Introduction

Mundunugu Spirit Barrage Solo Push
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Introduced with Season 20, the Mundunugu's Regalia is the most recent addition to the Witch Doctor's repertoire and, despite its funny name, the set itself is no joke at all. It focuses around releasing huge AoE bursts with specific setup and timings. As such, it is a very potent Trash Killer, especially when paired with a proper zBarb stacking enemies tightly together, allowing you to unleash devastating damage combos, one-shotting whole Elite packs even all the way up to Greater Rift 150.

The main damaging mechanic in this build Spirit Barrage Phantasm paired with The Barber originated from the old LoD Spirit Barrage theorycrafted during Season 10. While the mechanics are quite complicated, the overall idea is simple: make a pull, place three Phantasms on the ground, wait a few seconds, and then cast three more to instantly release the accumulated damage of the previous Phantasms. The more enemies are in the area and the longer you wait, the stronger the resulting explosions will be.

The build is quite tanky due to Spirit Walk and Grave Injustice in combination. Luckily, you have Big Bad Voodoo Ghost Trance following you around most of the time, thanks to the Mundunugu's Regalia (2) Bonus, to provide valuable healing and defense! This setup is also great for speed content, competing with top tier builds in Nephalem Rifts and Bounties. Keep in mind that this build has an exceptional scaling with monster density, which however requires a lot of Greater Rift fishing to reach the highest tiers.

Unfortunately, Season 21 brought a significant nerf to the build by removing the ability for Phantasm to benefit from Mask of Jeram and Enforcer. Season 23 further nerfed Spirit Barrage by lowering the Gazing Demise damage multiplier. Yet, the setup was stronger than ever in Season 24 with Ethereals (Arioc's Needle). In Season 25 Witch Doctors received additional buffs to Lakumba's Ornament, making the build more tanky and thus a bit stronger again. In Season 27, Mundunugu is a serious contender for the best Witch Doctor build due to the Sanctified Haunt. With Season 28, the build gets a slight buff with Manitou dealing more than twice the damage it did previously.

Unlike most others, this is not an Area Damage (AD) build, since all your damage comes from The Barber explosions which cannot proc it. It does replicate it though by redirecting the damage done by Spirit Barrage to all targets within 15 yards. This setup relies on many interactions between Phantasm and Manitou with The Barber, which makes it hands down one of the most complicated builds to fully understand in the entire game (see Mechanics). This guide will steer you through all the mechanics behind Spirit Barrage!

Unique Playstyle ✔
Insane AoE damage ✔
Rewarding Explosions ✔
Rewards Excellent Gameplay ✔

❌ Difficult Execution
❌ Sensitive to Fishing
❌ Complicated Mechanics
❌ Low Single Target Damage

Core Setup

Core Item Build

Items

The Mundunugu's Regalia set provides upwards of 20,000% separate damage multiplier to Spirit Barrage, your main damage ability.
Ring of Royal Grandeur in the cube will allow to wear the Captain Crimson's Trimmings set using the Belt and another piece of your choosing (Pants or Boots).
The Barber is the main item behind the special mechanics of the build, as well as giving a huge 500% damage bonus. Playing around its effect is the key aspect of the build.
Gazing Demise provides us with a 150% separate damage multiplier, makes Phantasms last twice as long and increases Manitou Attack Rate.
Ring of Emptiness activated by Locust Swarm Pestilence for another 300% separate damage multiplier.
Lakumba's Ornament goes along with Sacred Harvester and Soul Harvest Languish for a total of 30% bonus Intelligence, 100% Armor and 60% damage reduction, constituting your main source of toughness.

Season 28 Altar of Rites

Season 28 brings a brand new progression feature called the Altar of Rites that grants tremendous powers to your entire account in exchange for sacrifices. It requires you to farm Bounties, kill the Ubers, craft the Staff of Herding, and more. Completing all 26 of these tasks, along with sacrificing 6 Primal Ancients grants you unbelievable Damage, Defense, Quality of Life, Increased Drops, 3 Potion Super Powers, and the juicy Wings of Terror. Read the full guides on Unlocking the Altar and the Altar Mechanics by Raxxanterax and Chewingnom to learn everything about this fantastic Season!

Note: The suggested path assumes you are playing Solo and used the Challenge Rift Cache to help you level up.

Node 2: Choose Anointed to gain a full set of 70 yellows from level 18-70!

Node 6: Rush to gain double Bounties to help unlock other Nodes in the Altar.

Nodes 7-14: These are the last Nodes you can gain until the Challenge Rift resets. Take at least 1 Node at the bottom of each path to unlock all 3 Potion Super Powers. Pick up the Mirror Node at the top for a colossal 41% extra XP all season. Remember to unlock Father once you clear GR70 solo and have your first Primal!

Nodes 15-26: Pick up the final Quality of Life, Damage, and Defense Nodes (in that order) to finish the Altar.

Potion Super Powers: Take Father first, then Mother, and finally Mortal.

Disclaimer: The Mortal and Mother Potions require you to salvage 2 and 3 Primals respectively. Unlock them as soon as you have those materials as they don't cost a point!

Recommended Altar Path
Use the Scroll Bar to see Altar Progression

Global Stat Priorities

You want to stack damage stats wherever possible, especially Critical Hit Chance and Damage, Attack Speed as well as Cold Damage and Spirit Barrage Damage. Area Damage is useless in this build (and actively avoided in groups including in Paragon Points) as we only deal damage with The Barber explosions.

You want to stack a decent amount of Cooldown Reduction (CDR) to ensure a good uptime of Spirit Walk and Big Bad Voodoo, as these two skills will keep you alive. Grave Injustice will do most of the work, especially with some Pickup Radius. It is also a great offensive stat due to Captain Crimson's Trimmings (3) Bonus. Stack this stat as much as you feel comfortable with in Greater Rift Solo Push.

Attack Speed is a good stat as it is a separate damage multiplier for Phantasms and it helps us out stacking Bane of the Stricken. Manitou does not scale with Attack Speed in any way while Phantasm cast rate depends on Attack Speed Breakpoints when holding down Spirit Barrage, hence it is important to stay away from some Spirit Barrage Breakpoints (see Mechanics). In Solo you want to end up at the 21 FPA Breakpoint of Spirit Barrage, which requires you to play 7% Attack Speed on your Weapon and an additional 52% Increased Attack Speed from other sources (Paragon Points, Affixes on your gear as well as Gogok of Swiftness). In groups, 7% Attack Speed on your Weapon is enough; the rest of the Attack Speed will be granted via Pain Enhancer.

For toughness, we prioritize Armor on Pants, Boots, and Chest mixed in with some Vitality and perhaps Elite Damage Reduction on Chest. Resource Cost Reduction is also a good defensive option due to Captain Crimson's Trimmings (3) Bonus. Physical, Lightning or Arcane Resistances as a Secondary Affix are generally useful to have as Arcane Enchanted, Orbiter and Mortar Elite Affixes are your worst enemies by a long shot. Life Regeneration & Life per Hit are not useful as most of your healing is coming automatically from Big Bad Voodoo Ghost Trance. Mana Regeneration, despite being included in the Mundunugu's Regalia (6) Bonus, is neither useful for resources nor as an actual damage increase (around 0.3% per roll).

Crowd Control Reduction is an incredibly valuable secondary Affix to roll on both Rings, Amulet and Helmet as we are very sensitive to Hard Crowd Control effects and mitigating these will ease up our gameplay significantly. Make sure to get the Primary Affixes locked in before attempting to get CCR though.

Assembling the Build

1. Do the Challenge Rift for the materials to cube Legendary Powers. You can complete this once a week for additional resources and we always update the guide for you!

2. Gather the full Mundunugu's Regalia set. Each piece can be gambled from Kadala for Bloodshards. Do not salvage any duplicate pieces you find! Instead convert them to another part of the set with Recipe 4 in Kanai's Cube. If you have extra materials you can use Recipe 3 to craft the remaining pieces, but this is expensive and not recommended for new players.

3. Gamble from Kadala in this order:

The full Mundunugu's Regalia set
Gazing Demise
Goldwrap and Krelm's Buff Belt
Nemesis Bracers, Warzechian Armguards and Lakumba's Ornament
Aquila Cuirass
Frostburn
Ring of Emptiness, Convention of Elements, Rechel's Ring of Larceny and The Compass Rose

4. Craft using Recipe 3 in Kanai's Cube in this order:

Ceremonial Knives to get The Barber and Voo's Juicer
Swords to get In-Geom
Maces to get Echoing Fury
Amulets to get Squirt's Necklace, The Flavor of Time and The Traveler's Pledge
Anything from the Gamble list in Step 3 that you haven't already acquired.

5. Do Bounties to acquire several important items for this build:

Act 1: Ring of Royal Grandeur
Act 2: Gloves of Worship
Act 3: Avarice Band
Act 4: Can drop any bounty item from any act
Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Captain Crimson's Trimmings, Cain's Destiny and Sage's Journey

6. At this point you can somewhat comfortably farm Nephalem or Speed Greater Rifts where you can find all the remaining items you need for different variants of the build. It's better to spend your materials improving your set pieces, getting ancient weapon etc.

7. Use Primordial Ashes in Kanai's Cube with the new Curiosity of Lorath Nahr recipe to obtain a free Crafted Primal Ancient. Since you can only equip one of them, choosing the right item to focus matters! Great candidates are Weapons, Offhands, Jewelry or any item with an important multiplier. With that in mind, we recommend getting one of the following items:

Ring of Emptiness
Gazing Demise
Convention of Elements

Item Stat Priorities

SLOT	ITEM	STAT PRIORITY
Main-Hand	The Barber Sacred Harvester Voo's Juicer Echoing Fury (Cubed) In-geom (Cubed)	1. Damage Range 2. Socket Ramaladni's Gift 3. Attack Speed 4. Damage % 5. Cooldown Reduction 6. Intelligence
Off-Hand	Gazing Demise Shukrani's Triumph	1. Critical Hit Chance 2. Spirit Barrage Damage 3. Cooldown Reduction 4. Intelligence 5. Vitality 6. Mana Regeneration
Helm	Mundunugu's Headdress	1. Spirit Barrage Damage 2. Socket Flawless Royal Diamond 3. Intelligence 4. Critical Hit Chance
Gloves	Mundunugu's Rhythm Frostburn (Cubed)	1. Critical Hit Chance 2. Critical Hit Damage 3. Cooldown Reduction 4. Attack Speed 5. Intelligence
Shoulders	Mundunugu's Descendant Homing Pads	1. Intelligence 2. Cooldown Reduction 3. Resource Cost Reduction 4. Vitality 5. Life %
Chest	Mundunugu's Robe Aquila Cuirass (Cubed)	1. Sockets Flawless Royal Ruby 2. Intelligence 3. Armor 4. Elite Damage Reduction 5. Vitality 6. Life %
Pants	Mundunugu's Decoration Captain Crimson's Thrust (Crafted) Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan	1. Intelligence 2. Sockets Flawless Royal Ruby 3. Vitality 4. Armor
Boots	Mundunugu's Dance Captain Crimson's Waders (Crafted)	1. Spirit Barrage Damage 2. Intelligence 3. Vitality 4. Armor
Ring 1	Ring of Emptiness Ring of Royal Grandeur (A1 Bounties, Cubed) Avarice Band (A3 Bountie s)	1. Socket 2. Critical Hit Chance 3. Critical Hit Damage 4. Cooldown Reduction 5. Attack Speed 6. Damage Range
Ring 2	The Compass Rose Convention of Elements Rechels Ring of Larceny	1. Socket 2. Critical Hit Chance 3. Critical Hit Damage 4. Attack Speed 5. Damage Range 6. Cooldown Reduction
Bracers	Lakumba's Ornament Nemesis Bracers Warzechian Armguards (Cubed) Guardian's Aversion (Crafted)	1. Cold Damage 2. Critical Hit Chance 3. Intelligence 4. Vitality 5. Armor 6. All Resistance
Amulet	The Traveler's Pledge Squirts Necklace The Flavor of Time	1. Socket 2. Critical Hit Damage 3. Cold Damage 4. Critical Hit Chance 5. Damage Range 6. Attack Speed 7. Cooldown Reduction 8. Intelligence
Belt	Captain Crimson's Silk Girdle (Crafted) Guardian's Case (Crafted) Goldwrap Krelms Buff Belt	1. Intelligence 2. Vitality 3. Life % 4. Armor
Potion	Bottomless Potion of the Unfettered	To avoid Crowd Control effects during your DPS phases

Gems

Skills

Passives

Paragon Points

Follower

Patch 2.7.0 revamped the follower system giving all 3 hirelings new powers and the emanate system. The first thing you should do is read our complete follower guide and remember the key takeaways:

The emanation system allows followers to share certain legendary and set powers with you. The most important ones are: The Flavor of Time, Nemesis Bracers, Avarice Band, Sage’s Journey and Cain’s Destiny. Click the guide above for the full list.
Follower’s powers are based on their main stat (maxed at 25,000, but they have a 2.5x multiplier so you only need 10,000). This means we stack Intelligence on the Enchantress, Dexterity on the Scoundrel and Strength on the Templar.
Guardian's Jeopardy (3) Bonus works for followers by improving their inherent stat multiplier from x2.5 to x3.5, making it slightly easier to hit the 25,000 main stat threshold if needed.
Followers share 20% of their Experience, Magic and Gold Find stats with you.
Legendary gems do not work on followers, except Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard.
Cooldown Reduction does not work for any follower skill except the Templar’s Heal.
Followers never deal significant damage; you’re on your own to clear the content.

Select Follower

T16 Enchantress

For T16 we recommend this Enchantress setup because she is the only follower that gives Cooldown Reduction, allowing you to spam your abilities more. Since this is T16 content, she’ll stay alive with Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard and use Hand of the Prophet to gain all skills. This will give us Cooldown Reduction, Elemental Damage, Reduced Damage from Ranged Attacks, Armor, Attack Speed, and a Cheat Death.
Stat Priorities:Since we do not have the immortality focus, we need to stack survivability on our Enchantress.

Intelligence > Vitality > Life % > Armor > All Resistance > Life Per Hit > Attack Speed.

Key Items:

The Flavor of Time: For double duration on Pylons.
Nemesis Bracers: For extra Elites, Death’s Breaths and In-geom procs.
Avarice Band: For the insane pickup radius.
Ring of Royal Grandeur: To complete our sets.
Gloves of Worship: For 10 Minute Shrine Buffs.
Sage’s Journey: For double Death’s Breaths.
Cain’s Destiny: For 25% more Greater Rift Keystones.

Gameplay

Spirit Barrage has to be used with care and not always spammed. Doing so will usually actively reduce your overall DPS.
Activate Big Bad Voodoo when it's ready and you are engaging in a difficult fight. Usually you should be able to keep it up almost all the time when getting enough kills with Grave Injustice.
Use Spirit Walk to move through enemies that are in the way, for defense, to dodge affixes and projectiles or similar. Don't waste the cooldown when you are not in danger.
When making a pull, engage enemies by walking or with Locust Swarm, then group them up using Piranhas Piranhado. Make sure that Locust is applied to everything for the Ring of Emptiness effect.
Put your 3x Phantasm on top of each other where you intend to pull enemies together.
Stand still as much as possible to increase the offensive damage bonus from Endless Walk. Time your Spirit Walk with the incoming damage and your Phantasm explosions to reset the cooldown immediately (Grave Injustice won't work if the skill is still active).
Pull/kite more enemies together as your initial Phantasms are ticking on the pull. Try to spawn an Oculus Ring by killing exactly one target (or as few as possible) by recasting Spirit Barrage on top of the stack of enemies until you see one.
Run into the Oculus circle and wait there for as long as possible or until you feel like you have enough accumulated damage to finish everything off already. After 10 seconds, the Phantasm will detonate automatically, otherwise re-cast the skill 3 times.
In longer fights: re-apply Locust Swarm regularly (at least once every 6-8 sec).
Maximize your temporary damage buffs (Oculus Ring, The Traveler's Pledge, maybe Convention of Elements) during the accumulation phase. It's irrelevant if you have them during the detonation, which will count all individual ticks with their individually active buffs together.
In single target situations: Position yourself close enough to stay in range for Manitou as it will deal the bulk of the DPS here.

Hardcore

Variants

Nephalem Rifts

Bounties

GR Solo Push

GR Speeds

GR Group Trash Killer

Echoing Nightmare

Nephalem Rifts

Concept
Mundunugu's Regalia constitutes one of the best Nephalem Rift farmer for the Witch Doctor class. Spirit Barrage Manitou continuously attacks for you even while you are moving; all the multipliers from Gazing Demise, the set itself as well as Squirts Necklace provide such a massive damage boost that it's not necessary for you to worry for the accumulation mechanics of The Barber. You can use Phantasms to accumulate extra damage on Elites and the Rift Guardian, however, while moving Manitou will do most of the work. Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard protects Squirts Necklace.

Gameplay
Keep up Big Bad Voodoo and Soul Harvest at all times, spam Horrify when near enemies and use Spirit Walk for extra mobility. You will run at an insane pace due to all the Movement Speed buffs, effectively making you fly through Nephalem Rifts, while Goldwrap with Boon of the Hoarder and Avarice Band will grant you invincibility. On tough elite enemies and the Rift Guardian, use Locust Swarm to apply Ring of Emptiness.

When you do longer Torment 16 sessions, you can kill the first few monsters with Big Bad Voodoo active, summon some Zombie Dogs from the Boogie Man rune and then swap the rune to either Slam Dance or Ghost Trance. The dogs will stay permanently and keep your Fierce Loyalty active.

While playing in groups when you can't have the Cain's Destiny effect from your follower, it's possible to kill the boss yourself by accumulating some damage with Phantasm, then swapping items to get the set bonus and detonating them. Even without the Munudunugu's Regalia (6) Bonus active at that moment they will explode for their entire accumulated damage that includes the big multiplier. Be aware that even with great execution, it will not always work and requires a bit of practice to do well.

Setups
When you play in groups, replace Warzechian Armguards with Nemesis Bracers and Stone of Jordan with Avarice Band.

If you don't want to deal with Locust Swarm, you can drop it for Sacrifice Provoke the Pack. This way you can improve your overall AoE-DPS when rushing through the rift at the cost of slightly lower nuke potential on the elites.

Video Guide

Mechanics

In-Depth Explanation

As incentivized in the introduction of this guide, the interactions and mechanics going on in Spirit Barrage builds are "a bit" more complicated than the average build. In order to optimize our Witch Doctor gameplay as much as possible, we must understand everything about it! Earlier in this guide, we talked about 2 different playstyles:

Channeling Playstyle, which means holding down Spirit Barrage, continuously refreshing Phantasms and detonating the oldest one.
Delayed Playstyle, which means letting Phantasms accumulate some damage before detonating them.

While the channeling playstyle feels like a natural choice, it needs to be avoided as much as possible due to Phantasm mechanics. The idea is that you can have up to 3 Phantasms alive at once, and if you keep casting Spirit Barrage, the oldest one will detonate for the damage accumulated by The Barber. However, Phantasm first accumulation tick happens on the first frame it is cast and then every 30 frames, regardless of your Attack Speed.

This means that depending on your Spirit Barrage Attack Speed Breakpoint, simply holding down and channeling Spirit Barrage will every now and then refresh a Phantasm only a few frames before or even on the exact frame it should have accumulated damage, losing frames towards a tick and significantly reducing your overall damage output.
The best case scenario is to refresh a Phantasm right after an accumulation tick.

This explains why you want to avoid channeling for long periods of time and why there are specific Spirit Barrage Breakpoints you absolutely want to avoid as they are "eating" Phantasm ticks extremely often, the most relevant being the 20 FPA and the 30 FPA Breakpoints. These considerations have been unraveled in this old reddit post.

20 FPA Spirit Barrage w/ BBV:
Lots of Phantasms Ticks lost

Another reason to avoid the channeling playstyle at all costs is that it can effectively reduce your damage burst even more compared to a delayed detonation playstyle. Let's say you have 3 Phantasms accumulating damage on a pack of monsters.

If you detonate one of them, it would be enough to kill half of the pull; however, killing half the pull with one Phantasm would also mean your remaining Phantasms now accumulate damage on half the targets, making it more difficult to kill tougher enemies like Elite Packs. This is why you want to accumulate for as long as you can, and need to be very thoughtful about when to detonate. Monster density is by a long shot your biggest source of damage in this build.

The takeaway is to simply never channel Spirit Barrage, except on single target fights like Rift Guardians with a 21-23 FPA Breakpoint. Manitou does not require us to channel at all times and is not affected by Attack Speed in any way; holding down Spirit Barrage will simply constantly refresh its 20 second duration and Phantasms. Manitou will passively accumulate damage and stack Bane of the Stricken for us, we just need to make sure all 3 Phantasms are positioned on the Rift Guardian hitbox at all times if we don't have a proper Attack Speed Breakpoint to channel.

Another important reason to not mindlessly channel Spirit Barrage is any Phantasm spawned during Spirit Walk will not accumulate damage until Spirit Walk is over! Never touch Spirit Barrage while under the effects of Spirit Walk.

A relative damage output comparison of the possible playstyles can be seen here:

Spirit Barrage Phantasm & Pets Mechanics

Spirit Barrage Phantasm

Spirit Barrage Manitou

Shukrani's Triumph

Locust Swarm

Piranhas Piranhado

Summary

Put together the core items and acquire the full Mundunugu's Regalia set.
Don't stand still and simply channel Spirit Barrage.
Timing your rotations is key and incredibly rewarding.
Use Spirit Walk when it's truly needed.
Wait for your group to correctly setup a dense pull for you to kill.
Enjoy this powerhouse of a Witch Doctor build!

Good Luck!

Credits

Written by sVr, wudijo & Chewingnom.
Updated by wudijo & Chewingnom.

Changelog

11 February 2023
Updated for Season 28 / Patch 2.7.5.
15 August 2022
Updated for Season 27 / Patch 2.7.4.
23 March 2022
Updated for Season 26 / Patch 2.7.3. Refined Solo & Group Push Setups.

Core	Offensive	Defensive	Utility
1. Movement Speed	1. Critical Hit Damage	1. Armor	1. Resource Cost Reduction
2. Intelligence	2. Critical Hit Chance	2. Life %	2. Life per Hit
3. Vitality¹	3. Cooldown Reduction	3. All Resistance	3. Pickup Radius
4. Maximum Mana²	4. Attack Speed	4. Life Regeneration	~~4. Area Damage~~³

Mundunugu Spirit Barrage Witch Doctor Guide