Diablo III- Skills Article C: The Witch Doctor, Secondary Skills- Firebats

Firebats (123 Mana per second): A stream of burning bats roughly three yards wide blasts forwards from you, dealing 150% weapon damage per second to all enemies in the area of effect.

Firebats is one of the most useful raw-damage skills available to the Witch Doctor.  That said, do not ever rely on it to take anything out on its own.  While the mana cost and damage are both gradual over time (as relatively few damage over time effects are tick-based in Diablo III), the damage isn’t all too impressive and the mana cost gets prohibitive very quickly.  If you’ve managed to set up your Witch Doctor to use a lot of low-cost skills and summons, then you will probably like Firebats as an emergency splash of damage, though.  You should never consider this a main damage source, however.  It is best used in brief spurts, less than a second long, to finish killing something or add to the damage being dealt by your other effects.

Dire Bats (123 Mana per second): A single large flaming bat is launched from your hands.  This bat travels erratically in the direction you launch it for 40 yards, dealing 220% weapon damage as Fire damage to any enemy it touches.

Dire Bats is sadly a borderline useless skill.  The improved damage is impressive, the range is nice- but the bat travels in such an unpredictable pattern that you can’t rely on it hitting anything not immediately next to you.  On occasion you will find this an okay method of dealing high damage to a distant cluster of enemies, or smacking a single emergency hit onto something that’s closed with you and is near death, but for the most part this rune just isn’t going to help anything.  Stick with regular Firebats for now.

Vampire Bats (123 Mana per second): A stream of burning bats roughly three yards wide blasts forwards from you, dealing 150% weapon damage per second to all enemies in the area of effect.  You heal 2.5% of the damage they deal.

A basic and useful improvement to the basic Firebats, Vampire Bats makes this skill even more useful as an emergency damage shot against things that have gotten too close to you when you weren’t ready.  As with the regular skill, don’t rely on this for continual use- while the damage and healing aren’t anything to sneeze at, you’ll run dry of Mana far too quickly to make it worthwhile.

Plague Bats (123 Mana per second): A stream of burning bats roughly three yards wide blasts forwards from you, dealing constant Poison damage to enemies it hits as damage over time.  An enemy standing in the stream can have this damage over time stack to the point of dealing 225% weapon damage as Poison damage each second.

Plague Bats is a bizarre variation on Firebats that exchanges the fire for poison damage over time.  Since the damage over time is dependent on how long the enemy stays in the stream of bats, Plague Bats is the exception to the Firebats rule of ‘don’t try and keep this up for long’.  In spite of this, it’s still prohibitively Mana-expensive, so you’re generally best off not relying on this.  Anything in range of the skill is probably going to hurt you badly in the time it takes to cap out the damage over time effect, and then you’re stuck running away and out of mana.  It’s worth noting that the damage over time continues beyond the casting of the spell, though.

Hungry Bats (123 Mana per second): You rapidly launch flaming bats that seek out enemies and deal 280% weapon damage as Fire damage to each enemy they hit.

Hungry Bats is the fire-and-forget version of Firebats.  While the range is better and the enemies don’t have to stand in your area of effect, the bats themselves aren’t terrifically accurate, and you have absolutely no control over which enemy any given bat seeks out.  While the damage itself is thus reliable, whether or not you actually killed what you wanted to kill is not.  This is more of a gimmick spell than anything, though it’s possible to use it in tandem with control effects to chew away at approaching enemies.  The mana cost is still prohibitive for protracted use.

Cloud of Bats (123 Mana per second): A cloud of burning bats surrounds you, dealing 195% weapon damage per second to all enemies in melee range.  This damage increases by 10% every second, to a maximum increase of 50%.

While this form of Firebats is the most damaging, the mana cost remains prohibitive.  The range, actually, is even worse, as it turns the bats from a short-range stream into a melee-range barrier that only affects enemies that run right up to you.  Given the nature of the Witch Doctor as a ranged damage/control character, this is a terrible idea, and if you find yourself in a lot of situations where Cloud of Bats is useful, you probably should be playing a Barbarian or Monk.  Or at least a Wizard.