I played a Barbarian at a friend's house, and though I only got to level 6, I felt like Hammer of the Ancients was... underwhelming. It felt slow (Slower than your weapon attack speed), didn't do too much damage, and the AOE was negligible at best... any beta players have better mileage with it?
HotA only increase your damage by 80%. Since you problably kill most enemies in two hits (one take out 70% of HP, the other the 30% rest, for example) HotA won't increase the speed in wich monsters die.
It only shines on it's AoE attack and in the critical chance. Those risen dudes allways stays scattered so it's really hard to put the hammer Aoe to use. But when you're swarmed by skeletons it's a very effective skill.
Also, when you have the ruthless passive skills, the critical hits will start to hurt, which is excelent against bosses and uniques (no overkill chance).
In other words HotA is a good skill against really zergy monsters or against large ones were the improved critical chance will be useful.
Hammer of the Ancients is absolutely devastating at level 60. During Blizzcon, the PvP demo barbarian had HotA as one of the fury spending abilities and it melted every class that had the misfortune to stray too close to melee range.
The Blizzcon PvP characters had ~9000 health and HotA could crit for over 4000, and more with Wrath of the Berserker (Crimson Rune) activated.
Hammer has a low fury cost and a high crit chance with a red runestone it hits quite hard in a small radius infront of you. Also it works really well with cleave*
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HotA only increase your damage by 80%. Since you problably kill most enemies in two hits (one take out 70% of HP, the other the 30% rest, for example) HotA won't increase the speed in wich monsters die.
It only shines on it's AoE attack and in the critical chance. Those risen dudes allways stays scattered so it's really hard to put the hammer Aoe to use. But when you're swarmed by skeletons it's a very effective skill.
Also, when you have the ruthless passive skills, the critical hits will start to hurt, which is excelent against bosses and uniques (no overkill chance).
In other words HotA is a good skill against really zergy monsters or against large ones were the improved critical chance will be useful.
The Blizzcon PvP characters had ~9000 health and HotA could crit for over 4000, and more with Wrath of the Berserker (Crimson Rune) activated.
No, the basic crit damage is 150%.