Arachyr Corpse Spiders Witch Doctor BiS Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points

The build relies on the complete powers of the Spirit of Arachyr set, taking five of the six available pieces of the set and completing the full 6-piece set bonus by using Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube. Rolls-wise, the build makes good use of Skill and Area Damage affixes, as well as Attack Speed to reach optimal breakpoints of the Corpse Spiders attack animation. Arachyr's Carapace and Arachyr's Stride will be entirely dedicated to toughness stats, stacking up Resistances and Armor on top of bulky main stats wherever possible. Your helm (either Mask of Jeram or Arachyr's Visage) is similarly stacked on main stats, but also requires a Crit Chance roll; Arachyr's Mantle should feature Area Damage and Cooldown Reduction on top of the usual Intelligence and Vitality. Arachyr's Claws are a massive damage piece, as they should feature both Crit stats, Attack Speed, and — at high Paragon levels — an Area Damage roll to replace the Intelligence.

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.

Having Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube 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 Corpse Spiders Arachyr playstyle, which goes from extended periods of Spirit Walk movement and setting up fights with Locust Swarm and Piranhado into static Corpse Spiders spam (see this build's skills page for the proper rotation). Your remaining ring slot should be occupied by Ring of Emptiness, which brings a massive damage multiplier against enemies affected by either Haunt or Locust Swarm (you take the latter).

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

• Lakumba's Ornament is a tremendous source of damage reduction, working alongside the bonuses of Sacred Harvester (discussed below). It offers a baseline of 60% DR that stacks up to 80% with an easy 10 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.
• Shukrani's Triumph makes Spirit Walk last until you attack 3 times, or an elite is within 20 yards of you, resulting in outstanding mobility right until you decide to engage in a fight, putting you in a very advantageous position. It also offers a damage multiplier while you are in Spirit Walk; and while you will lose this form when you attack, you still get a grace period as if you just popped the skill on its own (2 seconds with base Spirit Walk, 3 seconds with Jaunt), giving you another short period of damage multiplication.

You complete the gear setup with two legendaries that are entirely dedicated to Corpse Spiders itself. Both The Spider Queen's Grasp and Brood of Araneae offer straight skill damage boosts that simply cannot be ignored. The Slowing effect of The Spider Queen's Grasp is also your most reliable source of Bane of the Trapped procs, since it does not rely on the Spider Queen pet from the 4-piece set bonus, nor on range-dependent triggers like the Horrify radius or the gem's own slowing field. Note that The Spider Queen's Grasp is interchangeable with Sacred Harvester depending on your better rolled item; the worse rolled one goes in the Cube.

For Offense stats, try to obtain Corpse Spiders % bonus on the belt, pants and offhand (maximum of 45%), Physical 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%+. Corpse Spiders is an Attack Speed breakpoint-dependent skill, meaning you attain better damage once you reach certain thresholds of IAS on gear. Aim for the 29 frame breakpoint base, achieavable at 2.01 Attacks per Second in the sheet (prior to Big Bad Voodoo buffs). In gear terms, this should ideally come from a maximized 7% Increased Attack Speed roll on the weapon (multiplicative source of IAS), plus 3 more rolls on gear — i.e., gloves and both rings, plus Paragons and an Enchantress follower with the Attack Speed buff.

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), and the Simplicity's Strength secondary effect.

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 substituting Piranhas from the regular build and using Horrify Frightening Aspect to proc the following power:

• Horrify Sanctification: Horrify becomes an aura that causes enemies to receive 100% more damage and deal 15% less damage in addition to its other effects.

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 Spider Queen's Grasp and Shukrani's Triumph.

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, as well as various other sources of crowd control in the build — i.e., The Spider Queen's Grasp, Spider Queen summon and Languish slows, the Immobilization from Horrify (if present in your setup), and others.

Enforcer is a pet-oriented gem that multiplicatively increases Corpse Spiders damage, since they get re-classified as pets via the 2-piece bonus of Arachyr.

Simplicity's Strength is one of the best DPS gems you can take for the build, as it brings another separate damage multiplication source to primary skills. Upgrading with a steady pace of half a percent per gem level, it quickly becomes a priority and a fixture in your gem choices. Its healing secondary effect is just icing on the cake.

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 your worse rolled item between The Spider Queen's Grasp and Sacred Harvester. Sacred Harvester is a universally useful Witch Doctor legendary weapon, whose unique power extends the number of Soul Harvest stacks from 5 to 10 — with all the respective bonuses from the skill, rune, and worn equipment enhanced by it. A squishier and more mechanically demanding — but also stronger — variation for the slot is to use Echoing Fury, which double dips the 75% Attack Speed bonus through its interaction with Brood of Araneae. A third viable variant is to use Wormwood, whose automatic Locust Swarms free up a slot on your skill bar — enabling you to use both Horrify and Big Bad Voodoo on your skill bar.

As previously mentioned, you will be wearing your better rolled item between Depth Diggers and Mask of Jeram, and extracting your weaker rolled one in the armor slot of the Cube.

In order to maintain the full 6-piece Arachyr set bonus and get a synergistic legendary on top, you will need to use the Act I bounty cache legendary Ring of Royal Grandeur in the jewelry slot of the Cube.

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.

The recommended follower for this build during solo GR progression is the Enchantress due to her elemental Amplification boost and Focused Mind attack speed buff, the latter of which is very helpful in reaching the attack speed breakpoints described above.

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.