Last week brought news of a change to improve the lag for Witch Doctors using the Carnevil helm, by reducing the number of Fetishes firing poison darts to 5, while also boosting the damage of the darts to keep the overall damage output roughly the same. Now that the patch is live, players have some reactions, and Blues have answers.
[blue]I’ve been running 2-3 GRs around 60 on the PTR and I noticed a DPS nerf. Ive tried to pinpoint the fact that my sycophants are shooting darts rather than my fetish army. Cannot tell for sure but it does seem likely sycophants indeed shoot darts when they are the closest. If this is true, a major nerf just hit us. Not just the 8% nerf from the 3.5x multiplier which was supposedly 3.8x, but the whole fact that you loose damage from syco`s shooting instead of army… I had strong faith in Yang not overlooking this but apparently he did.
And no, the area dmg for pets does NOT compensate for syco`s shooting the darts instead of FA.
John Yang: Fetish Sycophants
As of today’s PTR patch, Fetish Sycophants now benefits from +Fetish Army damage. This should smooth out concerns with which Fetish is doing the shooting – Fetish Army or Fetish Sycophants. We made this change because it felt bad to know that “if only I could control my fetishes and pick which 5 do the shooting, I could output more damage”.[source]http://www.diabloii.net/blizzard-tracker/devthread/us/18301005053[/source][/blue]
Lots of WD changes in this patch, but they’re still running last of all the classes in Grift solo power. At least Blizzard is trying, and there were many WD changes, mostly buffs, in today’s patch. So hope remains…