Diablo 3 - How to fix the pet Witch Doctor

Main Issue

Pets are the main source of damage and defense for the pet WD build. For most cases, they are the only source of damage and defense.


When pets die, there are a few scenarios:
a) the pet skills are available, and the WD resummons them immediately
b) the pet skills are on cooldown, and the WD has to dodge until one of the pet skills are ready. Tendency is that the WD dies anyway.

The problem now is that the pets die too quickly, that even when resummoned they die immediately, putting the WD into situation b most of the time. This is not aided by the fact that pet skills have very long cooldowns.

This is especially painful in higher Grifts.


Currently, pets die very easily to the following abilities:
- Charge attacks (Anarch, charging Beasts, Corrupted Angels)
- DOT effects (Anarch fire trail, Herald of Pestilence, Barbed Lurkers)
- Environment effects (blood pools in Blood Marsh A5, exploding plant in A2)
- Slam attacks (Mallet Lords, Punisher jumps, Hammer guys in A2)
- Elite affixes (Arcane Sentry, Electrified, Fire chains, Molten trails)

Generally, any ability that will tick for a decent amount of damage for a long time will kill the pet outright in a few seconds. A strong power move like the mallet lords slam can be mitigated by the force armor, but sometimes it's just too strong (especially in higher Grifts), and the pets get 1-shotted.

But strangely, they can survive molten explosions, frozen explosions, and similar stuff that kills most players.

Solutions to Improve Pet Survivability

There's a few ways to go about doing this:

1) Make pets toughness scale with the difficulty/monster's HP

This was seen in the PTR, and generally made the pets immortal. It was definitely fun to play immortal pets, and the WD only needs to worry about his own survivability. But other players will QQ and complain that the WD is OP, similar to the DH right now.


2) Make pets gain the defensive bonuses from the player's gears, like regeneration, LOH, immunity amulets, serpent, unity, blackthornes, etc.

This will probably lead to more interesting gear choices, if they directly affect the pets, and doesn't feel as OP as #1.

3) Tweak the numbers for the enforcer gem.

25% seems too low for now, and does not seem to help much. 75% would probably be a much better number.

4) Redesign the Zuni set bonus

Currently the SMK and Zuni set bonus serve almost similar function: to allow permanent Fetish Army. SMK requires a little more to work maintain the army, while Zuni requires the player to wear 4 parts of the gear.

Instead, redesign the Zuni set bonus to be:

Your pets are now invulnerable.

Note the slight difference here. This means the Fetish Army will still expire after 20 seconds, just that they are invulnerable for the duration they are out. Similarly for the sycophants and Wrathful Protector. At least now you get full mileage out of your pets when they are out.

This will have implications for the other builds that uses the Zuni sets though, like the Darts build.

5) Reduce the cooldowns of pet skills

Just have no idea why they are so long. They could simply half the cooldowns, and if the pets die then just resummon. This reduces the time spent without pets, and make the gameplay better for the WD.

6) Redesign the pet skills similar to the DH's

This way, pets will auto revive after a certain time, they have an active ability, and Zuni's bonus could simply make the active bonus permanent for Fetish Army (or something else). Thus far, I have yet to hear DH complain about their pet's survivability. And the DH's pets do tank very well due to their design and active abilities (boar and spider in particular). But this is going to be a major redesign, so I highly doubt it will happen.

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After it's all said and done, I will probably try running super tanky build with
- Jungle Fortitude
- Bad Medicine
- String of Ears
- Uhkapian Serpent

and see how far i can go.