Diablo III- Skills Article CLXXXVI: Elective Mode and the Witch Doctor

Elective Mode interacts differently with the Witch Doctor than it does with any of the other classes in Diablo III.  Thanks to the lack of a resource-generating ‘type’ of skills in the class and utter nonreliance on such effects, the Witch Doctor has the most flexibility to gain out of Elective Mode.  At the same time, there is a much greater risk- it is far easier to set yourself up to overtax your resources without really realizing it.

Despite this, the Witch Doctor’s emphasis on a large number of effects steadily dealing modest damage all at once is much easier to work with when you have Elective Mode enabled.  Typically speaking, you’re going to want your first mouse-button skill to be one of the Primary skills, just because they are very inexpensive Mana-wise.  Your other mouse-button skill should either be an alternative Primary skill with a different area of effect or target set, or one of the skills available whose damage stacks with other instances of itself- Acid Rain is a good example of this.

As far as your four hotbar skills are concerned, there really is no mandatory category to put here.  The Witch Doctor’s skills don’t provide any grouping of skills whose effects on you are exclusive to one another, and there isn’t really a necessity for any of the Defensive skills.  It’s usually advisable to put at least one of the ‘jumping damage’ skills- Haunt or Locust Swarm- just so that you have a nice opening strike in combat that then deals damage for at least a good chunk of the fight, if not until all enemies are dead.  While a skill that can be used defensively is a very good idea, this isn’t restricted only to the Defensive skill category- Grasp of the Dead can easily be used as a protective measure, as can Wall of Zombies and Fetish Army.

As far as Passive skills are concerned, the majority of the later Witch Doctor passives benefit highly from Elective Mode- Tribal Rites, Rush of Essence, and Fetish Syncophants most notably, though Spirit Vessel and Bad Medicine also become slightly more useful.  Typically, Tribal Rites and Fetish Syncophants will benefit most from builds that focus on enabling them, where Rush of Essence may find itself thrown into builds that didn’t have it in mind, and Spirit Vessel doesn’t actually indicate a direction for an entire build.  Bad Medicine becomes especially potent via Elective Mode, with proper skill selection letting you keep all enemy damage down virtually all the time.  Keep an eye to these skills even if you aren’t building to fit them- you may find them to be useful third-slot passives even so.