Just joined a public Act 1 game to test it out. You can definitely run into bad groups. :lol
This was one of the guys in the group:
:lol
I was in an Act 3 game today and a demon hunter kept dying and complaining how he spent $60 on this game just to die repeatedly, so I checked out his stats and he had 4K hp and 4K dps.
When I asked him about it he made up some lame excuse of his friends giving him this gear for farming. In reality he's probably just a leecher who was dragging our whole group down.
Wow. I mean I'm not denying you can find some awful people around like that, but usually they die ever 4 seconds for a few minutes and then leave. I'd love to see some of the equipment on people like that. What in the world are they even using, level 40 gear? I'm not even sure how you'd purposefully get 4k hp and 4k dps. On Kripp's budget barb he ended up with like 8k dps, and he wasn't even thinking about dps at all. That seems to be the low end of what you can get. 4k on a DH is insane, too. You'd have to have like no dex and a bow that does like 200 dps or something. At the beginning of nightmare I think I had over that dps and hp with my DH.
I can get through Act 3. I can do parts of Act 4. I can't farm Act 3. I only die in act 2 if I get vortexed onto molten+2 or 3 arcane lasers. I die every other pack in Act 3.
Most of my gear is 80-150 Int, 80-100 Vit, 70+ resist all. Stuff with more int, more vit, more resist all, and more armor is really, really, really expensive.
I've got ~1700 Life on Hit, ~35k HP, ~850 resist all. Single-target DPS is ~15k, multi-target DPS with bears/Acid Cloud is off the charts.
The most obvious pieces of my gear that need upgrade are my rings, which as you should know are also probably the most expensive items in the game after top tier weapons when factoring cost/stat.
Oh... You're a Witch Doctor... I'm sorry.
WDs are broken. It's not you, man, it's the game. I've literally seen 1 WD in my travels through Act 3 and 4. He was in Act 4. He was wearing some odd gear from what I remember, and he died a few times and left. Never seen one since.
I think the problem is that with WDs and especially with bears you need to be pretty close to the fray, and you've only got one good escape/defense tool. DHs and Wiz have a few more, and they don't have to be that close. With most other classes your resists, LOH, and HP would be pretty much insane, but without the melee damage reduction, and without some of the tools the other classes have I'm just not sure what to recommend to you. My own WD got slammed into a wall mid Act 2-ish where I really found that bears stops being as good. I was able to sail through Act 1 easily with it, but after that you just can't be that close to monsters unless you've got a ton of damage mitigation
skills. Not just equipment, but skills and passives too, and WDs just don't have them.