Arachyr Firebats Witch Doctor Speed Farming Variation

The Arachyr Firebats deals reasonably well with Normal Rift farming all the way through the highest Torment difficulties. With the appropriate gear modifications outlined below, it should also prove as a reliable and capable bounty farming build. We have solo speed GR rankings and solo speed T16 rankings if you want to know more about which builds are best for speed farming.

Within the limited scope of regular difficulties, the necessary damage and toughness to triumph over the enemy is significantly smaller. Thus, your best course of action is to improve utility and speed.

Active Skills
Firebats Cloud of Bats Locust Swarm Pestilence 1 Horrify Stalker 2 Spirit Walk Severance 3 Soul Harvest Soul to Waste 4 Piranhas Piranhado
Passive Skills
Creeping Death Gruesome Feast Spirit Vessel Grave Injustice

When you are speed farming regular rifts, parts of your playstyle will adapt to the lowered challenge and focus more on speed and utility.

You still begin runs by Soul Harvesting the nearest enemy pack, preferably from the safety of Spirit Walk. Whether you wear Lakumba's Ornament for extra protection or not, harvesting will speed you up with the Soul to Waste rune. Horrify is also used for a movement speed buff via the rune Stalker. Refresh both buffs and try not to let them fall off. You are at a significant combat advantage with the powers of Shukrani's Triumph, which allows you near limitless mobility in your Spirit Walk state, and when you decide to engage, it multiplies your damage — more than enough to oneshot packs during speed farming. To ensure their destruction, pre-pull with Piranhado to render them helpless and spread Locust Swarm on them to trigger the damage multiplication from Ring of Emptiness.

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. Ability to cross over great distances faster and more efficiently take precedence.

• Firebats is still your main damage dealer, taken with the highest damage rune — Cloud of Bats. This is a 15-yard radius channeling skill, whose damage ramps up over a 3-second period and whose attack speed gets snapshotted at the start of channeling with any applicable buffs.
• A proc for Ring of Emptiness will also be quite helpful to cement your ability to oneshot enemies; our default recommendation is to take Locust Swarm with the superior spread of the Pestilence rune, and to focus on Firebats damage on gear. You can however viably alternate the rune to the fiery Searing Locusts and take advantage of the Arachyr set damage multiplication for this skill as well; if you opt to do so, consider rolling Locust Swarm damage on your shoulders and chest, and using Vile Hive over Shukrani's Triumph.
• You should exchange the lengthier effect of the Jaunt rune on Spirit Walk for the faster movement of Severance.
• You should exchange the unnecessarily tanky Languish rune of Soul Harvest for the boost of speed coming from Soul to Waste. With similar argumentation, swap the Horrify rune from Frightening Aspect to Stalker.
• You can keep some crowd control in the build with Piranhas Piranhado, clumping up enemies for the ease of Firebats destruction.
• In your passives, replace the progression-oriented Blood Ritual for a cheat death failsafe from Spirit Vessel. Replace Confidence Ritual with Gruesome Feast, as it undeniably offers the strongest damage increase among its peers, provided you can keep it stacked with health globes — an easy task when farming. Keep Grave Injustice for the cooldown reduction utility, and Creeping Death to reduce the need to reapply Locust Swarm.

The foundation of the build will closely resemble the GR progression build, as you still rely on the 6-piece set bonus of Arachyr to deal damage. You will be equipping all 6 available pieces of the set, freeing up your jewelry slots for damage and utility-oriented amulet and rings, as well as allowing you to equip speedfarm-oriented gear in your rermaining armor slots. Your weapon and offhand can stay on the same pieces from GR progression, as both Sacred Harvester and Shukrani's Triumph provide generically useful bonuses for speed farming as well.

You will keep Ring of Emptiness from the GR progression build, as it provides a time- and pacing-agnostic damage bonus at the mere cost of including Locust Swarm in the build. Another great ring for GR speed farming is Rechel's Ring of Larceny, whose movement speed bonus will be triggered constantly via Horrify. The third suggested ring for the setup is a Fire damage Stone of Jordan, which provides a consistent elemental and elite damage bonus. You should have the SoJ equipped, since its elemental and elite bonuses cannot be extracted in the Cube; pair it with your better rolled item between Ring of Emptiness and Rechel's Ring of Larceny, and cube the worse one.

It should be noted that Avarice Band is a supremely useful legendary item that, in conjunction with Goldwrap and Boon of the Hoarder, will form a gold triumvirate that keeps you safe and showered in gold as you farm up T16s. When you are farming solo however, this ring can be equipped on your Follower, and its power will "Emanate" to you (meaning you gain the benefits of the item as if you wore it yourself). That being said, in group farming you will need to wear the Avarice Band yourself, replacing the SoJ, since you cannot have a Follower in parties.

Early on in character progression, you can keep Lakumba's Ornament for the immense damage reduction it provides to the build. When you have progressed your character and are comfortable with Goldwrap mechanics and relying on procs to survive, you can swap Lakumba's Ornament out for Warzechian Armguards, which provide you with an additional speed boost based on environmental destruction. The former favorite for the slot, Nemesis Bracers, are still quite valuable to the build; when soloing, they should be equipped on the follower however, since their power can be transferred to you via the Emanate mechanic.

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.

Bane of the Trapped is a universally useful damage multiplication gem that matches the fighting range of this build for the application of its bonuses. Other legendary gems that are meant for prolonged fights should be replaced by utility; Taeguk should be replaced by Boon of the Hoarder, whose interaction with the Avarice Band and Goldwrap will keep you rich, safe and sped up throughout the run. Bane of the Stricken should give way to Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard, whose shielding mechanics will safeguard your Squirt's Necklace damage bonus.

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.

Our default recommendation for the Firebats-reliant speedrunning spec is to store Bakuli Jungle Wraps for the massive damage multiplier to Firebats against enemies affected by Locust Swarm or Piranhas. In an alternative setup that splits damage duties with Locust Swarm (as described above), you can consider slotting Quetzalcoatl in this slot, which practically doubles the damage of your DoTs.

Your jewelry Cube slot will be occupied by your worse rolled item between Rechel's Ring of Larceny (massive speed boost whenever you Fear an enemy with Horrify), and Ring of Emptiness (massive damage multiplication against enemies affected by either Haunt or Locust Swarm).

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 T16 key farming is the Enchantress due to her cooldown reduction buff from Prophetic Harmony, as well as the Focused Mind attack speed buff.

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.