Arachyr Corpse Spiders Witch Doctor BiS Gear, Gems, and Paragon Points
Below, we detail the items and gems that you should use for your Arachyr Corpse Spiders Witch Doctor in Diablo 3 and why. We also list your paragon points and Kanai's Cube items. Updated for Patch 2.7.6 and Season 29.
Best in Slot Gear and Alternatives
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.
Desired Stats, Breakpoints and Other Notes
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.
Slot | Pieces | Stat Priority |
---|---|---|
Head |
|
|
Shoulders |
|
|
Torso |
|
|
Wrists |
|
|
Hands |
|
|
Waist |
|
|
Legs |
|
|
Feet |
|
|
Amulet |
|
|
Ring #1 |
|
|
Ring #2 |
|
|
Weapon |
|
|
Off-hand |
|
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.
Paragon Points
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.
Slot | Paragon Points |
---|---|
Core |
|
Offense |
|
Defense |
|
Utility |
|
Season 29: Paragon Cap
Season 29 introduces a season-specific cap to stat benefits from Paragon levels, all while updating how Paragon point distribution is handled. For the duration of this Season, you can only assign 800 Paragon stat points to your character, removing the long-standing practice of main-stat stacking (with some gearing implications — see below) after you reach Paragon 800.
On top of that, you could only allocate 50 Paragon stat points to each of the four stats in a given Paragon category (Core, Offense, Defense, and Utility). In Season 29, you can allocate up to the full 200 points per category into any attribute, allowing you to more easily reach necessary build breakpoints (as outlined in the Gear page of the guide) for Cooldown Reduction, Resource Cost Reduction, etc.
With the changes to Paragon in mind, we recommend using the following Paragon distribution for this build:
- Core: Movement Speed: 200 points.
- Offense: Attack Speed: 200 points.
- Defense: Life and All Resistance: Allocate points to maximize survivability; for Witch Doctors, this is usually achieved by evenly splitting 100 points into Life (directly increasing your Health pool) and Armor (to complement the naturally high All Resistance stat of Intelligence-based characters).
- Utility: Area Damage: 200 points.
Season 29: Gearing Considerations
In terms of gear, keeping the Paragon cap in mind is paramount, as it stymies the traditional endless supply of main stat after Paragon 800. This means re-rolling mainstat off your gear is no longer desirable, and full equipment augmentation with your main stat is even more critical. Additionally, you should take a careful look at your build and consider if you can fit the following changes to strengthen your damage and survivability:
- Guardian's Jeopardy: This is a craftable armor set, and the recipe
for its creation drops from Bounty farming. Guardian's 2-piece provides a
decent damage reduction bonus, but the true powerhouse of the set is the
3-piece bonus, which nets you an additional 100% of your main stats from
equipped items. This is a tremendous benefit in an 800 Paragon capped Season.
If the Guardian set can fit into the build with minimal sacrifices (other
craftable sets, tertiary damage multipliers, etc.), consider its
implementation. The available pieces are
Guardian's Aversion (Wrists),
Guardian's Case (Waist), and
Guardian's Gaze (Head). Of course, you can wear 2 pieces of the set and complete the full 3-piece bonus with a
Ring of Royal Grandeur (found from Act I bounty caches).
- Endless Walk:This is a jewelry set consisting of
The Traveler's Pledge (Amulet) and
The Compass Rose (Ring), and is randomly found through farming, gambling Blood Shards, and/or Kanai's Cube recipes. The Endless Walk set is a nice compromise between damage bonuses (building up while stationary) and defensive bonuses (building up while moving). It can replace glass cannon choices like the Bastions of Will set (
Focus and
Restraint) and
Squirt's Necklace with acceptable losses to DPS.
Unity: A character wearing this ring, along with another
Unity on their follower plus an immortality relic for them (i.e.,
Enchanting Favor), will reduce their damage taken by 50%.
Unity can roll excellent offense-oriented stats and has an innate Extra Damage to Elites roll, which somewhat offsets losing all-out offense jewelry.
Gems
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.
Slot | Gems |
---|---|
Jewelry | |
Helm |
|
Torso and Pants |
|
Weapon |
|
For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.
Kanai's Cube
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.
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.
Follower
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.
Legendary Potion
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.
Changelog
- 13 Sep. 2023: Added Season 29 Paragon Cap and Gearing recommendations.
- 22 Feb. 2023: Added Season 28 Altar of Rites recommendations.
- 26 Aug. 2022: Added Season 27 Angelic Crucible recommendations.
- 14 Apr. 2022: Guide reviewed for Season 26.
- 06 Dec. 2021: Guide revised according to the latest changes to the Arachyr set.
- 07 Nov. 2021: Guide added.
More Witch Doctor Guides
Builds from Other Classes
Farming Guides
This build is presented to you by Deadset, one of the very few professional Diablo 3 players. Deadset regularly publishes video guides on Youtube and streams on Twitch, where you can see how this and other builds play out in practice.
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