My decision to speak about a melee oriented Witch Doctor does not stem from my desire to make one, but rather because of the inevitability that somebody will attempt it. The Witch Doctor is already somewhat of an oddball of a character and those wishing to build a character completely on novelty alone will probably shoot for this build at some point in their Diablo 3 career. This is my best guess as to how such a build will be accomplished. It uses the current information on skills and runes as well as my own conjecture of how these skills and runes will function in tandem.
None of the Witch Doctor's skills are inherently melee oriented, but if one looks they can see that it may very well be a possibility. The Spirit Tree is host to a number of crowd control spells, a spell for movement called Spirit Walk, a spell for temporary invulnerability called Death Pact. The Zombie Tree and Voodoo Tree do not seem to be focused on control or regeneration as the Spirit Tree is, which is why I am not including skills from those skill trees.
These Spirit skills do not lend themselves to close quarters combat when viewed alone, but with the right skill rune setup, I believe that together they will provide enough crowd control to prevent the Witch Doctor from taking damage while he whacks away at enemies. The focus on regeneration, protection, and movement within the tree also leads me to believe that it will lend itself to melee combat. This, coupled with skill rune effects, could potentially turn these seemingly tame abilities into deadly Damage over Time skills or enhance their effects for even greater protection.
Known Rune Types
The description after each rune is my estimation of what each rune will do or already does.
* Energy Rune - Not Known. I am guessing it will add buffs or debuffs.
Perhaps refills health/mana/skill resource on ability hit/activation.
* Viper Rune (named Lethality before) - causes additional effects upon enemy death
* Hydra Rune (named Multistrike before) - causes abilities to create copies or hit additional enemies
* Force Rune (named Power before) - causes abilities to be more potent
* Striking Rune - causes abilities to deal additional damage
Examples of Possible Effects:
Energy rune-
We do not yet know what this rune does, but it seems to be named correctly for what I have in mind. This combination could possibly allow it to steal health as well as mana when using the Soul Harvest skill. It could become a nice Area of Effect skill that heals the Witch Doctor when his health is low.
Spirit Walk could function not only as a way to escape combat, but perhaps as a way to restore health or add a defense buff, if say, an energy rune was added to it that allowed rapid health regeneration while Spirit Walking, or perhaps a temporary boost to defense immediately after Spirit Walking.
Striking Rune-
Mass Confusion or Horrify coupled with a Striking Rune could possibly add stun or slow to the spells, or perhaps even damage, allowing additional crowd control or more effective crowd control. Did you ever wish the Necromancer had a curse that directly damaged an enemy? This would be an example of that.
If Striking Rune works the same with with Spirit Walk as it does with Teleport for the Wizard, Spirit Walk may become an important opening move for the Witch Doctor, causing a large explosion of damage as he exits the spirit world.
These rune-enhanced crowd control skills would turn the Witch Doctor we all know as being a summoner/caster into a defensively oriented, crowd controlling melee warrior when equipped with the correct armor and weapon. Since the passive skills within this tree help with mana management, energy resources could be kept at minimum, allowing equipment choices to be more focused on Damage, Defense, and Life instead of magical capability.
Example Gameplay:
The Witch Doctor starts the battle by using Spirit Walk to sneak into a large group of enemies. The Witch Doctor explodes into existence, damaging all nearby enemies and attracting their attention. The Witch Doctor then uses Mass Confusion to have the enemies turn on each other. With the enemies distracted, he is free to use his melee weapon to attack the enemies which are still focused on him. When he gets low on health, he uses horrify, and quickly follows it up with Soul Harvest to regain some of his health and mana.
EDIT
I have been looking at the Voodoo skill tree and Jungle Fortitude and Hex have caught my eye.
Jungle Fortitude could boost the WD's life bar quite high if properly equipped, the skill would provide a sizable boost to Vitality as it would increased by 9% of your Strength, 9% of your Dexterity, and 9% of your Willpower. Since a melee WD would have a large amount of Strength and Dexterity from items, his vitality would be quite a bit higher than most other classes, enabling him to be much more effective at close range.
Hex is interesting because we do not yet know what it does. If the Hexes turn out to be debuffs, they could very well serve a melee WD, providing yet another source of crowd control.
Closing Statement:
I would appreciate feedback. Please use the forum to discuss the plausibility of such statements, the viability of such a build, and the appeal of playing a melee Witch Doctor. Additional hypothesis on rune/skill combinations will be very helpful, as well as insight into the uses of skills in the other two trees. Weapon and armor combinations would also be helpful.|||Hi!
Quote:
Introduction
My decision to speak about a melee oriented Witch Doctor does not stem from my desire to make one, but rather because of the inevitability that somebody will attempt it. The Witch Doctor is already somewhat of an oddball of a character and those wishing to build a character completely on novelty alone will probably shoot for this build at some point in their Diablo 3 career. This is my best guess as to how such a build will be accomplished. It uses the current information on skills and runes as well as my own conjecture of how these skills and runes will function in tandem.
None of the Witch Doctor's skills are inherently melee oriented, but if one looks they can see that it may very well be a possibility. The Spirit Tree is host to a number of crowd control spells, a spell for movement called Spirit Walk, a spell for temporary invulnerability called Death Pact. The Zombie Tree and Voodoo Tree do not seem to be focused on control or regeneration as the Spirit Tree is, which is why I am not including skills from those skill trees.
These Spirit skills do not lend themselves to close quarters combat when viewed alone, but with the right skill rune setup, I believe that together they will provide enough crowd control to prevent the Witch Doctor from taking damage while he whacks away at enemies. The focus on regeneration, protection, and movement within the tree also leads me to believe that it will lend itself to melee combat. This, coupled with skill rune effects, could potentially turn these seemingly tame abilities into deadly Damage over Time skills or enhance their effects for even greater protection.
Known Rune Types
The description after each rune is my estimation of what each rune will do or already does.
* Energy Rune - Not Known. I am guessing it will add buffs or debuffs.
Perhaps refills health/mana/skill resource on ability hit/activation.
* Viper Rune (named Lethality before) - causes additional effects upon enemy death
* Hydra Rune (named Multistrike before) - causes abilities to create copies or hit additional enemies
* Force Rune (named Power before) - causes abilities to be more potent
* Striking Rune - causes abilities to deal additional damage
Examples of Possible Effects:
Energy rune-
We do not yet know what this rune does, but it seems to be named correctly for what I have in mind. This combination could possibly allow it to steal health as well as mana when using the Soul Harvest skill. It could become a nice Area of Effect skill that heals the Witch Doctor when his health is low.
Spirit Walk could function not only as a way to escape combat, but perhaps as a way to restore health or add a defense buff, if say, an energy rune was added to it that allowed rapid health regeneration while Spirit Walking, or perhaps a temporary boost to defense immediately after Spirit Walking.
Striking Rune-
Mass Confusion or Horrify coupled with a Striking Rune could possibly add stun or slow to the spells, or perhaps even damage, allowing additional crowd control or more effective crowd control. Did you ever wish the Necromancer had a curse that directly damaged an enemy? This would be an example of that.
If Striking Rune works the same with with Spirit Walk as it does with Teleport for the Wizard, Spirit Walk may become an important opening move for the Witch Doctor, causing a large explosion of damage as he exits the spirit world.
These rune-enhanced crowd control skills would turn the Witch Doctor we all know as being a summoner/caster into a defensively oriented, crowd controlling melee warrior when equipped with the correct armor and weapon. Since the passive skills within this tree help with mana management, energy resources could be kept at minimum, allowing equipment choices to be more focused on Damage, Defense, and Life instead of magical capability.
Example Gameplay:
The Witch Doctor starts the battle by using Spirit Walk to sneak into a large group of enemies. The Witch Doctor explodes into existence, damaging all nearby enemies and attracting their attention. The Witch Doctor then uses Mass Confusion to have the enemies turn on each other. With the enemies distracted, he is free to use his melee weapon to attack the enemies which are still focused on him. When he gets low on health, he uses horrify, and quickly follows it up with Soul Harvest to regain some of his health and mana.
Closing Statement:
I would appreciate feedback. Please use the forum to discuss the plausibility of such statements, the viability of such a build, and the appeal of playing a melee Witch Doctor. Additional hypothesis on rune/skill combinations will be very helpful, as well as insight into the uses of skills in the other two trees. Weapon and armor combinations would also be helpful.
Nice taughts in here. WD indiid has tons of passives + skills that could work as you describe. "Melee" ain't just the word for this kind of stuff. You would still be relying 90% of the time on spells and your melee hits would most likely deal crap to none damage. Autostats makes it sure that you can't stack that much str for damage. In the end the melee would be just less effective than using spells.
What comes to the spec i certainly see that something like this can be done, but it has it's problems. For something to really be called a spec and not something stupid is that it is good for something or it's not simply alot worse than other specs. Spirit walk in and BOOM! Huge damage from rune. Gz, now you have used your escape skill to start the battle and you are surrounded by enemies. Tho i can see it being usefull to take out critical enemies at the start. Also gaining mana and hp from soul leech sounds pretty imba to me.
Deciding what would be the best and most interesting close quarters spec would be a better topic IMHO. Atleast 2 ways come to my mind straight up. Summons + going in the thick to use soul harvest or vit stacking with high spell power (all stats give more vit and vit gives spell power). Would skull 'o flame still be viable addition as it also does aoe damage? MAss counfusion also sounds good but one problem is that if you can't damage the creatures that are confused.
Using WD for melee hitting is most likely going to be a really bad idea no matter what the spec is as you can't boost your melee damage at all. If you want to hit people around and cast some spells you should consider Wiz as they got skills to boost melee damage.|||Quote:
The Witch Doctor starts the battle by using Spirit Walk to sneak into a large group of enemies. The Witch Doctor explodes into existence, damaging all nearby enemies and attracting their attention. The Witch Doctor then uses Mass Confusion to have the enemies turn on each other. With the enemies distracted, he is free to use his melee weapon to attack the enemies which are still focused on him. When he gets low on health, he uses horrify, and quickly follows it up with Soul Harvest to regain some of his health and mana.
At this point in time this WD would have really good CC, some leech, bad protection and crap damage with his melee weapon. The Meleemancer has good CC, good protection, great leech and ****ty damage that can be boosted to reasonable by curses and weapon effects. The Meleemancer already takes a while to clear areas. In order for the WD build to not be just plain boring it needs mods on its weapons to increase the damage.
The idea of taking a caster character and playing him like a melee character appealed to me in DII. I'll likely try to do the same with the WD. however his current load out of spells really doesn't lend itself to a melee orientation. He needs something to increase his damage and prevent damage from reaching him.|||Quote:
You would still be relying 90% of the time on spells and your melee hits would most likely deal crap to none damage. Autostats makes it sure that you can't stack that much str for damage. In the end the melee would be just less effective than using spells.
I have to disagree with you on this, this might have been true in D2, but in D3 things will be quite different, in order for skills to more effective you need to boost certain stats with the right gear to get enough damage (the Devs stated they will make casters as gear dependent as melee characters).
So that in the end means that gear will have a much more pivotal effect than in D2, in short a melee Witch Doctor will probably be as viable as a Caster one if he gets the right equipment and skills.
Quote:
Using WD for melee hitting is most likely going to be a really bad idea no matter what the spec is as you can't boost your melee damage at all. If you want to hit people around and cast some spells you should consider Wiz as they got skills to boost melee damage.
That's not right, the right STR gear boost melee damage greatly, not to mention we don't know how the extra system for customization will affect stats.|||Quote:
Gz, now you have used your escape skill to start the battle and you are surrounded by enemies. Tho i can see it being usefull to take out critical enemies at the start. Also gaining mana and hp from soul leech sounds pretty imba to me.
At this point, we do not know if the escape skill will be more viable offensively or defensively, or how and when the Striking rune will activate. For instance, if the damage is applied when the skill is activated instead of when it ends, then the WD would explode upon entering the spirit world. This would maintain a defensive focus on the skill, but when would players use it and how much damage would it do? Strategically, it would not make much sense.
If the damage is applied upon reentering the real world then you would use Spirit Walk offensively. You are consciously making a trade off between the damage you do and the protection you have, which I think strategically is very interesting, and far more logical.
A third option would be to apply the damage before and after entering the spirit world, giving the player the option to use the skill both offensively and defensively. The fact that there would be two bursts of damage means positioning and timing would be more difficult, which is also quite interesting from a game play perspective.
You are absolutely right that balancing will be tricky. HP gain from Soul Leech could be imbalanced if the amount healed was far more than the damage being taken. It will be up to Blizzard to decide if putting health leech on a spell is viable or not. We know the Necromancer had a curse which gave life leech, but I do not believe any of the Diablo casters have ever had a spell which directly gave the caster health. Diablo II leech was based off a percentage.
I do know that the Warlock in World of Warcraft has a spell called Drain life which gives an integer amount of health to the Warlock per second, something which was unheard of in Diablo II. Since Soul Leech is an AoE and cast instantaneously, the integer amount would be very small.
Let us say that the health received at level 1 is 3 health. The WD has 100 health. The WD casts Soul Leech on a group of 5 enemies and gains 15 health, a fraction less than quarter of his health back. This is not enough to be at full health all of the time, in fact, it is more like a small supplement to Health Globes. Additionally, if the WD is taking 30 or 40 damage every few seconds, this amount of leech is not enough to survive indefinitely. What it is enough for, though- especially when used tactically- is keeping your health high enough to hit the next health globe while simultaneously doing close-range damage.|||Im a big WD fan already but i just dont think im sold on it being possible to make an viable melee WD build : (....Looking at a class like the wizard..you can find many melee skills: all the armor skills, lethal eng, weapon mast, ston skin, conjured health..
Looking at the WD, i dont see ANY skills that are ment for melee, and i dont think that runes would alter a skill on a high enough level to make it worth while in close combat. Idk maybe im wrong, but i would like to see the WD with at least one skill thats melee oriented..maybe like the necro poison dagger? I think that would make a WD melee build more do-able.|||Quote:
Im a big WD fan already but i just dont think im sold on it being possible to make an viable melee WD build : (....Looking at a class like the wizard..you can find many melee skills: all the armor skills, lethal eng, weapon mast, ston skin, conjured health..
Looking at the WD, i dont see ANY skills that are ment for melee, and i dont think that runes would alter a skill on a high enough level to make it worth while in close combat. Idk maybe im wrong, but i would like to see the WD with at least one skill thats melee oriented..maybe like the necro poison dagger? I think that would make a WD melee build more do-able.
Let's see .. there are really some skills that would be very practical fro a melee/caster hybrid WD ... there goes some of them.
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*Mind and Body - A passive skill; regenerates mana and health. (naturally a must to max)
*Spirit Sense - Increase damage against targets with low health by X% percentage. (Excellent for a melee character)
*Spirit Walk - Traverse your physical body into the spirit realm, allowing unhindered movement for a time. (to escape when swarmed or low on health)
*Death Pact - Induce momentary invulnerability whenever you are reduced to 10% of your maximum health. This effect cannot occur more than once every 60 seconds. (another excellent skill for melee WD, the temp invincibility will help you bash your way out of tight situations)
*Jungle Fortitude - Increase your Vitality by 5% of your Strength, 5% of your Dexterity, and 5% of your Willpower. (Since Vitality is a high priority for a melee this one is a must too)
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Those will be the core skills to any melee/caster WD .. but they will need to be complimented by few magic skills to back them up .. and which exact skills to back them up is really left open for preferences as each tree (specially Spirit and Voodoo) have lots of useful attack spells).
Now add Melee oriented gear (high DPS spear/sword/Axe with armor that gives STR bonus and gloves that give extra attack speed and such) you will end up with a very viable melee WD (not pure melee of course but still melee will be your main method of killing enemies) .... all that without mentioning anything about skill runes or the new customization systems they didn't announce yet ... i say a melee WD has a very high probability of being very viable and a build class to use.|||I see you point Wolf, the WD has skills that can keep him alive through a fight, but i just dont see where the damage is going to come from. You can say Jungle Fort and Spirit Sense can boost damage but we still dont know how greatly attributes will up your WD's damage.
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Now add Melee oriented gear (high DPS spear/sword/Axe with armor that gives STR bonus and gloves that give extra attack speed and such) you will end up with a very viable melee WD (not pure melee of course but still melee will be your main method of killing enemies) .... .
I agree with you here, but can you really rely only on attribute points from your gear for damage? We know very little about gear and attribute points and their effect on damage, and I dont wana make assumptions. Maybe attribute points alone will be enough, maybe im wrong, but I would still like to see a cool WD melee based attack skill, I think that would be cool.
Wouldnt you?|||Quote:
Wouldnt you?
Absolutely. Since the skill trees are not finished yet, I am optimistic that Blizzard is planning some way for Witch Doctors to be viable in melee combat.|||Quote:
Absolutely. Since the skill trees are not finished yet, I am optimistic that Blizzard is planning some way for Witch Doctors to be viable in melee combat.
mmhmm mmhmm! I hopefull that this is the case as well. I remember when the WD was first announced, i loved the idea and the look of him and his skills. Later down the line, when the wizy was released i saw him packed with all these juicy melee skills and i was like "wow" i didnt really expect that after seeing the WD skill set...i got jealous
The wizy is set and ready for melee in pvm, probably even PVP! So ive been waiting for a new WD melee skill to be announced for all this time and it as yet to come, and i doubt it will : (
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