Arachyr Angry Chicken Witch Doctor BiS Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points

The build relies on the complete powers of the Spirit of Arachyr set, taking all of the six available pieces. Rolls-wise, the build makes good use of Elemental and Area Damage affixes. Arachyr's Carapace, Arachyr's Legs and Arachyr's Stride will be entirely dedicated to toughness stats, stacking up Resistances and Armor on top of bulky main stats wherever possible. Arachyr's Visage is similarly stacked on main stats, but also requires a Crit Chance roll; Arachyr's Mantle should feature Area Damage on top of the usual Intelligence and Vitality, plus another tanky roll (Life % or Armor). Arachyr's Claws are a massive damage piece, as they should feature both Crit stats and Area Damage on top of the base Intelligence stat.

You have two Corpse Spiders-applicable damage multiplication items that affect the build but clash with Arachyr set pieces. Depth Diggers double the damage of Primary skills, which Corpse Spiders is categorized as. Mask of Jeram triples the damage of Pets, a sub-category of skills that is tacked onto Corpse Spiders via the 2-piece bonus of Arachyr. Both items should be included in the build; simply wear your better rolled piece and store the power of the weaker rolled one in the Cube. Adjust the worn Arachyr pieces accordingly.

Wearing all six pieces of the Arachyr set frees up the worn jewelry slots for the strongest possible damage multiplication pieces. The Endless Walk set — The Compass Rose ring and The Traveler's Pledge amulet — adds a unique mechanic that slowly increases your damage by up to a 100% if you remain stationary, and drains it away and increases your damage reduction while moving. This mirrors the Angry Chicken Arachyr playstyle, which goes from extended periods of Spirit Walk movement and setting up fights with Locust Swarm, Spirit Barrage and Piranhado punctuated with Angry Chicken bursts (see this build's skills page for the proper rotation). Your remaining ring slot should be occupied by your better rolled item between Convention of Elements and Ring of Emptiness. Convention of Elements amplifies your damage in periodic cycles, forcing you to keep a close watch for the Poison cycle of its rotation. Ring of Emptiness brings a massive damage multiplier against enemies affected by either Haunt or Locust Swarm (you take the latter). Your weaker between the two rings goes in the jewelry slot of Kanai's Cube.

Two generically useful Witch Doctor legendaries will augment both your defense and offense capabilities.

• Lakumba's Ornament is a tremendous source of damage reduction, offering a baseline of 60% DR that stacks up to 70% with an easy 5 monster harvest during the Rift clear. Note the variance in the roll of its legendary bonus — 1 to 3 Soul Harvest stacks required for the base DR to trigger. Aim for the lowest, 1 stack required roll.
• Without any particularly desirable belt, the Angry Chicken Witch Doctor uses the glass cannon champion, The Witching Hour. Naturally sporting the unusual combination of Attack Speed and Crit Damage, the best-in-slot rolls would also include a hefty Vitality roll. Another viable, but noticeably weaker option for GRs is the Belt of Transcendence, allowing you to free up the Fetish Sycophants passive slot for another of your choosing.

You complete the gear setup with the signature set of the build — The Manajuma's Way, consisting of Manajuma's Carving Knife and Manajuma's Gory Fetch. This weapon-and-offhand combo extends the duration of Hex Angry Chicken to 15 seconds, allowing you ample time to aim and release your burst. To your additional advantage, Hex's cooldown begins when you enter the Angry Chicken form, allowing you to prepare your Chicken form ahead of time and double up the detonation blasts where necessary.

During Greater Rift speed farming, the measured pace of the Endless Walk set diminishes in usefulness. Consider a combo of Squirt's Necklace, Ring of Emptiness and Convention of Elements instead. This frees up a jewelry slot in the Cube, allowing you to slot Ring of Royal Grandeur there and toy around with an additional legendary power (i.e., St. Archew's Gage).

For Offense stats, try to obtain Poison elemental damage on the amulet and wrists (maximum of 40%), Crit Chance and Crit Damage within a 1:10 ratio (ideally over 60% and 450%, respectively), and Area Damage of 100%+.

For Defense stats, aim for a life pool of 800k+; dropping as much as you can for offense as you grow accustomed to the build. You will mostly sustain through Life per Hit on gear, with at least one high roll in your setup (i.e. bracer). Note that the build is fairly lacking on Crowd Control Immunity (especially when in Chicken form), so do your best to roll 2 or more Crowd Control Reduction Secondary stats on gear.

All augmentations on gear should be done with your main stat, Intelligence.

Note that the stat suggestions below portray an ideally rolled item with stats listed in relative order of importance. The first four of them are main stats, and the latter two — secondary stats. If your item lacks and is unable to be rerolled into the primary stats outlined below, especially for a stat higher on the list, strongly consider its replacement. Perfecting Secondary stats is mostly a case of hyper-optimization and is not a case for discarding an item, except where noted.

To help you with farming the gear you need for your builds, we have two very useful guides that you can access by clicking the links below: a Salvage Guide to help you quickly check whether or not you can safely salvage a piece of gear and a Legendary Farming Guide to help you efficiently farm legendaries and set items.

This Season comes with the theme of Angelic Crucibles — consumable items that empower Legendary items with perfected Ancient-level stats, as well as infuse them with one of three unique, powerful, class-specific abilities at random. For this build, we recommend aiming for the Haunt Sanctification, which adds the following power to your build:

• Haunt Sanctification: Enemies affected by Locust Swarm are also Haunted. When you cast Piranhas, all Haunted enemies within 60 yards are pulled into the pool. A lesser enemy stunned by Bogadile is instantly killed. Elites and Bosses stunned by Bogadile take massive damage.

Use Angelic Crucibles on an item that crosses over most (if not all) variants of a build, and is also an item that is relatively harder to perfect than other slots (since sanctifying an item maximizes its stats). In the case of this build, good candidates for Sanctification are the Sacred Harvester, Vile Hive, and Ring of Emptiness.

You can read more on Angelic Crucibles and the sanctification process in our dedicated Angelic Crucible Mechanics guide.

The former Season 28 theme, the Altar of Rites, has been revised and re-added to Diablo 3 as a permanent character progression mechanic. — For virtually all builds and players of all skill levels — from casual to advanced — we recommend progressing through the Altar tree using the path outlined below. The suggested path is geared towards maximum quality of life first, then amplifying damage, and then mopping up the tree with defensive and edge case utility nodes.

Note that while they require reaching them with a Seal, Legendary Potion Powers are not part of the Seal cost system; Potions unlock with a separate resource called Primordial Ashes, obtained from salvaging Legendary or Set items of Primal (red bordered) quality. Upgrade them as soon as possible, and in the order shown below (courtesy of Caleko's Altar of Rites planner).

You can read more on the Altar of Rites, Seals and Legendary Potion Powers in our dedicated Altar of Rites Mechanics guide.

In the Core section, max out Movement Speed to the 25% cap. Normally this is done by dumping the first 50 Core Paragon points into Movement Speed, but if your boots have an imperfect roll with Movement Speed as a stat that you cannot replace, adjust the necessary point investment accordingly by simply subtracting your roll from the 25% max. After that, dump as much as you comfortably can into Intelligence, but feel free to invest into Vitality if you feel yourself lacking in toughness. Investing into Max Mana should not be necessary.

In the Offense section, max out Attack Speed, Crit Damage, Crit Chance and Cooldown Reduction in that order. In Defense, prioritize Armor, then Life %, then All Resistance, and finish off with Life Regeneration. In Utility, build up Area Damage and Life on Hit first, then finish off with Resource Cost Reduction and Globe Radius.

Bane of the Trapped is the staple gem of the build; a potent source of additional damage, as it is its own multiplier in your total damage calculation. The gem procs itself with its Level 25 property when in melee range (where you dwell by necessity), as well as various other sources of crowd control in your and your follower's build.

Enforcer is a pet-oriented gem that is, amusingly, used as a survival tool for the Fetish summons. Its level 25 bonus allows the summons to survive long enough to be timed with your burst and be turned into exploding chickens at your convenience. Minions are less threatened in lower Greater Rift speed farm, where you could replace this gem with Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard, in order to safeguard your Squirt's Necklace damage multiplication.

For the absolute highest tiers of Greater Rift Progression, you will have to use Bane of the Stricken for its scaling damage bonus, in order to get you through the GR Guardian fight. You will be mostly stacking its bonus with Spirit Barrage, since Chickens won't work. In lower Greater Rifts, replace this gem with the all-around toughness and damage buff of Bane of the Powerful.

When it comes to gear gems, you will start out progression by slotting the highest available level of Topazes in the chest and pants sockets. Ideally, these will all be Flawless Royal Topazes as soon as possible. As you grow in Paragon (bulking up Intelligence in the Core section) and aim for higher tier and more dangerous GRs, you will transition those gems into the defensive Flawless Royal Ruby, scaling the lacking Armor of an Intelligence-based character (Intelligence scales Resistances). There is no specific breakpoint where you do that; the rule of thumb is to make the change as soon as you feel the lack of toughness impede your progress. Since this build is easy on both cooldowns and resource spending, you can either stack survivability with Flawless Royal Amethyst, or invest a little into CDR with Flawless Royal Diamond to make Spirit Walk and Big Bad Voodoo more readily available (our default recommendation). In your weapon, use a Flawless Royal Emerald for the Crit Damage boost.

For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.

Your weapon Cube slot will be occupied by Cluckeye; this Witch Doctor-specific legendary bow has an Angry Chicken amplification power that propels the viability of the skill into the endgame. Its transformational power (pets into chickens when you use Hex Angry Chicken) also enforces the summon-centric powers in the build.

Due to the low Mana-spending nature of the build, you can take advantage of a defensive multiplier in your armor Cube slot — Aquila Cuirass. Alternatively, you can play with the stronger Stone Gauntlets power, and work around its drawback with Spirit Walk uptime (requiring a bigger investment into Cooldown Reduction, however). When speed farming lower Greater Rifts, another alternative for the slot is St. Archew's Gage — its shielding power is quite useful to keep Squirt's Necklace safe and active.

As previously mentioned, you will be wearing your stronger rolled ring between Convention of Elements and Ring of Emptiness, and using the other in your jewelry Cube slot.

The Kanai's Cube can be used for much more than simply extracting Legendary powers from items. Please refer to our Kanai's Cube guide for more information.

For Greater Rift progression with this build, we recommend the Templar for his essential heal and cheat death abilities. The Templar is a preferable choice due to the lacking sustain in this build, as well as the general squishiness of Witch Doctors in high Greater Rift progression. For Greater Rift speedfarming however, you should definitely consider the Enchantress for her myriad of helpful buffs.

For more information regarding followers, we advise you to read our Follower Guide, which contains detailed advice for choosing the skills and the gear of your follower.

The preferred potions for this build are Bottomless Potion of Kulle-Aid (allowing you to break down Waller affixes that impede your positioning) and Bottomless Potion of the Tower (whose Armor-increasing properties complement the naturally high All Resistances stat of Witch Doctors). Pick whichever you feel helps you out the most.