LoD Spirit Barrage Witch Doctor BiS Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points

As this is a Legacy of Dreams setup, the rest of your gear slots will be comprised entirely of legendary items. As a rule of thumb, focus on synergistic stats like Attack Speed, Average Damage and skill bonuses, and remember the setup's requirements for ancient items, as well as its restriction on other set bonuses. You can run individual set pieces with beneficial stats, as long as they do not form any set bonus.

The Legacy of Dreams power allows you to run any legendary item combination while not losing out on the damage amplification and reduction associated with the traditional 6-piece sets. You can obtain this power in two ways; the older way is equipping the two rings — The Wailing Host and Litany of the Undaunted — as your only active set bonus. The newer (and more powerful, since it also opens your ring slots for legendary jewelry) method is the Legacy of Dreams legendary gem.

In a setup with Legacy of Dreams, you will be wearing your two best rolled rings and cubing the third between Convention of Elements, Unity, and Ring of Emptiness. Unity will cut incoming damage in half when paired with another on the follower, along with an immortality relic for them (i.e. Enchanting Favor). Ring of Emptiness greatly amplifies your damage as you spread at least one of the two DoTs associated with its power, Haunt and Locust Swarm. Convention of Elements simply provides a massive damage increase during the Cold cycle of its rotation.

The recommended amulet is Squirt's Necklace, which adds another massive damage multiplier, albeit with a hefty drawback — its loss when you take a hit, plus a hefty increase in damage taken. This glass cannon favorite necessitates careful play and positioning to minimize potential threats to your Witch Doctor. Another viable option is a Hellfire Amulet of Intelligence with a synergistic fifth passive like Spirit Vessel. The former favorite for the slot, The Flavor of Time, can now be equipped on the follower and its power will transfer to you via the Emanate mechanic.

With the changes in Patch 2.6.9, the Spectres from the Phantasm rune no longer benefit from pet bonuses, effectively ending our previous recommendation for the slot — Mask of Jeram. In its stead, we recommend that you equip either a Cold damage Andariel's Visage (for optimal damage), or a Leoric's Crown for the additional Toughness with a socketed Amethyst. Rolls-wise, aim for Intelligence, Spirit Barrage %, and Crit Chance.

In terms of gearing outside the jewelry, we can roughly divide gear into three categories: offense, defense, and Spirit Barrage-specific.

Your offensive armor equips will be evenly split between boosting elemental damage and pet damage, working in unison to boost your primary skill. A straightforward addition to the build, Frostburn will increase Cold damage (affecting both Manitou and Phantasm), as well as bring circumstantial survivability to the build via the 50% chance to freeze affected enemies. Note that you can either wear or cube Frostburns depending on your better rolled item between them and Stone Gauntlets, discussed below. Blackthorne's Jousting Mail provide an elemental damage increase, which is fairly unique for the slot — as long as it does not form its set bonus with another Blackthorne item, thus breaking the LoD bonus, this will be your best-in-slot item.

Your five defensive items bring the bulk of the survivability in the build, requiring you to pick skills, passive and Cube choices to cater to their mechanics. Aquila Cuirass reduces damage in half as long as you do not dip below 90% of your resource pool, which is heavily assisted by Rush of Essence. On the other hand, Lakumba's Ornament is a class cornerstone that reduces incoming damage significantly as you Soul Harvest your way through fights (see this build's skills page for more information). Stone Gauntlets (either worn or cubed) are one of the most effective protective pieces in the game, bumping your armor in 50% increments as you get hit, but with a similarly stacking mobility penalty — a downside you will be completely negating with the unique property of Ice Climbers, which make you immune to immobilization effects. Lacking any truly synergistic shoulders, your best bet for the slot are the Pauldrons of the Skeleton King — an Act 1 cache legendary that gives you an independent, yet minor chance for a cheat death proc.

The belt slot is adaptable between Belt of Transcendence and The Witching Hour, depending on your need for extra survivability or damage, respectively. Belt of Transcendence will bring a lot of indirect toughness by creating a Fetish "meat shield" army around you. The Witching Hour is very straightforward with its bonuses, as it offers both an Attack Speed and Crit Damge rolls, which are unique for the slot.

You have three options for the weapon slot: the Spirit Barrage-specific The Barber and Voo's Juicer, and the generic utility staple Sacred Harvester. The Barber forms a unique interaction with Spirit Barrage, turning it from a directly damaging skill to an accumulated one, where you choose when the damaging detonation actually occurs; it enforces a rather unique playstyle where you try to buff up during the accumulation phase rather than lining up buffs during the detonation. Sacred Harvester simply extends your Soul Harvest stacks to 10, and coupled with Lakumba's Ornament forms the basis of your survivability in this generally squishy build. We generally recommend wearing the Sacred Harvester due to its fixed power, and extracting The Barber to enjoy its maximized legendary power in the Cube. Lastly, Voo's Juicer adds to the Spirit Barrage damage and nets you the Phlebotomize and The Spirit Is Willing runes for free; it should be considered over Sacred Harvester when you reach a higher Paragon level and comfort with handling the build, as you will gain a tier or two worth of extra damage by including it in the setup.

In your other hand, the Gazing Demise will be a crucial piece in the formation of the build; it brings the "pets" of the Phantasm rune for free and multiplies their damage for each spirit in the field. The item has an unfortunate base Life Regeneration roll and lacks a natural Crit Chance stat, making it hard to obtain with a good roll and a high priority gamble target.

For Offense stats, try to obtain Spirit Barrage % bonus on both the helm, boots and offhand (maximum of 45%), Cold elemental damage on both the amulet and wrists (maximum of 40%) and Crit Chance and Crit Damage within a 1:10 ratio (ideally over 60% and 450%, respectively). This build is mostly heavily invested in Attack Speed, and does not require much CDR or RCR to function. A suggested (but not mandatory — test and see what split you are comfortable with) setup would be to reach 22%+ CDR (achieved through Paragons, Shoulders, and Gloves); 10% Resource Cost Reduction (Paragons); and having Attack Speed rolls on both Rings, Gloves, and Helm (if Andariel's Visage), as well as Paragons.Area Damage is useless in this build. You can consider adding to Maximum Mana through secondary stat rolls, as this will help with Aquila Cuirass uptime.

For Defense stats, aim for a life pool around 850-900k; dropping as much as you can for offense as you grow accustomed to the build. Your sustain will come from Life per Hit rolls on your bracer or weapon (or both), as well as the Grave Injustice passive effect and Ghost Trance, should you pick it as your Big Bad Voodoo rune.

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 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 your equipped weapon (either The Barber or Voo's Juicer), or the Gazing Demise.

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 (very likely). Investing points into Maximum Mana should not be necessary, but can be considered for improved uptime of the Aquila Cuirass buff.

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

Bane of the Stricken is a frequent part of Greater Rift solo progression builds, as it is meant to aid strong AoE builds against their nemesis — high health, single target Champions and Rift Guardians. Its stacking damage mechanic is a mechanical guarantee for taking down bulkier enemies in high progression, making it a natural inclusion in Spirit Barrage builds.

With the changes in Patch 2.6.9, the Spectres from the Phantasm rune no longer benefit from pet bonuses, effectively ending our previous recommendation for the slot — Enforcer. In its stead, we recommend that you use Bane of the Trapped; a potent source of additional damage, as it is its own multiplier in your total damage calculation. You will easily proc this gem with the slows from Spirit Barrage and Soul Harvest Languish, as well as the gem's own level 25+ effect in short ranges.

Your final slot is best occupied by the Legacy of Dreams legendary gem, which provides a scaling bonus for each legendary item equipped, as long as you have no set bonuses equipped. This bonus is multiplied for Ancient or Primal quality items, and when the gem is maxed out, it matches the Legacy of Nightmares ( The Wailing Host and Litany of the Undaunted rings) set bonus. This potent bonus allows you to play around with all your gear slots for synergistic legendary powers at the cost of a gem slot; in the older LoN setup, this socket would be occupied by Gogok of Swiftness.

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

As discussed in the paragraphs above, you can extract your weaker roll between Sacred Harvester and The Barber for the weapon slot in the Cube. You will likely run The Barber due to its highly variable bonus. If you choose to run the variation with Voo's Juicer, equip it in your hand (the skill bonus roll cannot be extracted), and extract The Barber in the Cube.

As noted above, you will wear your better rolled item between Frostburn and Stone Gauntlets in your equipment, and store the powers of your weaker rolled glove in the armor slot of the Cube.

The same applies in the jewelry slot, where you will be wearing your two best rolled rings and cubing the third between Convention of Elements, Unity, and Ring of Emptiness.

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 Scoundrel due to his powerful crit buff, allowing you brief windows of extra damage that are well suited to the strengths of this build. Alternatively, if you feel yourself too squishy, you can alter to the Templar for his powerful heals and sustain boons.

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.

Your recommended potion is Bottomless Potion of the Tower, whose Armor-increasing properties complement the naturally high All Resistances stat of Witch Doctors (due to Intelligence scaling Resistances) for optimal survivability.