In this Diablo 3 Witch Doctor leveling guide you will find some good tips and tricks to power level Witch Doctor in Diablo 3. We’ll keep it short and simple but yet cover some important aspects of Witch Doctor’s game play that are important for boosting your leveling speed.

In order to level up at optimum speed while also ensuring that you are able to farm decent amount of rare items and gold, it is important to pick the right balance of skills, runes, and items. Until you hit that your build will mainly change as per the skills you unlock and rare items you obtain.

But before we get started, I recommend that you read the general Diablo 3 leveling guide that covers important leveling tips that are applicable for all classes. Make sure you read this and incorporate it into your game play right from your beginner days.

Witch Doctor leveling tip # 1 – Strengths and weaknesses

I usually recommend that you should be very much aware of your strengths and weaknesses even before you pick your class. This is what determines how successful you will be at playing that class since it may or may not suit your style of game play. For example you might pick Witch Doctor and you’re personally a tank fan then you might not find it that interesting to play a Witch Doctor and end up leveling slower compared to what you could do using Barbarian.

Strengths and how to use them to speed up leveling:

Witch Doctors are good at ranged nuking and spamming skills while their pets do all the tanking for them. Moreover they can also unleash havoc with their status skills which come extremely handle when dealing with mobs.

Spam your skills and ranged nuking abilities when mobs are in groups and then use single target skills when they are not. This helps conserve a lot of Mana over time which eventually will help you sped up leveling.

Get your gears and skills on damage mode when you have good tanks in your coop party. Good damage output skills like Firebomb combined with status skills like Gasp or Horrify will make you a must have member on quests at higher levels.

Master your weaknesses

Witch Doctors are weak when it comes to defenses and mobility. They move a little slow and don’t have that great escape skills like other characters so beware of surprises.

You do have pets who can tank for you but that will only work when you’re the one who is surprising the monsters or rare mob packs and not when you run into mobs by accident. So when you try to mob for spamming area skills be very careful and don’t get yourself killed. For a major part of the game your pets will be tanking for you as you stand back and nuke the heck out of your enemies.

Witch Doctor leveling tip # 2 – Hit and Run

Keep moving as much as you can. Use skills like Gasp to slow to enemies that are chasing you. Many of your area skills require you to be very close to enemies to be able to deal damage to mobs. Use such skills with caution and preferably only when you can tank the mob yourself or you have pets tanking mobs for you.

Witch Doctor leveling tip # 3 – Conserve Mana

As you level up you will find yourself constantly running out of Mana. It becomes very important at this point to start using your skills more efficiently rather than wasting it on breaking barrels and single monsters. As a general rule, always have some Mana in reserve and when Mana is about to hit low make sure you have already figured out escape  plan.

Diablo 3 Witch Doctor Leveling Skills and Builds

The next part focuses on what skills to pick as you level all the way to 60 and beyond.

Leveling Guides for 1-13

Use Poison Dart at lower levels. Don’t spam it on single enemy. Hit one enemy once and then move to a different one. It has delayed damage that is dealt over two seconds which eventually ends up killing the monsters. Plague of Toads is also good, but it only works good on mobs and you won’t see those until you descend to lower levels of cathedral.

Summon your Zombie Dogs and make sure you have then on all the time. This skill is must and will go all the way to 13.

At level 5 switch to Zombie Charger and try to mob a bit before you spam that skill. Don’t worry about tanking as nobody is going to kill you at these lower levels.

Haunt will be another must have skill for your third slot as soon as you unlock the slot. Stick with Haunt all the way till level 13. Do not spam this on single enemy just as I advised for Poison Dart.

Switch to Fire Bats at level 9 and use the same tactic as Zombie Charger.

At level 11 switch to Fire Bomb which is a really good skill and has potential to go long way. From what I’ve experienced so far this will go all the way to level 30 and beyond and also would be one of the must have skills in PVP.

Leveling guides for 13+

I’ll write more as the game goes live or when more levels are introduced in Beta.