Rush of Essence: Whenever you cast Haunt, Horrify, Mass Confusion, Soul Harvest, Spirit Barrage, or Spirit Walk, you regain Mana equal to 30% of the skill’s Mana cost over the next 10 seconds.
This can, strangely, actually be combined nicely with Spirit Vessel in a short-range Witch Doctor, though that means dropping Bad Medicine, and that will make you considerably more vulnerable in melee range. On the other hand, trying to pick up the whole batch of spells that benefit from Rush of Essence does cut down your options for dishing out Poison damage pretty severely. The real question here is whether you expect to be in melee with enemies focusing on you or not. If not, you can drop Bad Medicine and take advantage of your ally’s ability to distract enemies with impunity, since Horrify, Mass Confusion, Spirit Walk and Spirit Vessel will all give you protection enough for occasional accidents. If you are finding yourself the focus of a lot of enemy aggression, you’re going to have to choose between Spirit Vessel for safety, or Rush of Essence for continual function. It’s a tough choice, and you need to be able to judge the frequency and duration of your fights and what actually poses more or less danger to you before you actually decide on one direction or the other to go in.
Vision Quest: When 4 or more of your skills are on cooldown, your Mana regeneration increases by 300%.
Curiously, via Elective Mode, this skill goes really well with Tribal Rites- by picking up a bunch of skills with long cooldowns, of which the Tribal Rites skills are a large part, you can ensure massive mana regeneration and then use it to power spells that are normally too mana-hungry to spam while you wait for the cooldowns to end. Really, that’s the primary use for this skill- a lot of your cooldowns are going to be fairly short as a Witch Doctor, so you can’t really rely on having most of your options shut off a lot of the time- besides, that’s not a very fun way to play in most cases.
Fierce Loyalty: Your pets gain 100% of the benefit of your Thorns and Life regeneration effects from your equipment.
Pets pets pets. If you’re equipped for a -lot- of life regeneration, this might combine with Jungle Vitality and Zombie Handler to keep your Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan usable longer, but at this point you’re investing all three of your passives into keeping two of your active skills viable- and that’s a terribly high expense for having pets. Until the Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan are fixed, this skill is simply a bad idea, so you should generally be ignoring it. Once they are fixed, though, this skill should prove immensely useful, particularly with heavy Thorns gear- as that will help your four-five independent tanks keep the attention off you so you can blast the faces off of things while they chew on your zombies. The Life regeneration is a little harder to rely on, but some players will find themselves running into more of that than they do of Thorns. Unfortunately, while it improves your zombies’ durability, it won’t do much about keeping enemies off your back, so you probably shouldn’t worry about that too much unless your zombies die frequently and you want to try to use it to replace them less often.
