Pierce the Veil: Your skill damage is increased by 20%, but your Mana costs for skills are increased by 30%.
This is the flip side of skills like Blood Ritual and Spiritual Attunement. To a certain degree, you can use Spiritual Attunement alongside Pierce the Veil and you’ll come out fairly close to the same spot on the ‘how fast do I run dry of Mana’ scale as you did without either skill, which makes the combination a really nice boost to your damage. As an alternative, you can rely on low-cost spells like Corpse Spiders or Firebomb and on Manaless spells like Fetish Army and Sacrifice. Or you can wind yourself in a third direction and grab up a lot of Mana-restoring runes onto your skills to mitigate the effects of Pierce the Veil. However you do it, 20% is a rather large damage increase, so as long as you can sustain that increase in Mana cost, you’re likely to want Pierce the Veil.
Fetish Syncophants: Whenever you cast Poison Dart, Plague of Toads, Zombie Charger, Corpse Spiders, Firebats, Firebomb, Locust Swarm, Acid Cloud, or Wall of Zombies, you have a 3% chance to summon a Fetish to fight for you for 60 seconds.
While there aren’t any ways to boost your Fetish allies, choosing the right skills to go with this one can give you a good shot at having at least one Fetish alongside you at all times, a very nice prospect (particularly since the Fetish will be stabbing at someone else’s calves and not yours). The array of skills that can summon a Fetish is veyr nice also, giving you the option to rely on Wall of Zombies for protection, Corpse Spiders for rapid-casting to improve your chances at a free Fetish, and the powerful choices of Locust Swarm and Acid Cloud. Elective Mode can enable you to run around with a suite of entirely Fetish-chance spells, though if you like Fetishes, you should probably reserve a slot for the Fetish Army. Since Fetishes, surprisingly, scale properly in exactly the way Zombie Dogs and the Gargantuan don’t, becoming a Fetish-focused Witch Doctor is hardly a banal or especially difficult prospect, so you may want to try it out even if it doesn’t sound like it’s quite what you’re looking for. You may also find yourself stumbling into a build heavy on these skills to begin with in which case- why not?
Spirit Vessel: The cooldown of your Horrify, Spirit Walk, and Soul Harvest spells is reduced by 2 seconds. Once every 90 seconds, when you would die, you instead enter the Spirit Realm for 3 seconds and heal to 10% of your maximum Life.
For a close-range Witch Doctor, this makes an excellent skill option, giving you an out if you should accidentally commit suicide by demon, and also giving you a chance to use three of your skills that are useful in melee range more frequently than you otherwise would. It’s not a big increase for Soul Harvest, but it’s decent for Spirit Walk and very nice to have on Horrify. It’s unlikely you’ll accidentally fall into using two or even all three of these skills in the same build though, so unless you’re specifically looking to use Spirit Vessel, you can safely ignore it- the rescue is nice, but hardly infallible, after all, as being in the Spirit World doesn’t prevent you from taking damage- it just lets you walk blithely through anything short of an actual wall.
