slots. Also, since this set is one of the seasonal sets, you’ll get to drive it immediately.