Quote Originally Posted by Tvtyrant View Post
My play group and I switched over to Diablo iii recently. We got to level 50 on this season then all of us decided to switch characters. I went from all passives + disintegrate wizard to witchdoctor, another went from necromancer to crusader, third went from demonhunter to copying my wizard.

I prefer zone control to pets, I'm wondering if a pure control doctor is viable. Grasping hands, mass confusion, hex and horrify or frogs. Anyone have witch doctor experience, and are pets needed?
Your best bet for a powerful zero-pet WD is the Jade Harvester set, at least if you're concerned about T13+ difficulty. This is a popular variant.

Which leads nicely to my next question - what exactly do you consider "viable?" You can set your own difficulty in this game, and it's all up to you to stop wherever you're having the most fun. A common viability benchmark to aim for is GR70, i.e. Torment 15, because you need to be able to solo that difficulty level to unlock Primal Ancients for all your characters, and most of the seasonal challenges top out around that level too. But if you don't care about that stuff then any difficulty can work and the number of "viable" builds vastly increases. Similarly, for other folks that might still be too easy and they may want to climb all the way to 90+.

As it is, there are currently at least 5 builds per class (4 sets + LoN) that are viable at GR70, and pretty much all of those can go well beyond that benchmark, with some only starting to fall off in effectiveness after GR100+ or so and some being the leading edge of the game's leaderboards. (If, again, that's something you care about.)


As for your specific question - building purely for crowd control (cc) is generally not viable at the difficulties I mentioned. First, most powerful builds can cc roomfuls of mobs while also killing them, which is ultimately the point (since they need to die to drop loot or give you additional timer), so a build that only does cc is a significant dps loss to the group. Secondly, crowd control suffers from diminishing returns, with monsters who are controlled repeatedly eventually becoming immune rather quickly, so that's another reason to kill them rather than stunlocking or what have you. Third and final, elites/champions/bosses have innate resistance to cc effects to begin with - these effects have shorter duration on them and also reduced effects if the effect has a gradient. (e.g. a spell that reduces monster movement by 80% will reduce an elite by much less, but a spell that outright stun or blindss them should still work - albeit falling off more quickly.)

This is not to say that support builds aren't viable, but the good ones tend to buff your party rather than debuffing the enemy for this reason. Monk is probably the king of this particular playstyle but pretty much every class has a buff build of some kind. For a dedicated buffer, you won't really see the benefits until very high difficulties though.