LoD Spirit Barrage Witch Doctor Guide

1. Do the Challenge Rift for the materials to cube Legendary Powers. You can complete this once a week for additional resources and we always update the guide for you!

2. This is a Legacy of Dreams build whose success is heavily dependent on this gem's rank. The first order of business is to equip a Legendary or Set item in every slot to take advantage of its power. Make sure to not have any Set Bonuses equipped or the gem will be nullified and you will deal no damage! Farm speed Greater Rifts (in under 5 minute clears) to find the items and get this gem as high as possible. Above Rank 25 ancient pieces of gear will give you even greater power. Note that meanwhile Legacy of Dreams is great to get you started, farming with Mundunugu's Regalia to collect the LoD setup gear is a valid option.

3. Gamble from Kadala in this order:

1. Create a level 1 Witch Doctor and gamble for Gazing Demise
   This is the only Mojo accessible at level 1 and will help you get started.
   Gamble it on a level 70 character afterwards.
2. Goldwrap, Krelm's Buff Belt, The Witching Hour and Belt of Transcendence
3. Warzechian Armguards and Lakumba's Ornament
4. Aquila Cuirass
5. Frostburn, Stone Gauntlets and St. Archew's Gage
6. Blackthorne's Jousting Mail and Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan
7. Ring of Emptiness, Convention of Elements, Rechel's Ring of Larceny and Unity

4. Craft using Recipe 3 in Kanai's Cube in this order:

1. Ceremonial Knives to get The Barber and Voo's Juicer
2. Create a level 1 Demon Hunter and upgrade Swords to get In-geom
3. Amulets to get Squirt's Necklace
4. Anything from the Gamble list in Step 3 that you haven't already acquired.
   
   

5. Do Bounties to acquire several important items for this build:

• Act 1: Ring of Royal Grandeur and Pauldrons of the Skeleton King
• Act 2: Gloves of Worship and Illusory Boots
• Act 3: Avarice Band
• Act 4: Can drop any bounty item from any act
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Cain's Destiny and Sage's Journey (for your follower)
  
  

6. At this point you can somewhat comfortably farm Nephalem or Speed Greater Rifts where you can find all the remaining items you need for different variants of the build. Spend your materials getting items with better rolls and/or ancient quality.

7. Use Primordial Ashes in Kanai's Cube with the new Curiosity of Lorath Nahr recipe to obtain a free Crafted Primal Ancient. Since you can only equip one of them, choosing the right item to focus matters! Great candidates are Weapons, Offhands, Jewelry or any item with an important multiplier. With that in mind, we recommend getting one of the following items:

• Ring of Emptiness
• Gazing Demise
• Convention of Elements

• Legacy of Dreams is the Legacy of Nightmares Set in a gem, which frees up two ring slots at the cost of removing Gogok of Swiftness. Due to the rings available to us this is a great trade-off to take.
• Bane of the Stricken helps us kill the Rift Guardian. As long as you don't need more than 2 minutes to kill it you can equip Bane of the Powerful instead.
• Bane of the Trapped is equipped since it grants us a nice 1.6 global separate multiplier and is applied by default in this build, since Spirit Barrage applies its slow before the damage instance.
• For Nephalem Rifts, Boon of the Hoarder is always a default include specifically due to its amazing synergy with Avarice Band.

• Spirit Barrage Manitou is our main skill. Phantasm is given for free by Gazing Demise and will deal the bulk of the damage. The Spirit is Willing and Phlebotomize are provided by Voo's Juicer and are great for Mana and Life recovery as they are procced by Manitou.
• Locust Swarm Pestilence is used to enable the Ring of Emptiness damage multiplier and is a great tool for massive bodypulling.
• Spirit Walk Jaunt or Severance for mobility and survival purposes.
• Piranhas Piranhado is used to apply a 15% additive damage debuff and pull enemies together, which synergizes well with the overall playstyle
• Soul Harvest Languish for massive damage and damage reduction buffs with Lakumba's Ornament.
• The final slot is open and can be filled with different options. Big Bad Voodoo Slam Dance provides a small damage boost. Ghost Trance can be used to help you survive and is a better option at lower paragon or to get used to the playstyle. Zombie Dogs can be spawned by changing to Big Bad Voodoo Boogie Man or equipping Summon Zombie Dogs.

• Grave Injustice is the cornerstone of our playstyle. It reduces Cooldowns when you kill enemies, allowing a very high uptime of Spirit Walk and Big Bad Voodoo.
• Confidence Ritual provides us with a separate 1.25 multiplier if our target is within 20 yards. This means we need to adopt a somewhat melee playstyle.
• The last two passives are chosen based on your needs and preferences:
  • Swampland Attunement for more toughness.
  • Creeping Death makes Locust Swarm Pestilence and the additive damage debuff from Piranhas Piranhado last almost forever, which significantly ease up our gameplay, allowing us to focus on pulling and damage and getting a better Aquila Cuirass uptime.
  • Gruesome Feast for some damage and toughness.
  • Spirit Vessel to escape death.
  • Blood Ritual grants us Life recovery based on our HP pool while also allowing for easier Aquila Cuirass uptime.
  • Rush of Essence provides infinite resource, easing up the gameplay mainly regarding Aquila Cuirass uptime.

¹ Aim for a decent HP pool (~900,000 Life in Solo Push) as Phantasms accumulation requires a pretty static playstyle.
² Avoid any source of Area Damage as this build doesn't scale with it and it can lag the game.

The Altar of Rites is a tree that grants tremendous powers to your entire account in exchange for sacrifices. It requires you to farm Bounties, kill the Ubers, craft the Staff of Herding, and more. Completing all 26 of these tasks, along with sacrificing 6 Primal Ancients grants you extra Damage, Defense, Quality of Life, Increased Drops and 3 Potion Super Powers. Read the full guides on Unlocking the Altar and the Altar Mechanics by Raxxanterax and Chewingnom to learn everything about this fantastic mechanic!

Optimal Path

Patch 2.7.0 revamped the follower system giving all 3 hirelings new powers and the emanate system. The first thing you should do is read our complete follower guide and remember the key takeaways:

1. The emanation system allows followers to share certain legendary and set powers with you. The most important ones are: The Flavor of Time, Nemesis Bracers, Avarice Band, Sage’s Journey and Cain’s Destiny. Click the guide above for the full list.
2. Follower’s powers are based on their main stat (maxed at 25,000, but they have a 2.5x multiplier so you only need 10,000). This means we stack Intelligence on the Enchantress, Dexterity on the Scoundrel and Strength on the Templar.
3. Guardian's Jeopardy (3) Bonus works for followers by improving their inherent stat multiplier from x2.5 to x3.5, making it slightly easier to hit the 25,000 main stat threshold if needed.
4. Followers share 20% of their Experience, Magic and Gold Find stats with you.
5. Legendary gems do not work on followers, except Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard.
6. Cooldown Reduction does not work for any follower skill except the Templar’s Heal.
7. Followers never deal significant damage; you’re on your own to clear the content.

Select Follower

Spirit Barrage has to be used with care and not always spammed. Doing so will usually actively reduce your overall damage output. Activate Big Bad Voodoo whenever you engage with a new pull of monsters. Grave Injustice should ensure you always have it ready. Always cast Big Bad Voodoo before positioning your Phantasms because the Attack Speed and Additive Buff are snapshot by them!

Use Spirit Walk to move through enemies that are in the way, for defense, to dodge affixes and projectiles or similar. Don't waste it when you don't need it! When making a pull, engage several screens of monsters by bodypulling and spreading Locust Swarm Pestilence, then group them up using Piranhas Piranhado. Make sure that Locust Swarm is applied to everything for the Ring of Emptiness effect. Don't forget monster density is extremely important to scale your damage, do not engage with small pulls!

When you are ready to damage monsters:

• Put 3 Phantasms on top of each other on the enemies.
• Pull a bit more enemies together as your initial Phantasms are ticking on the pull. Try to spawn an Oculus Ring by killing as few monsters as possible by quickly recasting Spirit Barrage on top of the stack of enemies until you see one. Go into the Oculus Ring proc and wait for your Phantasms to accumulate damage, using Spirit Walk to avoid incoming damage. While waiting, you can also use Homing Pads damage reduction (equipped on your follower) by teleporting to town and interrupting it.
• When Spirit Walk or Oculus Ring proc are over, or you feel the damage accumulated is enough to kill most targets, detonate 1 Phantasm, or more until you see another Oculus Ring proc. Rinse and repeat. The idea is to time your Spirit Walk with your Phantasm explosions to reset the cooldown immediately (Grave Injustice won't work if Spirit Walk is still active) while maximizing your Oculus Ring uptime.
• Try to never touch Spirit Barrage during Spirit Walk, as Phantasms spawned during Spirit Walk won't accumulate damage until Spirit Walk is over!

On Rift Guardians:

• On a single target, Manitou and Phantasms will both deal approximately half of your damage.
• It is not needed to channel Spirit Barrage, you only need to keep Manitou and 3 Phantasms at all times.
• Do not get hit to maximize Squirt's Necklace stacks. This is where Belt of Transcendence shines as Fetishes are going to tank the Rift Guardian.
• On Bloodmaw, use Spirit Walk whenever the Rift Guardian starts its Leap animation. This interrupts it as Bloodmaw needs to have a target to perform this attack.
• On Voracity, use Spirit Walk while entering Gas Clouds. As AoE ground effects snapshot toughness upon entering them, you will take 0 damage from the Gas Clouds.
• Use the layout and your Fetishes to protect yourself from some Rift Guardians' abilities like on Agnidox, Cold Snap or Erethon. Check out this post about Rift Guardians to learn more!
• Due to Manitou randomly targeting monsters within 40 yards, Rift Guardians with lots of minions like Hamelin or Saxtris are not as good as you would think.
• The Binder is still decent as minions spawn on the boss, being instantly killed by Phantasms and granting you an Oculus Ring.

Witch Doctors are typically not the best class to play in Hardcore as you have no immunity to Crowd Control and only limited defensive utility skills with long Cooldowns. Witch Doctor's defensive playstyle mainly relies on Grave Injustice and Spirit Walk combination. Nevertheless, the build is overall fairly tanky and should have no big issues if you are mindful about Elite affixes.

Don't forget to use the Spirit Vessel passive at all times! Additionally, you can use the Templar as a follower with Cooldown Reduction for his Heal. Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!

As incentivized in the introduction of this guide, the interactions and mechanics going on in Spirit Barrage builds are "a bit" more complicated than the average build. In order to optimize our Witch Doctor gameplay as much as possible, we must understand everything about it! Earlier in this guide, we talked about 2 different playstyles:

• Channeling Playstyle, which means holding down Spirit Barrage, continuously refreshing Phantasms and detonating the oldest one.
• Delayed Playstyle, which means letting Phantasms accumulate some damage before detonating them.

While the channeling playstyle feels like a natural choice, it needs to be avoided as much as possible due to Phantasm mechanics. The idea is that you can have up to 3 Phantasms alive at once, and if you keep casting Spirit Barrage, the oldest one will detonate for the damage accumulated by The Barber. However, Phantasm first accumulation tick happens on the first frame it is cast and then every 30 frames, regardless of your Attack Speed.

This means that depending on your Spirit Barrage Attack Speed Breakpoint, simply holding down and channeling Spirit Barrage will every now and then refresh a Phantasm only a few frames before or even on the exact frame it should have accumulated damage, losing frames towards a tick and significantly reducing your overall damage output.
The best case scenario is to refresh a Phantasm right after an accumulation tick.

This explains why you want to avoid channeling for long periods of time and why there are specific Spirit Barrage Breakpoints you absolutely want to avoid as they are "eating" Phantasm ticks extremely often, the most relevant being the 20 FPA and the 30 FPA Breakpoints. These considerations have been unraveled in this old reddit post.

Another reason to avoid the channeling playstyle at all costs is that it can effectively reduce your damage burst even more compared to a delayed detonation playstyle. Let's say you have 3 Phantasms accumulating damage on a pack of monsters.

If you detonate one of them, it would be enough to kill half of the pull; however, killing half the pull with one Phantasm would also mean your remaining Phantasms now accumulate damage on half the targets, making it more difficult to kill tougher enemies like Elite Packs. This is why you want to accumulate for as long as you can, and need to be very thoughtful about when to detonate. Monster density is by a long shot your biggest source of damage in this build.

The takeaway is to simply never channel Spirit Barrage, except on single target fights like Rift Guardians with a 21-23 FPA Breakpoint. Manitou does not require us to channel at all times and is not affected by Attack Speed in any way; holding down Spirit Barrage will simply constantly refresh its 20 second duration and Phantasms. Manitou will passively accumulate damage and stack Bane of the Stricken for us, we just need to make sure all 3 Phantasms are positioned on the Rift Guardian hitbox at all times if we don't have a proper Attack Speed Breakpoint to channel.

Another important reason to not mindlessly channel Spirit Barrage is any Phantasm spawned during Spirit Walk will not accumulate damage until Spirit Walk is over! Never touch Spirit Barrage while under the effects of Spirit Walk.

A relative damage output comparison of the possible playstyles can be seen here:

• Spectres from Phantasm are treated as pets and obey to very specific rules, often acting like a pet and sometimes not, which leads to several unique interactions.
• Like other pets, Attack Speed is a separate damage multiplier for Phantasms.
• Similarly, Spirit Barrage damage affix on your equipment is counted as a separate damage multiplier for Phantasm. This reason alone makes Voo's Juicer a solid item choice due to its fifth affix that grants 45-60% Spirit Barrage damage.
• Surprisingly, Ring of Emptiness, an item specifically designed to work with non-pet abilities only, does buff Spirit Barrage Phantasm damage.
• Mask of Jeram and Enforcer do not increase Spirit Barrage Phantasm damage anymore since the Season 21 launched alongside the patch 2.6.9.
• Frostburn's legendary affix granting "Cold skills deal 15-20% increased damage" double dips on Phantasm damage, for a total of 40% additional Cold damage.

• You can have 3 Phantasms at a time.
• They last for 5 seconds (10 seconds with Gazing Demise), ticking once every 0.5 seconds (30 frames).
• With The Barber equipped, they will deal no damage while on the ground. Instead, they will accumulate that damage (as in: add up / remember what they would have done) and then release it in the final explosion at the end of the duration (with the extra damage multiplier).
• Casting Spirit Barrage while you have 3 Phantasms active will detonate the oldest one (with its accumulated damage).
• Each tick is scaled by Attack Speed (sheet APS being a separate damage multiplier), making Pain Enhancer your strongest DPS gem by far in high density situations.
• The Attack Speed multiplier snapshots for each Phantasm individually upon cast. Moving out of the pull and therefore losing Pain Enhancer stacks will not reduce the Attack Speed multiplier of already placed Phantasms.
• Intelligence is snapshot by each Phantasm upon cast, including Soul Harvest and Gruesome Feast bonuses.
• All damage buffs are dynamically calculated for each tick during the accumulation phase with the exception of additive buffs like Sacrifice Provoke the Pack or Big Bad Voodoo Slam Dance, which are snapshot upon Phantasm cast. This means that you accumulate (wait) during DPS buffs like Oculus Ring or Convention of Elements and detonate afterwards. You won't need to have those buffs when the Phantasms explode.
• The explosions from The Barber cannot proc Area Damage as they have proc coefficient of 0, hence why it's not taken as a stat and actively removed from Paragons to reduce lags.

• Casting Spirit Barrage once will activate Manitou, an eerie ghost sentry hovering above your head.
• Manitou lasts 20 seconds and shoots 2 projectiles per second (for up to 40).
• With Gazing Demise, Manitou's Attack Rate is improved by 450%, going from 2 projectiles per second to around 11 projectiles.
• Manitou's Attack Rate is fixed, it does not have Attack Speed Breakpoints, hence adding more Attack Speed does not improve damage any further.
• In conjunction with Voo's Juicer, the numerous projectiles from Manitou are effectively triggering the effects of The Spirit is Willing and Phlebotomize runes.
• Not accumulating for 1.5 second will release the explosion, which means running out of range as you can't stop Manitou Attacks otherwise... or dying but the explosion lacks most damage multipliers in this case.
• Manitou will immediately explode as soon as enough damage has been accumulated to finish off the target, so no time can be lost by waiting too long. You cannot overkill a target (accumulate for too long).
• When accumulating for long periods of time on the same target (especially Rift Guardians), you won't see any damage done to the enemy until The Barber explosion is released.
• If there is more than one nearby enemy, Manitou will randomly switch between targets within 40 yards and create tiny The Barber explosions all the time. In high group Greater Rifts, you should avoid using this rune to reduce lag since all of your damage will come from Phantasm.

• This ability is one of the few ways in the game to pixelpull enemies.
• If used on top of enemies, it pulls them close together but does not pixelpull most of them. In order to get the best pull possible, it has to be used on a spot with no other nearby enemies.