Basic Theorycrafting: The New Sacrifice is Awesome
by JR Cook - 10 years ago show comments
A lot of excitement could be found on the 2.1. patch notes, the news had many fans around the world fawning over Greater Rifts, Weapon Gem Slots, and new Legendary Items; meanwhile, my brain was going crazy about a certain Witch Doctor change.
- Sacrifice
- Has been redesigned
- Now sacrifices a single dog at a time
- The dog will now be thrown to you cursor location and detonates on impact
- Weapon damage increased from 185% to 1090%
- If you’re wearing The Tall Man’s Finger, the damage is tripled to 3270% weapon damage for sacrificing your dog
- You do not gain additional damage if your giant dog represents more than 3 normal dogs
- Skill Rune – Black Blood
- Has been redesigned
- Now stuns enemies in the impact area for 3 seconds
- Skill Rune – Pride
- Mana gained increased from 60 to 280 per dog
- Skill Rune – For the Master
- Has been redesigned
- All your dogs will now be sacrificed in a single cast for 1090% weapon damage each
- Skill Rune – Provoke the Pack
- Has been redesigned
- Now gain 20% increased damage for 5 seconds when you sacrifice a dog
- This buff gains a stack with each cast and has a maximum of 10 stacks
From 185% Weapon Damage and all the way to a whooping 1090%. Talk about a buff!
This big of a buff might look like an exaggeration to some, but my first reaction was a big, wide smile; this was a much needed buff, and it couldn’t come at a better moment. Sacrifice, as it stands on the live servers, is a severely undertuned skill. It is so weak that I doubt that many Witch Doctors use it.
I might be one of the few that actually use Sacrifice, and I have mainly been using it to generate health globes with the Final Gift Rune. The damage boost alone is going to change my witch DOCTOR from a gimmicky spec into a very competitive and deadly on, the changes to the runes are just the icing on the cake.
The Numbers
- 1090%, the new amount of damage per dog.
- 5, the maximum amount of dogs you can have out at the same time.
- 20%, the increased damage you get from the Provoke the Pack rune.
- 45, the seconds of cooldown on your Summon Zombie Dog Skills.
- 25%, the cooldown reduction granted to Summon Zombie Dogs by the Tribal Rites Passive.
- 4-6, the seconds between each [d3item name= Homunculus] summon.
- 3270%, the damage you do when exploding Tall Man’s fingers dogs.
- 3, the amount of seconds you can stun an enemy with the Black Blood Rune.
How often can we explode our doges?
Considering the maximum of 5 dogs out, Tribal Rites and 40% CDR from items. That’s 55% CDR on Zombie Dogs.
That’s a 20.25 second cooldown on your doges skill. Since every cast summons 5 dogs then you get 0.25 dogs per second. If we have a perfect 4 second [d3item name=Homunculus] then we get an extra 0.25 dogs per second for a grand total of 0.5 dogs per second.
So we could theoretically explode a dog every 2 seconds.
How Much DPS would we get?
If we stack up 40% Physical Damage and 45% Sacrifice Damage, we would get 2212,7% per explosion. or 1106.35% Weapon Damage per second. Considering we’d also have extra time to spam other skills then this build starts looking pretty awesome.
What do I do when I’m not exploding dogs?
Since this is a build that is heavily dependant on set cooldowns, attack speed is of no use to use. The slowest 1-Handers are Maces at 1.2 attacks per second. Out of those 1.2 attacks per second, 0.5 of them could be dog explosions and 0.7 would have to be something else.
We also have to consider that we can stack up to 5 dogs before the fight starts, and we can also wait to make sure that our Summon Zombie Dogs CD is up. We are very likely to be entering fights with a few extra dogs to burn.
Provoke the Pack would stack up neatly on this scenario, and after your stacks build up you would still have your entire mana pool to burn on powerful spells that will be boosted even more by your Provoke the Pack buff
Other Canine Options
While I’ve mentioned the main ways of getting dogs, there’s also other options to compliment our dog summoning. You can also consider the Circle of Life Passive, with the new Hellfire Amulet this would be a perfect fifth passive skills. You could give up some damage from Provoke the Pack and go with Next of Kin. There’s also Devolution and Death is Life, two skills that synergize greatly with our would-be build.
The Build
Actives:
Summon Zombie Dogs – Final Gift
Grasp of the Dead – Death is Life
Passives:
The Items
[d3item name=”Razor Strop”]
[d3item name=Homunculus]
You might be surprised that I haven’t added the Tall Man’s Finger, but this build is more about your dog quantity, as you want the most amount of Dogs for Provoke the Pack.
Maybe on next week’s Hellforge we can look at a Tall Man’s Finger Variant.
