Diablo III- Skills Article CXVIII: Witch Doctor, Passive Skills (2 of 6)

Jungle Fortitude: Damage you and your pets take is reduced by 20%.

If the actual pets- the Zombie Dogs and the Gargantuan- were viable, this skill would be pretty tasty.  As it is, it’s still fairly nice- that 20% damage reduction is close to the 30% that Monks and Barbarians have by default, and can go a long way towards making your short-range spells more useful.  It also keeps the Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan relevant for a few extra levels, though not many.  Really, even with properly-scaled summons, the damage reduction to yourself is paramount- it enables you to use spells like Firebats and Soul Harvest without nearly as much risk of dying from happening to have wandered into melee.  This, of course, means that every Witch Doctor wants it- but not every Witch Doctor wants it more than all but one or two other skills.  Pay close attention to how you play before deciding to keep ahold of Jungle Fortitude- if you never close to short range to begin with, you probably have something better to use the passive slot for.

Spiritual Attunement: Your maximum Mana is increased by 20%.  You regenerate an additional 1% of your Mana every second.

Unlike most resource pool incrasers, this skill hinges on percentages- and with good reason.  Since the Witch Doctor’s Mana pool increases with their level, a straight number simply isn’t going to stay significant.  The fact that it just generally improves your resource regeneration, both directly by adding 1% of your maximum per second and indirectly by increasing the size of your pool and thus the amount that each percentage is, makes this skill very strong.  If you’re going in a particular direction with your passive skills, you may find yourself with a third slot that’s up in the air- if you consider Spiritual Attunement roughly equal with another choice, then you should probably take it over that choice- it will keep you more consistently active and that’s always better than burst damage or an effect you only use some of the time.

Gruesome Feast: When you are healed by a health globe, you regain 10% of your maximum Mana and your Intelligence increases by 10% for 10 seconds.  This increase can stack up to 5 times, to a maximum of 50%.

If you happen to have picked the majority of the health globe producing skills that are available to the Witch Doctor- and there are more than a couple, thanks to some very interesting runes- then you may find that Gruesome Feast is to your liking.  Paired up with health globe effect gear this can have a pretty hefty impact on both your maximum Mana and your damage per skill use, and with a 10-second duration, it’s not too hard to stack it.  The real difficulty comes in when you’re going from battle to battle- there are some times when the buff will wear off and you’ll have to start over.  Also, if you don’t have enough ways to find health globes available to you (and/or your teammates don’t for themselves) this can be hard to really get much advantage out of.  Because of that, skills like Gruesome Feast can be taken as a cue to do something very interesting and put together a regular party that relies heavily on health globes and has lots of boosts to them.  If you want to team up a lot and have a lot of health globe reliance you will find you need to do either that or alter your build to become less needy of the crimson spheres.  Particularly with powerful effects like this at hand.