Diablo III- Skills Article CIII: Witch Doctor, Defensive Skills- Zombie Dogs

Zombie Dogs (49 Mana, Cooldown 60 Seconds): Summon three Zombie Dog animated corpses.  These Zombie Dogs have health and defenses based on your level, and attack at your speed for 9% of your weapon damage as Physical damage.

Zombie Dogs are classified as a Defensive Skill, because that’s where they belong- unlike the Skeletons of old Necromancer fame, the purpose of Zombie Dogs is solely to distract and impede your enemies, getting in the way and drawing their attention.  Sadly, while the Zombie Dogs are competent for low-level play (most of Normal mode), they do not scale well at all, and quickly start getting one-hit killed by most enemies.  With a 60-second cooldown, this is not a good or even usable method, so don’t rely on using Zombie Dogs in the later parts of the game for anything but blowing them up to deal fairly nice damage.     Just as a note, under normal conditions you are only allowed 3 Zombie Dogs at any given moment, though this applies to all Zombie Dogs, and not just ones summoned by this skill.

Rabid Dogs (49 Mana, Cooldown 60 Seconds): Summon three Zombie Dog animated corpses.  These Zombie Dogs have health and defenses based on your level, and attack at your speed for 9% of your weapon damage as Physical damage and 9% of your weapon damage as Poison damage over the next 3 seconds.

While it is an upgrade (and has the handy effect of turning your Zombie Dogs bilious green and making them easy to spot), the added damage from Rabid Dogs is negligible- much like the damage from Zombie Dogs to begin with.  It may have the effect of improving their ability to draw aggro, but even that isn’t very strong.

Final Gift (49 Mana, Cooldown 60 Seconds): Summonthree Zombie Dog animated corpses.  These Zombie Dogs have health and defenses based on your level, and attack at your speed for 9% of your weapon damage as Physical damage.  Each time a Zombie Dog of yours dies, it has a 15% chance to leave behind a health globe.

This is probably the most currently-useful rune for Zombie Dogs, adding a chance of a benefit to their inevitable (and all too often swift) death.  It’s still not much of an effect, but if the Zombie Dogs were more viable, it would be fairly useful in party play.

Life Link (49 Mana, Cooldown 60 Seconds): Summon three Zombie Dog animated corpses.  These Zombie Dogs have health and defenses based on your level, and attack at your speed for 9% of your weapon damage as Physical damage.  The Zombie Dogs absorb 10% of the damage dealt to you.

If Zombie Dogs were a viable skill (which it likely will either become or be replaced by an example of), the ability to essentially automatically consume their health to alleviate your pain would be useful-if not for the fact that, as basically wandering mini-tanks, they’re trying to do that to begin with.  Even without the poor scaling of the Zombie Dogs themselves, this is most useful as a last-ditch side effect in the event that you somehow get mobbed while the dogs are still active- and most of what it can do is kill the dogs so you’re being attacked by -everything-.

Burning Dogs (49 Mana, Cooldown 60 Seconds): Summonthree Zombie Dog animated corpses that are on fire.  These Zombie Dogs have health and defenses based on your level, and attack at your speed for 9% of your weapon damage as Physical damage, and deal 2% of your weapon damage as Fire damage each second to enemies in melee range.

If Zombie Dogs were a usable skill, this would be a very handy rune for them.  Adding a flaming aura to the wandering mutts improves their ability to draw attention far more than the poison bite effect of Rabid Dogs.  Sadly, this rune comes in long after Zombie Dogs lose all their usefulness.  At least Burning Dogs are kind of pretty.

Leeching Beasts (49 Mana, Cooldown 60 Seconds): Destroy all your existing Zombie Dogs, and summon three Zombie Dog animated corpses.  These Zombie Dogs have health and defenses based on your level, and attack at your speed for 9% of your weapon damage as Physical damage.  50% of the damage dealt by the zombie dogs is healed by you and the dogs, divided evenly.

In the event that Zombie Dogs become viable, this is probably one of the two contenders (with Burning Dogs) for best Zombie Dog rune.  While the healing wouldn’t ever be huge, the fact that three dogs are wandering around doing it could mean very good things for your ability to survive anything that the Dogs themselves don’t attract.  If only Zombie Dogs weren’t made of paper...