Arachyr Firebats Witch Doctor Group Progression Variation
Arachyr Firebats Group Build
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 |
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Passive Skills |
Adapting Rotation
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.
Adapting Skills
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.
Adapting Gear
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 |
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Head |
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Shoulders |
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Torso |
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Wrists |
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Hands |
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Waist |
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Legs |
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Feet |
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Ring #1 |
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Ring #2 |
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Amulet |
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Weapon |
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Off-hand |
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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: 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.
Adapting Gems
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 |
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Jewelry | |
Helm |
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Torso and Pants |
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Weapon |
For more information about gems, please refer to our guide on gems.
Adapting Kanai's Cube
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.
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: Enriched the guide and added Season 25 Soul Shard recommendations.
- 22 Jul. 2021: Added S24 Ethereal recommendation.
- 01 Apr. 2021: Added potion recommendation.
- 19 Nov. 2020: Added Cube recommendations for Season 22.
- 01 Jul. 2020: No changes required for Season 21.
- 14 Mar. 2020: Guide adjusted to reflect the changes to Ring of Emptiness.
- 12 Mar. 2020: No changes necessary for Season 20.
- 22 Nov. 2019: Reviewed for Season 19.
- 23 Aug. 2019: Reviewed and approved for Season 18.
- 17 May 2019: Guide was reviewed and approved for Season 17.
- 17 Nov. 2017: Added group variant.
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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