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 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.

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.