One of the more anticipated redos of sets is the Helltooth set for Witch Doctors. The original set centered around the ability Wall of Zombies, which really didn’t do much even though it looked cool. Instead, part of the redesign was changing the ability to be called Wall of Death and moving Wall of Zombies into a rune. That partly added more flexibility along with adding Necrosis to add a debuff on enemies, provided a defensive buff to the Witch Doctor and slow enemies.
The set is mostly going to a combination of a resource and cooldown intensive set. Part of the thing is that Wall of Death has a cooldown attached that will prevent you from spamming the ability all over the place. The resource intensive part comes from Acid Cloud, which will your primary damage dealer when used in conjunction with Wall of Death. You will definitely want to use the Bastion of Will ring set with this build since your primary skills damage gets buffed from the 6 piece bonus via a stacking Wall of Death debuff.
Beyond the 6 piece, you will want to use the new Jerams Bracers, which allows Wall of Death to be cast up to twice again within 2 seconds before the cooldown begins. Since the 6 piece for Helltooth allows you to stack Wall of Death up to three times, the bracers is necessary to maximize this effect in quickly dropping down three consecutive Wall of Deaths on your enemies.
Also, you will want to include the new SuWong Diviner staff that gives you the Lob Blob Acid Cloud rune and rolls with additional 45-60% acid cloud damage. In this manner, you’ll be receiving two types of runes for your acid cloud ability.
From here, the gear becomes a little looser but the belt slot of choice seems to be the Belt of Transcendence for the auto generated fetishes. You could probably get something like The Witching Hour and Cube the Belt of Transcendence, but the other cubed item I’ve seen for armor is The Grin Reaper for the extra pets or a Mask of Jeram if yuo decide to go with the Belt of Transcendence.
Weapon-wise, there’s honestly not a lot of stand out choices beyond the new SuWong Diviner. So you do have that flexibility of just cubing that item and doing say a Starmetal Kukri and a mojo like an Ukhapian Serpent. However, I feel that the bonus damage from Acid Cloud is more valuable here. If anything, you can cube The Furnace or a Starmetal Kukri and simply go with Big Bad Voodoo as a periodic buff if used in conjunction with the Belt of Transcendence and the Mask of Jeram. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to get the Tasker and Theo gloves without sacrificing the Bastion of Will rings and using a Ring of Royal Grandeur. But that’s entirely up to you.
For your ring slot, more than likely you’ll be going with the Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac. No other ring will match up for this slot since you’ll need your cooldown to keep your Wall of Death up as much as possible. While the semi-pet build suggested above does sound cool, in reality it’s only a support option and should not be the focus of your skills outside of novelty.
For your main skills, I would suggest using Firebomb along with Ghost Bomb as your rune and Acid Cloud with Corpse Bomb. There’s just no two ways about it for this. For your Wall of Death rune, most people I’ve seen choose Communing with Spirits. Even though it’s a Cold rune, the main purpose is adding the slow effect. So that would help proc Bane of the Trapped if you decide to use it as one of your legendary gems.
For the other three skills, you can go with Big Bad Voodoo if you manage to acquire a Starmetal Kukri and have the cooldown reduced via your fetishes generated from the Belt of Transcendence. Also, Spirit Walk pretty much is a must have ability for any Witch Doctor. Your last skill is something you can have a bit of freedom on. I tend to preference Zombie Dogs because of how it works with Necrosis. The rune I’ve seen used often is Chilled to the Bone for a damage buff.
For your passives, you should be going with Grave Injustice for the cooldown reduction to Wall of Death and mana regeneration, Pierce the Veil for raw damage increase, Gruesome Feast for the mana restoration via health globes and intelligence/damage boost and finally Vision Quest for additional mana regeneration.
The reason for needed all the methods of mana regeneration is due to Acid Cloud’s 175 point mana cost. You will eat up mana like crazy and should probably focus on cooldown reduction on gear. Then your passives will be the ones to help manage your resources in between keeping Wall of Death up.
For your legendary gems, you definitely want to have Bane of the Trapped and Gogok. Gogok is good for more attack speed/cooldown reduction and Bane of the Trapped is there to proc from your Wall of Death. The last gem slot is pretty open ended. Effacious Toxin seems like a good choice here since you’re dealing dot type of damage mostly.
The game play mostly is about tossing Wall of Death on your enemies, slowing them so that your acid cloud drops on top and keeping up your procs from Bastion of Will. It’s a slower paced version of the Slow Time Delsere build in my opinion, does reasonable damage but honestly has very little to write home about. I didn’t find much trouble with the set on T6, doing a few hundred million crits and nuking my enemies with ease.
The build is pretty straight forward in my opinion and doesn’t take a lot of work to get going. If you’re looking for a simple ranged witch doctor build, this is for you. It’s probably a good middle tier type of build that gets the job done.
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