For this season I created a Witch Doctor, I never played this character before and only just got the items I need for the Mundungu build I saw on Icy Veins. I have all the items needed, most likely not with perfect stats but at least I got the basic mechanics of this playstyle working-
I get how to play with this set and the playstyle, with Spirit Walk I pull mobs (or use it as a saftey bubble in tricky situations), keep my Soul Harvest buff up and spread locust on enemies to increase the damage, Pirahnas for mob grouping and Spirit Barrage for damage.
Now, with the weapon “The Barber” it says I need to accumulate damage on targets, sounds easy but I don’t understand how it really works.
What I thought how it works: The longer I click on an enemy, the higher the damage will be once I release my left mouse button (where I have Spirit Barrage bind to).
From what I experienced however, it only works like that… half the time? I don’t know how to explain it properly, sometimes I click on an enemy like 4 seconds and barely deal any damage but then at times I do a single click on an enemy and kill it instantly.
Currently I am at Rift level 104, the enemies were no big deal there, I can nuke them down fairly easy and I don’t notice that “inconsistency” I talked about above not very often. The Rift Guardians however make this inconsistency very obvious to me.
Sometimes, I can click for 10 seconds on a guardian and they take no damage at all but sometimes, seemingly randomly, I nuke like half their health while running around (without a pylon shadow clone). How does that happen? I can’t really see the pattern here. Is there an internal cooldown on how often I can “trigger” the explosion, or something like that? Is there a “stack limit”, how high I can let the damage explosion stack?
Anyone able to explain the mechanics to me?
A couple of possibilities:
- You either miss applying Locusts or it expires after 8s, but then you do, and see the effect.
- Your Crit stats are really low, so may happen rarely enough to surprise you.
You should also know that once a creature has accumulated enough Barber damage to be fatal…it blows on it’s own.
I try to keep the locust debuff up all the time, especially at rift guardians I try to keep an eye on that.
I am currently at 46% crit chance and roughly 300% crit damage (roughly 25% more are going to come from paragon levels), is this build heavily depending on crit chance? In the guides I didn’t see crit chance having a vet, high priority, cooldown and resource reduction seem more important due to using the captain crimson set. So, should I try to get r more crit ratings?
Ah okay that is something I have observed as well but that raises the question, some guides say you shouldn’t click too long on enemies due to “over killing them”, but if the damage instantly kills the enemy anyway if it has accumulated enough, is it even possible to overkill something?
The Phantasms stack the Barber damage on their own, not the WD. They do not explode when you stop casting, they explode when they are replaced by another phantasm (you can only have 3) or they expire after 10 seconds. They won’t really stack up much Barber damage if you spam them because they are constantly getting replaced and don’t have time to stack any damage. If you cast 3 and wait you will get a huge explosion after 10 seconds.
The Manitou also stacks itself but it will explode once a target stops getting hit. It doesn’t care if you are spamming or not, only if the target is in range and keeps getting hit. This can take a big chunk of life off of a RG that the Manitou has been stacking on the whole fight.
The actual spirit barrage works just like the tooltip says. It will keep stacking as long as the WD keeps spamming a target and explode when it stops.
The basic strategy is to cast 3 phantasms in large groups and let them stack up damage on a lot of enemies for a big explosion. When there are only a few or single target it is better for the WD to just spam.
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Alright that makes it a lot more clear, thanks for explaining!
Actually it matters quite a lot Imo.
The damage is technically the same but if you let the Phantasms stack on a single target then you are not doing damage with your actual Spirit Barrage because you are not casting it. If the target moves away before you explode, it will not take any damage at all. On the other side you can do far more damage by setting up a big explosion in density than you can by spamming.
At some point after the Mundungu set was released and they halted the exploit of it being a pet, they changed the attack/explosion time on spirit barrage so there’s an extra slight delay on the hit damage time, something like that. I do not remember the exact quotation but it’s something like that. See above for all the mechanics and workings.
click, click, click. boom, boom, boom…