DiabloFans

Ok, so I took a long break and have just come back. Never really played hardcore in comparison to most players on these forums, but have been playing off and on since D3V launch. Anyhow, I've got this WW barb that I have been slowly building and replacing parts and pieces for his gear. I have this older Skull Grasp ring and Im wondering if I should be searching for something different, or is this one one of those legacy items that you would regret scrapping. It's not so old that it does +weapon damage, but it does have +391% damage to Whirlwind. Im seeing builds posted that show Skull Grasp in the cube and only adding 250% to WW. Any ideas?

Any other critiques to try to make my character better is welcome as well. Yes I know I need to get level 50 gems to enhance my gear, but it's a real grind and I dont really the drive to grind out level 50 gems when I can only complete GR51.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Devestator-1333/hero/50143225

I hope you won't mind if I tell you what I would change.

First of all, there are few combinations of gear that I would use.

Variation #1

Go for 6pc WotW set, replace RoRG in cube for Obsidian ring of the Zodiac.

Use Witching Hour as belt, or Lamentation, since you use rend as one of your skills.

Use Lacuni Prowlers as bracers or Strongarms with FC to proc them. Also, FC will replenish your rage whenever you charge into group of mobs.

Roll CDR on both weapons and use diamond in helmet. Will get huge boost to CDR that way and WotB will be on almost 100% of time.

Find new Skull Grasp since it is multiplicative now, compared to old ones that were additive damage only.

Make HF amulet that has passive you need for this build, and those are:

• Ruthless
• Weapons Master ( will make your life easy and refill your rage whenewer you attack mobs)
• Nerves of Steel
• Rampage
• Berserker Rage or Brawler

BTW if your belt does not have life per fury, nor your weapons have it, there is no point in using Bloodthirst at all.

Variation #2

Keep RoRG in cube, and use Hexing pants of Mr Yan to get 25% more damage when moving and 20% reduced fury cost.

Rest is pretty much the same.

About L gems. You might wanna check out how bane of the powerful works now, since it gives you + damage to elites and reduces damage you suffer from them, too. Also, you can use SoJ as one of your rings, and get Skull Grasp in cube. With Bane of the Powerful and furnace, you would have 50+30+15=95% damage to elites lol.

I dont say this what I wrote here is best thing ever, but I think it might help you get to at least grift 70.

wow that's some legacy skull grasp here!

i wonder if it's better or worse than the reworked one.

The new one multiplies skill damage, while the legacy one multiplies by weapon damage. Sounds same to me. But legacy has higher number.

also check my dps build here:

this is as much DPS as you can get from a ww barb.

For GR though you need more damage mitigation.

Also reroll armor to %life on your belt

Well thanks for the advice, I am working on making some of the suggested changes and making a mix of both your advice. I went poking around my other characters and found an even older Skull Grasp!

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Devestator-1333/hero/69824295

It literally does nothing for WW. This guy is just a mule to collect crap (and to experiment with leap quake a bit)

I also built a HotA barb at one point...

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Devestator-1333/hero/9684974 ... but it really doesnt fit my play style.

this is actually a "later" version of skull grasp without affix i believe. But it does not matter, it's still bad.

Ok, so I finally got a new Skull Grasp to drop. I had Unity on slot 1 and when I was hovering over the new ring to check it against my old ring I noticed something strange... it was comparing it to Unity rather than the other Skull Grasp. Now I have been around long enough to know that Unique Equipped always compares to itself no matter what slot it's in, so Im like WTF? Then I realize, the legacy SG is not considered the same as the new one. So I said, why not? and equipped them both for maximum WW damage. I am seeing occasional crits of over 1B now and my average crit is 650M. I took points from both of your suggestions and went from never completing 53 to ripping through it in 6:53 which was only 3 seconds off my level 50 time for this leaderboard reset. Im also playing around with Stricken vs Powerful. I realize Powerful is probably better against trash mobs, but having that extra 10% against the RG from Stricken is a nice touch.

Yeah equipping the legacy one and the new one might be crazy!