Arachyr Firebats Witch Doctor Group Progression Variation

With minor adaptations from the solo GR progression build, Arachyr Firebats can be adapted to a Trash Killer in 4-man parties. Its role in a 2-DPS setup is to take care of AoE damage, clearing monster pulls created by the Support teammates. This variation is no longer considered meta, but we keep the page around for documentation purposes.

Active Skills
Firebats Cloud of Bats Locust Swarm Cloud of Insects 1 Big Bad Voodoo Slam Dance 2 Spirit Walk Jaunt 3 Soul Harvest Languish 4 Haunt Draining Spirit
Passive Skills
Creeping Death Confidence Ritual Gruesome Feast Grave Injustice

Similarly to the soloing build, you will need to apply and keep up Soul Harvest for the damage reduction of Lakumba's Ornament, and you should spread DoTs to keep the Ring of Emptiness damage multiplication active. You will be adding Haunt Draining Spirit on top of the soloing DoT Locust Swarm, since Mana spending will be harder to manage with your skyrocketed Attack Speed (due to Pain Enhancer). With the powers of Shukrani's Triumph, Spirit Walk gains an added damage multiplier aspect on top of its protective properties; you will need to time your Convention of Elements burst during the Fire cycle to ideally match the duration of your Spirit form for supremely buffed Firebats channeling.

Once you start channeling, do not stop until the pack is done and your group moves on ahead; Firebats snapshots Attack Speed at the start of channeling, so if you start with a beefy Pain Enhancer stack, it pays off to hold onto that cast. In an ideal case scenario, your supports will bring everything to you, so you can root yourself in place for the duration of the fight for the maximum Endless Walk set bonus — even with a potential Oculus Ring proc to buff you up even further.

Parts of the skill and passive selection will overlap with the base Greater Rift progression build, but others will have to change according to the task at hand. Maximizing your AoE potential and damage overall takes precedence.

• The main damage dealer of the build remains Firebats, along with the highest damage dealing rune: Cloud of Bats.
• In a group variant, due to the high Mana demands of Firebats channeling at high Attack Speed breakpoints, you will have two Ring of Emptiness triggers instead of one. Locust Swarm Cloud of Insects still brings damage reduction value (applicable to the whole group), while Haunt Draining Spirit keeps your Mana reserves up.
• With Draining Spirit taking care of Mana management, you can alter your Spirit Walk rune to the lengthier Jaunt; this gives you more time under the Shukrani's Triumph damage multiplication effect.
• Soul Harvest Languish remains a damage reduction powerhouse in conjunction with Sacred Harvester and Lakumba's Ornament.
• You should consider adding another massive, group-wide damage buff in the form of Big Bad Voodoo Slam Dance. While it has a considerable cooldown, you can whittle it down with Grave Injustice and have it up for most, if not all, decisive pulls in the Rift.
• Some adaptation will be necessary in the passives. Some of them will carry over from the soloing build — Creeping Death is still necessary to keep DoT effects going without the need for re-application, while Confidence Ritual remains a solid damage buff for a melee-range spellcaster. Grave Injustice grows tremendously in value if you choose to run Big Bad Voodoo; otherwise, you can consider other staples like Spirit Vessel, Pierce the Veil, or Swampland Attunement. Lastly, the massive damage buff of Gruesome Feast can comfortably replace the resource management-oriented Blood Ritual.

You have some degree of adaptation possible in the gear. In less experienced groups, and especially ones lacking Support Monks, you should consider staying on the set split suggested for the soloing build: 5 Arachyr set pieces, plus 2 of the craftable Cpt. Crimson set and a cubed Ring of Royal Grandeur to get you the full set bonuses. Complete the setup with the Endless Walk set and a Ring of Emptiness (again, mirroring the soloing setup) and you should have a decent, group-agnostic Trash Killer setup.

In a more advanced group, you should equip the full 6-piece Arachyr set, dropping Ring of Royal Grandeur from the Cube, and going all-out on damage multipliers. This allows you to re-equip Bakuli Jungle Wraps, and store Mantle of Channeling and Convention of Elements in the Cube. In your jewelry, you will either stick to the Endless Walk set (our default recommendation), or run Squirt's Necklace, Ring of Emptiness and a Fire damage Stone of Jordan for a glass cannon, extremely support-reliant DPS spec.

Class staples like the Sacred Harvester plus Lakumba's Ornament combo, as well as the Shukrani's Triumph off-hand, remain fixed in the setup for their invaluable bonuses.

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 the rune on Piranhas from Piranhado to Bogadile, and 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 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.

When grouped with a single target DPS teammate, you can omit any Guardian-killing concerns from the build and focus on improving your AoE DPS. To that end, you will be dropping Bane of the Stricken from the soloing setup and replacing it with Pain Enhancer, which allows you to reach the maximum 3 frames per animation breakpoint of Firebats at 47+ stacks.

The other two gems from the soloing setup — Bane of the Trapped (multiplicative damage increase vs. crowd controlled enemies) and Taeguk (up to 80% additive damage and 20% Armor increase) — are still overwhelmingly valuable and should be kept for the group build as well.

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

The weapon Cube selection remains the same as the soloing spec — Staff of Chiroptera. It sports a unique affix that provides a 2.5 damage multiplier, doubles the skill's attack speed (cutting the frames per animation in half), and provides a Resource Cost Reduction multiplier that enables its prolonged channeling.

The armor Cube slot needs to be occupied by Mantle of Channeling, which provides a balanced source of multiplicative damage increase and damage reduction while channeling, neatly fitting into this build subtype.

If you followed the gear alteration advice above and use the full Arachyr set in groups, your jewelry Cube slot needs to be taken by your weaker rolled item between Convention of Elements and Ring of Emptiness. In an Arachyr/Cpt. Crimson mixture, you will need to stick to Ring of Royal Grandeur instead.

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 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.