Arachyr Firebats Witch Doctor Speed Farming Variation

The Arachyr Firebats deals reasonably well with Normal Rift farming all the way through the highest Torment difficulties. With the appropriate gear modifications outlined below, it should also prove as a reliable and capable bounty farming build. 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.

Within the limited scope of regular difficulties, the necessary damage and toughness to triumph over the enemy is significantly smaller. Thus, your best course of action is to improve utility and speed.

Active Skills
Firebats Cloud of Bats Locust Swarm Pestilence 1 Horrify Stalker 2 Spirit Walk Severance 3 Soul Harvest Soul to Waste 4 Piranhas Piranhado
Passive Skills
Creeping Death Gruesome Feast Spirit Vessel Grave Injustice

When you are speed farming regular rifts, parts of your playstyle will adapt to the lowered challenge and focus more on speed and utility.

You still begin runs by Soul Harvesting the nearest enemy pack, preferably from the safety of Spirit Walk. Whether you wear Lakumba's Ornament for extra protection or not, harvesting will speed you up with the Soul to Waste rune. Horrify is also used for a movement speed buff via the rune Stalker. Refresh both buffs and try not to let them fall off. You are at a significant combat advantage with the powers of Shukrani's Triumph, which allows you near limitless mobility in your Spirit Walk state, and when you decide to engage, it multiplies your damage — more than enough to oneshot packs during speed farming. To ensure their destruction, pre-pull with Piranhado to render them helpless and spread Locust Swarm on them to trigger the damage multiplication from Ring of Emptiness.

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 cross over great distances faster and more efficiently take precedence.

• Firebats is still your main damage dealer, taken with the highest damage rune — Cloud of Bats. This is a 15-yard radius channeling skill, whose damage ramps up over a 3-second period and whose attack speed gets snapshotted at the start of channeling with any applicable buffs.
• A proc for Ring of Emptiness will also be quite helpful to cement your ability to oneshot enemies; our default recommendation is to take Locust Swarm with the superior spread of the Pestilence rune, and to focus on Firebats damage on gear. You can however viably alternate the rune to the fiery Searing Locusts and take advantage of the Arachyr set damage multiplication for this skill as well; if you opt to do so, consider rolling Locust Swarm damage on your shoulders and chest, and using Vile Hive over Shukrani's Triumph.
• You should exchange the lengthier effect of the Jaunt rune on Spirit Walk for the faster movement of Severance.
• You should exchange the unnecessarily tanky Languish rune of Soul Harvest for the boost of speed coming from Soul to Waste. With similar argumentation, swap the Horrify rune from Frightening Aspect to Stalker.
• You can keep some crowd control in the build with Piranhas Piranhado, clumping up enemies for the ease of Firebats destruction.
• In your passives, replace the progression-oriented Blood Ritual for a cheat death failsafe from Spirit Vessel. Replace Confidence Ritual with Gruesome Feast, as it undeniably offers the strongest damage increase among its peers, provided you can keep it stacked with health globes — an easy task when farming. Keep Grave Injustice for the cooldown reduction utility, and Creeping Death to reduce the need to reapply Locust Swarm.

The foundation of the build will closely resemble the GR progression build, as you still rely on the 6-piece set bonus of Arachyr to deal damage. You will be equipping all 6 available pieces of the set, freeing up your jewelry slots for damage and utility-oriented amulet and rings, as well as allowing you to equip speedfarm-oriented gear in your rermaining armor slots. Your weapon and offhand can stay on the same pieces from GR progression, as both Sacred Harvester and Shukrani's Triumph provide generically useful bonuses for speed farming as well.

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 suggested ring for the setup is a Fire damage Stone of Jordan, which provides a consistent elemental and elite damage bonus. You should have the SoJ equipped, since its elemental and elite bonuses cannot be extracted in the Cube; pair it with your better rolled item between Ring of Emptiness and Rechel's Ring of Larceny, and cube the worse one.

It should be noted that Avarice Band is a supremely useful legendary item that, in conjunction with Goldwrap and Boon of the Hoarder, will form a gold triumvirate that keeps you safe and showered in gold as you farm up T16s. When you are farming solo however, this ring can be equipped on your Follower, and its power will "Emanate" to you (meaning you gain the benefits of the item as if you wore it yourself). That being said, in group farming you will need to wear the Avarice Band yourself, replacing the SoJ, since you cannot have a Follower in parties.

Early on in character progression, you can keep Lakumba's Ornament for the immense damage reduction it provides to the build. When you have progressed your character and are comfortable with Goldwrap mechanics and relying on procs to survive, you can swap Lakumba's Ornament out for Warzechian Armguards, which provide you with an additional speed boost based on environmental destruction. The former favorite for the slot, Nemesis Bracers, are still quite valuable to the build; when soloing, they should be equipped on the follower however, since their power can be transferred to you via the Emanate mechanic.

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 (Best in Slot) Warzechian Armguards (Alternative)	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	Goldwrap (Best in Slot) Bakuli Jungle Wraps (Alternative)	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	Stone of Jordan (solo) Avarice Band (groups)	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) Rechel's Ring of Larceny (Alternative)	Socket Critical Hit Damage Critical Hit Chance Area Damage Crowd Control Reduction (Secondary Stat) Life per Kill (Secondary Stat)
Amulet	Squirt's Necklace	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.

Bane of the Trapped is a universally useful damage multiplication gem that matches the fighting range of this build for the application of its bonuses. Other legendary gems that are meant for prolonged fights should be replaced by utility; Taeguk should be replaced by Boon of the Hoarder, whose interaction with the Avarice Band and Goldwrap will keep you rich, safe and sped up throughout the run. Bane of the Stricken should give way to Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard, whose shielding mechanics will safeguard your Squirt's Necklace damage bonus.

Slot	Gems
Jewelry	Boon of the Hoarder Bane of the Trapped Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard
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.

Our default recommendation for the Firebats-reliant speedrunning spec is to store Bakuli Jungle Wraps for the massive damage multiplier to Firebats against enemies affected by Locust Swarm or Piranhas. In an alternative setup that splits damage duties with Locust Swarm (as described above), you can consider slotting Quetzalcoatl in this slot, which practically doubles the damage of your DoTs.

Your jewelry Cube slot will be occupied by your worse rolled item between Rechel's Ring of Larceny (massive speed boost whenever you Fear an enemy with Horrify), and Ring of Emptiness (massive damage multiplication against enemies affected by either Haunt or Locust Swarm).

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 T16 key farming is the Enchantress due to her cooldown reduction buff from Prophetic Harmony, as well as the Focused Mind attack speed buff.

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.