Arachyr Corpse Spiders Witch Doctor Greater Rift Speed Farming Variation

The Arachyr Corpse Spiders Witch Doctor is a viable Greater Rift Speed Farmer, managing to retain the core strengths of the GR progression build but also able to adapt for a more aggressive playstyle that is well suited to the needs of speed GRs. 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.

During lower tier Greater Rift farming, the balance between defense, damage and utility can be shifted to favor the latter two aspects of character building.

Active Skills
Corpse Spiders Widowmakers Locust Swarm Pestilence 1 Horrify Stalker 2 Spirit Walk Severance 3 Soul Harvest Languish 4 Piranhas Piranhado
Passive Skills
Spirit Vessel Confidence Ritual Gruesome Feast Grave Injustice

When you are Speed Farming Greater Rifts, your playstyle should at least partially reflect the circumstances by focusing on massive pulls, generic bonuses against enemies and chaining pylon effects.

The build maintains the entirety of its GR progression rotation, but is much more aggressive in engagements and much more relaxed on the rotation. You still want to maintain maximized stacks of Soul Harvest, at least up to the baseline damage reduction of Lakumba's Ornament. Horrify continues to be the accompanying defensive cooldown, but it will assume a much more utility driven angle with speed combo buff of Stalker and Rechel's Ring of Larceny. Shukrani's Triumph keeps you flying through Rifts at high speeds with near-permanent Spirit Walk, and during Speed GRs you can be a lot more frivolous with how you spend its buff. At its core, you still want to find a thick clump of enemies, cast Piranhado in their midst and mow them down with Corpse Spiders, as Pestilence auto-spreads around from Wormwood and guarantees you the Ring of Emptiness damage bonus.

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 burst down enemies quicker takes precedence.

• Your main damage dealer remains Corpse Spiders, taken with the hard-hitting Widowmakers rune.
• Ring of Emptiness remains a valuable source of damage multiplication, meaning Locust Swarm Pestilence still finds its spot in the build during GR speed farming. You will be free of the concern to manually cast it however, as a cubed Wormwood can take care of that for you.
• Grouping monsters is just as valuable in progression as it is during speed farming, so Piranhas Piranhado remains a fixture across variations as an invaluable pulling and monster control tool.
• The duo of protective skills from GR progression, Soul Harvest and Horrify, keep their value during GR speed farm as well. Protection from Lakumba's Ornament is still paramount in any reasonably high Greater Rift, so you need to ensure you harvest at least a few (depending on your item roll) enemies for its baseline effect, and the rune Languish offers the perfect defensive complement. Horrify retains some defensive value due to its base effect, but it doubles down on movement speed utility through the rune Stalker and the skill interaction with Rechel's Ring of Larceny.
• With its immense movement speed power and added offensive angle because of Shukrani's Triumph, Spirit Walk remains in the build during GR speed farming. Adjust to the rune Severance for even more speed.
• Parts of your passive lineup retains its value during GR speed farming; Confidence Ritual still matches your fighting range, while Grave Injustice offers invaluable cooldown and regenerative bonuses. Due to Wormwood autocasts, you can drop Creeping Death and insert a failsafe tool against mishaps in he face of Spirit Vessel instead. Another good adjustment is replacing the additive Pierce the Veil damage buff with the stronger, but clear speed reliant Gruesome Feast — a relatively easy buff to maintain during GR speed farming.

The foundation of your gearing will match the GR progression build, as you still rely on the 6-piece set bonus of Arachyr to deal damage and continue to wear 5 of the 6 available pieces, swapping either Arachyr's Visage for Mask of Jeram, or Arachyr's Legs for Depth Diggers depending on your better rolled legendary item (the other one will go in the Cube). You will retain the full 6-piece bonus of Arachyr by using Ring of Royal Grandeur in the Cube. The remainder of your major equipment slots is split between Corpse Spiders-synergistic items with The Spider Queen's Grasp and Brood of Araneae, and generically useful Witch Doctor items with Lakumba's Ornament and Shukrani's Triumph.

The actual adaptation and changes will happen in your jewelry, where you need to swap from the slow paced, rotation-oriented combo of the Endless Walk set ( The Compass Rose and The Traveler's Pledge) into more speedfarm-appropriate gear.

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 required ring for the setup is Ring of Royal Grandeur, but due to its weaker innate primary rolls it is recommended as a Cube item; nevertheless, if your Ring of Emptiness rolls badly on its legendary property, it is quite viable to equip the RoRG and cube the RoE due to the former's uniform legendary power.

Finish off the jewelry with the powerful damage multiplication from Squirt's Necklace. Take heed of its downside (increase in damage taken, as well as loss of the damage buff as you take hits) and try to safeguard its bonus with Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard, as well as crowd controlling monsters prior to engagements with Horrify and Piranhado, rendering them unable to retaliate.

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.

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.

The entirety of your legendary gem selection from GR progression retains its full value in GR speed farming as well. Bane of the Trapped, Enforcer and Simplicity's Strength all bring excellent damage multiplication value to the build irrespective of the GR difficulty you undertake.

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

You will replace the staple Sacred Harvester from progression in this slot for the automated convenience of Wormwood, which casts Locust Swarm on its own and procs Ring of Emptiness for you. 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.

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 GR speed farming is the Enchantress due to the myriad of helpful buffs from all her skills, which you will attain by equipping her with Hand of the Prophet and then decking her out in survivability gear. Her most important buff remains Focused Mind, since it is very helpful in reaching the attack speed breakpoints described in the GR progression build.

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.

This Season revives the Pandemonium Kill Streak buff from Season 19. Each stack grants a bonus to movement speed and damage, capping at +50% movement speed and +100% damage at 1000 kills. Hitting specific kill thresholds unleashes powerful effects. Read more in our dedicated Season of the Eternal Conflict Mechanics Guide!

While speedfarming sees limited use from this theme, Greater Rift pushing benefits significantly. Effects like Geysers (150), Meteors (400), and Angels (500) can clear elites and Rift Guardians instantly. Players may reset streaks after 150 kills to repeatedly trigger Geysers or push for 500+ kills near boss fights, often using Nemesis Bracers to spawn extra enemies.

Because the most potent effects (Geysers, Meteors, Angels) can obliterate Rift Guardians instantly up to GR150, players can retool builds for efficiency and comfort. Here’s how:

Since you can rely on killstreak procs to clear the Rift Guardian, Bane of the Stricken can be safely omitted in favor of:

• Another generic damage-scaling legendary gem ( Bane of the Trapped for builds with any form of crowd control and/or melee range, Zei's Stone of Vengeance for far ranged builds, Taeguk for channeling builds, Simplicity's Strength for primary attack-focused builds, Enforcer for pet-oriented builds, etc.)
• A survivability-oriented legendary gem ( Esoteric Alteration, Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard), or additional utility ( Gogok of Swiftness for CDR-reliant builds, Pain Enhancer for attack speed-heavy builds, or Wreath of Lightning for extra movement speed).

Adjust your equipment to items that favor durability, health sustain, and ease of movement. Consider adjusting non-essential skills for the build to ones that pull, reposition, or otherwise displace enemies to facilitate large pulls of enemy packs. In more concrete terms, this means:

• For class-specific items, Witch Doctors should consider Lakumba's Ornament; this is a powerful damage reduction item that incentivizes you to be mindful of maintaining stacks of Soul Harvest. This synergizes well with the killstreak theme by improving survivability while in the middle of large enemy packs.
• For additional options that balance between defense and offense, the class-specific offhand Shukrani's Triumph greatly extends the duration of Spirit Walk, giving you the freedom to reposition optimally. Other helpful cross-class jewelry includes Unity (combined with the same ring on the follower plus a follower immortality token), and the Endless Walk set ( The Traveler's Pledge and The Compass Rose).
• Situational items that can bolster your defenses include Stone Gauntlets, the drawbacks of which are negated via CC-immunity effects like Ice Climbers, or the Altar of Rites CC-immunity node. The class-agnostic Aquila Cuirass is a powerful and popular choice for low Mana-spending builds, especially ones built around generators like LoD Poison Dart. Niche options for protection are found in Vile Hive, allowing for an easy spread of Locust Swarm Cloud of Insects, or the incidental tanking of the Belt of Transcendence meat shield summons.
• Utility items like Nemesis Bracers are essential as more elites mean more killstreak maintenance and faster progression. When soloing, they should be equipped by your follower; in groups, at least one party member should commit to wearing them. Edge cases will see the inclusion of Warzechian Armguards or Krelm's Buff Belt (more speed for easier scouting and pulls), Strongarm Bracers (extra damage vs. displaced enemies), and Rechel's Ring of Larceny in speedfarming builds that employ Horrify. To facilitate large pulls, consider using a Follower equipped with The Ess of Johan, a proc-based analogue to an enemy-pulling skill (albeit outside your control).
• Skill-wise, make sure to include at least one movement skill tool like Spirit Walk, ideally in conjunction with an Shukrani's Triumph, and an enemy-pulling tool like Piranhas Piranhado.Take a look if you can include passives like Spirit Vessel (for a cheat-death), Grave Injustice (for cooldown reduction and resource regeneration on kill), or enemy density-beneficiaries like Confidence Ritual and Gruesome Feast.