Arachyr Firebats Witch Doctor Group Progression Variation

With minor adaptations from the solo GR progression build, Arachyr Firebats can be adapted to a Trash Killer in 4-man parties. Its role in a 2-DPS setup is to take care of AoE damage, clearing monster pulls created by the Support teammates. This variation is no longer considered meta, but we keep the page around for documentation purposes.

Active Skills
Firebats Cloud of Bats Locust Swarm Cloud of Insects 1 Big Bad Voodoo Slam Dance 2 Spirit Walk Jaunt 3 Soul Harvest Languish 4 Haunt Draining Spirit
Passive Skills
Creeping Death Confidence Ritual Gruesome Feast Grave Injustice

Similarly to the soloing build, you will need to apply and keep up Soul Harvest for the damage reduction of Lakumba's Ornament, and you should spread DoTs to keep the Ring of Emptiness damage multiplication active. You will be adding Haunt Draining Spirit on top of the soloing DoT Locust Swarm, since Mana spending will be harder to manage with your skyrocketed Attack Speed (due to Pain Enhancer). With the powers of Shukrani's Triumph, Spirit Walk gains an added damage multiplier aspect on top of its protective properties; you will need to time your Convention of Elements burst during the Fire cycle to ideally match the duration of your Spirit form for supremely buffed Firebats channeling.

Once you start channeling, do not stop until the pack is done and your group moves on ahead; Firebats snapshots Attack Speed at the start of channeling, so if you start with a beefy Pain Enhancer stack, it pays off to hold onto that cast. In an ideal case scenario, your supports will bring everything to you, so you can root yourself in place for the duration of the fight for the maximum Endless Walk set bonus — even with a potential Oculus Ring proc to buff you up even further.

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. Maximizing your AoE potential and damage overall takes precedence.

• The main damage dealer of the build remains Firebats, along with the highest damage dealing rune: Cloud of Bats.
• In a group variant, due to the high Mana demands of Firebats channeling at high Attack Speed breakpoints, you will have two Ring of Emptiness triggers instead of one. Locust Swarm Cloud of Insects still brings damage reduction value (applicable to the whole group), while Haunt Draining Spirit keeps your Mana reserves up.
• With Draining Spirit taking care of Mana management, you can alter your Spirit Walk rune to the lengthier Jaunt; this gives you more time under the Shukrani's Triumph damage multiplication effect.
• Soul Harvest Languish remains a damage reduction powerhouse in conjunction with Sacred Harvester and Lakumba's Ornament.
• You should consider adding another massive, group-wide damage buff in the form of Big Bad Voodoo Slam Dance. While it has a considerable cooldown, you can whittle it down with Grave Injustice and have it up for most, if not all, decisive pulls in the Rift.
• Some adaptation will be necessary in the passives. Some of them will carry over from the soloing build — Creeping Death is still necessary to keep DoT effects going without the need for re-application, while Confidence Ritual remains a solid damage buff for a melee-range spellcaster. Grave Injustice grows tremendously in value if you choose to run Big Bad Voodoo; otherwise, you can consider other staples like Spirit Vessel, Pierce the Veil, or Swampland Attunement. Lastly, the massive damage buff of Gruesome Feast can comfortably replace the resource management-oriented Blood Ritual.

You have some degree of adaptation possible in the gear. In less experienced groups, and especially ones lacking Support Monks, you should consider staying on the set split suggested for the soloing build: 5 Arachyr set pieces, plus 2 of the craftable Cpt. Crimson set and a cubed Ring of Royal Grandeur to get you the full set bonuses. Complete the setup with the Endless Walk set and a Ring of Emptiness (again, mirroring the soloing setup) and you should have a decent, group-agnostic Trash Killer setup.

In a more advanced group, you should equip the full 6-piece Arachyr set, dropping Ring of Royal Grandeur from the Cube, and going all-out on damage multipliers. This allows you to re-equip Bakuli Jungle Wraps, and store Mantle of Channeling and Convention of Elements in the Cube. In your jewelry, you will either stick to the Endless Walk set (our default recommendation), or run Squirt's Necklace, Ring of Emptiness and a Fire damage Stone of Jordan for a glass cannon, extremely support-reliant DPS spec.

Class staples like the Sacred Harvester plus Lakumba's Ornament combo, as well as the Shukrani's Triumph off-hand, remain fixed in the setup for their invaluable bonuses.

Slot	Pieces	Stat Priority
Head	Arachyr's Visage	Intelligence Socket Critical Hit Chance Firebats % Damage Crowd Control Reduction (Secondary Stat) Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat)
Shoulders	Arachyr's Mantle	Intelligence Area Damage Resource Cost Reduction Cooldown Reduction Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Health Globe Healing Bonus (Secondary Stat)
Torso	Arachyr's Carapace	Intelligence 3 Sockets Vitality Armor Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Wrists	Lakumba's Ornament	Intelligence Critical Hit Chance Fire % Damage Life per Hit or Vitality Reduced Damage Melee Attacks (Secondary stat)
Hands	Arachyr's Claws	Intelligence (or Cooldown Reduction at high Paragon) Critical Hit Chance Critical Hit Damage Area Damage Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat)
Waist	Bakuli Jungle Wraps	Intelligence Vitality Armor Life % Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat) Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)
Legs	Arachyr's Legs	Intelligence 2 Sockets Vitality Armor Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat) Physical or Lightning Resistance (Secondary Stat)
Feet	Arachyr's Stride	Intelligence Firebats % Damage Vitality Armor Pickup Radius (Secondary Stat) Health Globe Healing Bonus (Secondary Stat)
Ring #1	The Compass Rose	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Area Damage Crowd Control Reduction (Secondary Stat) Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)
Ring #2	Ring of Emptiness (Best in Slot) Convention of Elements (Alternative)	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Area Damage Crowd Control Reduction (Secondary Stat) Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)
Amulet	The Traveler's Pledge	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Fire % Damage Crowd Control Reduction (Secondary Stat) Melee or Missile Damage Reduction (Secondary Stat)
Weapon	Sacred Harvester	High Weapon Damage Socket (preferably from Ramaladni's Gift) Intelligence (or % Damage at high Paragons) Increased Attack Speed Area Damage
Off-hand	Shukrani's Triumph	High Damage Range Intelligence Critical Hit Chance Firebats % Damage Area Damage

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.

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.

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.

When grouped with a single target DPS teammate, you can omit any Guardian-killing concerns from the build and focus on improving your AoE DPS. To that end, you will be dropping Bane of the Stricken from the soloing setup and replacing it with Pain Enhancer, which allows you to reach the maximum 3 frames per animation breakpoint of Firebats at 47+ stacks.

The other two gems from the soloing setup — Bane of the Trapped (multiplicative damage increase vs. crowd controlled enemies) and Taeguk (up to 80% additive damage and 20% Armor increase) — are still overwhelmingly valuable and should be kept for the group build as well.

Slot	Gems
Jewelry	Bane of the Trapped Taeguk Pain Enhancer
Helm	Flawless Royal Diamond (Cooldown Reduction)
Torso and Pants	Flawless Royal Topaz (Damage) Flawless Royal Ruby (Toughness)
Weapon	Flawless Royal Emerald

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.

The armor Cube slot needs to be occupied by Mantle of Channeling, which provides a balanced source of multiplicative damage increase and damage reduction while channeling, neatly fitting into this build subtype.

If you followed the gear alteration advice above and use the full Arachyr set in groups, your jewelry Cube slot needs to be taken by your weaker rolled item between Convention of Elements and Ring of Emptiness. In an Arachyr/Cpt. Crimson mixture, you will need to stick to Ring of Royal Grandeur instead.

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 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.