Spirit Barrage Mundunugu WD Skills and Runes

Active Skills
Spirit Barrage Manitou Locust Swarm Pestilence 1 Piranhas Piranhado 2 Spirit Walk Severance 3 Big Bad Voodoo Ghost Trance 4 Soul Harvest Languish
Passive Skills
Spirit Vessel Rush of Essence Confidence Ritual Grave Injustice

Most of your skill selection arsenal will be reactive to the circumstances of the Rift, as you pop Spirit Walk when needing a burst of speed, repositioning or simply a moment of invulnerability in reaction to incoming damage. Big Bad Voodoo will be used pretty much on cooldown from its very high uptime in the build due to the set 2-piece mechanics. Maintain the Soul Harvest buff at all times, and use Piranhado to clump up enemies into a dense pack for the benefit of your Spirit Barrage explosions.

You will open engagements with a cast of Locust Swarm to draw the attention of enemies, as well as to amplify your damage against them via the Ring of Emptiness effect.

Note that the Phantasm rune can only sustain three spirits at a time, which factors into the DPS optimization of the build for group play. Like most high-end Greater Rift builds, you will need to maximize the effects of Convention of Elements to make the most of your damage potential. For the Spirit Barrage WD, this means that during the Poison element part of the CoE cycle (~2 seconds into it), you need to manually explode your triple Phantasms once to spawn an Oculus Ring proc (worn by your follower). Then, quickly run to the damage-empowering circle and channel a new triple Phantasm stack, whose duration you will let run out normally — but which will now include the damage amplification from the Cold CoE cycle, as well as the Oculus proc.

Your primary damage dealer comes in the form of Spirit Barrage, a mid-range projectile whose power is augmented by the dedicated legendary ceremonial knife The Barber. For solo GR pushing, you have some freedom in your rune selection, as the one you select on your bar is mostly supplementary and to provide additional utility. Either the extra DPS from Manitou, the Mana restoration of The Spirit Is Willing or the health sustain of Phlebotomize can all work here. Remember that the majority of the damage in this build will come from the Phantasm spawns, and the selected rune can vary with comparable results.

Big Bad Voodoo is tied into the 2-piece set bonus of Mundunugu, providing a strong incentive for its inclusion with the extended duration and mobility convenience. With a modest investment in Cooldown Reduction, you will have very high uptime of this strong buff, and two runes are very comparable contenders. The general recommendation is the protective Ghost Trance, but very high Paragon Witch Doctors can consider the Rain Dance rune as well, as its Mana Regeneration bonuses tie into the mechanics of the set.

While not directly relating to Spirit Barrage, Locust Swarm will be included as a trigger for Ring of Emptiness and its massive damage increase. Despite its unassuming visuals, it will actually spread very consistently across massive groups of enemies and affect nearly, if not all, nearby targets — especially when taken with the Mana-efficient rune Pestilence. Note that this skill has additional utility when used in groups; check out the group variation page to learn more.

One of the strongest utility cooldowns of Witch Doctors, Soul Harvest is almost universally a great addition. Soul Harvest acts as a damage buff by default, increasing your Intelligence by up to 15% for the reasonable requirement of 5 harvested enemies. With the Languish rune and the worn Lakumba's Ornament bracers, it nets you additional crowd control and reduces incoming damage, solidifying its place in this mid-range playstyle. The naturally overlapping duration simply sweetens the deal.

Piranhas is taken for the solitary grouping tool of Witch Doctors — the vortex effect of the Piranhado rune. It is hard to argue with the addition of a pull in a build that benefits so much from clumped up enemies, and is a major reason to include Grave Injustice for faster Piranhado cooldown resets.

Spirit Walk is the final Witch Doctor staple included in the build, and its moderate cooldown is compensated by its versatility: it renders you invulnerable, removes enemy collision and increases your movement speed by 50%. The recommended rune is Severance, whose 100% additional movement speed will allow you to reposition in the blink of an eye. Early on in the gearing process, you can also consider the Honored Guest rune to add another source of emergency Mana regeneration to the build (see this build's gear page for more information). Regardless of your choice, the use of this skill ties into the damage reduction from your set 4-piece bonus, and its use at least once every 30 seconds (in practice, much more frequently than that) is mandatory.

This concludes the overview of the active skills, now let us look through the passives.

While Rush of Essence provides the obvious damage increasing interaction with the Mundunugu set, this is mostly a positive side effect to its powerful Mana regeneration properties, and this passive is largely taken for its most straightforward purpose — allowing you to cast your spells. This passive also allows you to largely skip Mana Regeneration on gear, despite the resource intensive nature of the build.

Confidence Ritual is taken for a very straightforward purpose — its decent overall damage increase for mid-to-short range builds, such as this one.

Grave Injustice is an elegant source of Cooldown Reduction, synergizing with the mid-range playstyle of the Spirit Barrage build. For each enemy killed in a 20-yard radius of the Witch Doctor, it not only reduces your cooldowns by a second, but also replenishes your health and mana reserves by 1%. Take notice of the pickup radius synergy and try to obtain that stat in the secondaries of your gear.

Last but not least, Spirit Vessel adds a cheat death effect that is never unwelcome in the highly damaging environments of high end GR solo progression. Note that its proc counts as "entering the Spirit Realm" for the purposes of the 4-piece bonus of the Mundunugu set.