(Formerly the Low Budget Barbarian Guide, changed because this build is not just about spending as little as possible, it is highly effective all the way though Inferno)
These are a series of video guides that I have made to show that you can gear out and play a damage based barbarian for far less gold than most think. I explain how to play the build, and how to set up your skills to maximize your damage, and what gear that you want to look out for while spending as little as possible.
With this build I am able to speed farm elites in act 1 and 2, and have progressed through act 3 and 4, albeit at a much slower and careful pace. I recommend sticking to act 1 and 2 farming in order to make gold, as kills/hour is what is truly important in elite farming. As it stands right now, the drop rate in act 3+4 compared the increase in difficulty makes for poor farming.
A short, text guide is just below the posted videos.
I will post additional videos to answer questions and demonstrate this build's capabilities as I am requested.
I'm shortening this post by just linking my video channel. https://www.youtube....notzizka/videos
For those of you who want a shorter text version, here are some key points:
The build:
1. The basic build
a. For added defense, swap Overpower for Warcry, then Animosity for Superstition
b. For extra healing, swap the Whirlwind rune Hurricane for Blood Funnel.
c. Frenzy can be swapped out with your choice of rage generator.
2. Battle Rage is your most important ability. If you don't keep it up, you will run out of rage and this will lead to issues.
3. Sprint' tornadoes are your main source of rage, not frenzy or whirlwind. If you don't have tornadoes down, you're going to run out of rage.
4. Wrath of the Berserker's main purpose is the immunity to CC that it grants.
The gear:
1. This build can work with very little gear and gets very strong as your gear improves.
2. The importance of stats for starter gear is as follow: Life on Hit > Crit %+ > Vitality > Resists
3. Added damage is something to look for as a luxury, strength and bonus crit damage both drastically improving this build performance.
4. Once base damage is high enough, Life Steal becomes and extremely dtrong stat, especially as it can be found in gear slots that LoH can not.
added note: Nobody should expect to spend next to nothing and start farming act 4 elites. This build is a great way to get started, and will easily clear its way through act1/2 with very basic gear. You can use that as a stepping stone to gear up a little more for further acts. Even so, I found that I spent far less on this build than an equally progressed tank barbarian would, and continued progressing much faster.
I'm not crying or bitching around. I just want to know, what you define as "very little gold"? I have really crap gear (I can barely farm act one. it is possible, I get butcher down, but it actually can be a pain in the ass with the wrong affixes on rares. I don't even have to try act 2 yet, I get ass raped (yep, post nerf). I have around 42k life and it is basically a defensive build, just with a 1200 dps 2h weapon. I have currently roughly 400k. is that your sort of "very little gold"?
3 legendarys, around 1k loh from weapons alone, the neck is also quite brilliant. I can see how the build works, but I cannot see how that gear is worth "very little gold". and getting all of this from just inferno act 1 farming would just be too fricking ridiculous lucky.
however, I'm sure I'll give it a try. it's always refreshing to see a way-from-standard build work. hopefully it doesn't get nerfed. 1.0.4 is coming and as it looks like, there will be a lot of "class balancing".
As I said in the video, I did all this with far less than 3million gold, and the market value of items has decreased quite a bit since. A similar gearset could be put together off of the auction house for quite a bit less if your sole objective is act 1 farming. This is a much, much cheaper alternative to the very expensive "tank" build alternatives. I think the most I've spent on a single item might have been 500k. You could replace most of the legendaries/rares that I have with properly itemized blues and still be quite effective.
Interesting build! How well does it work against champs especially very hard hitting champs? At the moment i berally play my barb he was my main but ones i got to ACT 3 and realized that i had to drop another 10-20 mil to get to ACT 4 i leveled a DH which now farms all of Inferno. I try to play my barb but i am getting so tired of sword and board... i may give this build a go.
As I said in the video, I did all this with far less than 3million gold, and the market value of items has decreased quite a bit since. A similar gearset could be put together off of the auction house for quite a bit less if your sole objective is act 1 farming. This is a much, much cheaper alternative to the very expensive "tank" build alternatives. I think the most I've spent on a single item might have been 500k. You could replace most of the legendaries/rares that I have with properly itemized blues and still be quite effective.
hm, ok. so basically... what is the most important thing for that build? I guess, it is some vit up to ~30-40k, then crit, then str. and ofc, life on hit on weapons + amulet. or is it possible with close to no crit/loh as well?
@Faithful The most important stats are crit and loh. Str is of course very nice, but totally a luxury stat. I would focus first on getting decent crit and loh, then defense, then damage.
@Maddog this build actually fairs surprisingly well against champ packs, especially with the immunity to CC that wrath grants. In later acts, you usually have to drop overpower for resist shout, unless you can play with a more defensively built barb in your group. I'm making a video of handling elites in early acts now, and I'll work on more videos for later acts tomorrow.
This build is strong because it works very well with very little gear, and then just gets ridiculously strong as your gear improves.
My weapons took a bit of bargain hunting, but nothing too extreme. I believe a 2hander alternative to this build would be very effective and much cheaper, it's definitely worth a try and I'll keep an eye out for a 2hander to try it with. The downside of lifesteal is that it scales down in inferno, it's something like 8% life steal = 1.2% in inferno. However, you can get lifesteal on items that you can not get loh on, such as your belt. And life steal becomes more and more potent as your gear increases. It's definitely a viable stat for this build.
Well, at least in the EU AH your main hand alone would be an insane bargain. The cheapest >=300 LoH weapon with similar DPS to yours is 3 mio - and it doesn't come with any other stats unlike yours. So stating it's a cheap build when your weapon alone is worth as much as you're stating for your whole gear is a bit ridiculous in my opinion.
If you really want a cheap build, get a >1k DPS 2h with life steal and %critdamage - you can reliably get those for <200k. Get %Crit, %Critdamage on slots that can have those stats and otherwise get a mix of Strength, Vitality and All Resists (usually only two of those). Congratulations, you now have a 2h Barbarian that's actually worth <2 mio that can easily run through Act 1/2 and with a bit more effort Act 3 as well.
Edit: Checked the US AH, it's not different at all.
Thus tl;dr: LoH builds are not low budget builds whatsoever.
He seemed to do it really easily, I'd bet it would be fine with a cheaper weapon.
Just looked it up, and you can get over 200 LoH on a 600dps weapon for 20k. So....Yeah, there's that.
Once I got up to 500k I was finding extremely good main hands, easily comparable to or better what he was using.
Yea, life steal is still very effective as your dps goes up, especially when your laying down so many attacks at once. I just didn't include it in this video since it revolves around being effective with very low base damage.
It looks like my second video will have to wait until the morning, having an issue with my encode and I'm too exhausted to deal with it.
edit: I was able to clear act 1 with ease with about 1/4 the loh I have now, I just used resist shout to help with the damage, and you can subsitute the Hurricane rune out for Blood Funnel if you're still hurting for healing.
I'm making similar videos to show effectiveness against act1/2 packs tomorrow, I'm too tired to finish them right now. I used this build with this gear through the entirety of inferno, skipping very few packs. I don't usually play on softcore anymore, so I threw this gear together with what little money I had left on my softcore toons, which was about 3million gold. I really only spent about half that, though a few of my pieces I've found on my own. That is much cheaper than gearing out with high vit/resist gear, which averages at well over a mil a piece.
edit: I actually started this gearset/build as a cheap and easy way to get the inferno D Barb kill achieve, as I'm an achievement hunter. I then added the whirlwind setup and started to use it to farm elites when I didn't feel like playing hardcore. This spec is really meant for elite hunting, I was just showcasing how easy it was to kill belial with no effort even with the stricter enrage timer, something that I've seen overly defensive barbarians with much more expensive gear fail to do.
just few tips from someone who has started using this (to avoid frustration). battle rage is key here. without this you will die as you will not get enough fury. so start with BR, now sprint AROUND mobs (you wont be able to go through them withour whirlwind) in fairly large circle (if possible, harder in dungeons). when you are on full fury, keep sprint up, run towards mobs and hit whirlwind. you will go through them, drop more cyclones, etc. circling around whilst using whirlwind is good too. just dont forget to refresh battle rage. after some practice you will see it works like a charm. if you die its most probably due to lack of BR and no fury. for hard hitting mobs its best to kite them around so they walk into the cyclones. its safe way how to kill them. works nice for fast mobs too.
I have to attach one more thing after I tried what is possible with a ridiculous low budget as I have. I invested 1,99€ (sold sth before) for a 650 dps 250 loh 80 str/vit mainhand and about 80k for a 500 loh 500 dps offhand, as well as another 70k for two items, that alltogether including all buffs (except wrath of the berserker) put me at 39% critchance and ~900 loh. I have 45k life but only 190-220 resistance (which is a BIT low) and ~13k dps w/o wotb.
- shielding / invuln. minions totally rapes that build. no hits = no rage = no loh = no whirlwind = no sprint = dead.
- Mainly because of my quite low resistance, I got a combo molton firechains plauged shared health, also totally raped me. I was dead before I could get battle rage up. when I got BR up, I was dead before I could use wotb and spam WW.
- I have the feeling, that crits from the tornados from sprint dont give rage. so the sprint tornados are soley for loh procs (which works). Can someone confirm/reject this?
so if the affix combo doesn't include invulnerabilities and/or isn't a totally assraping elemental damage combination, that build is a very viable one for low geared barbarians. Yet you SHOULD have a fair backup of gold, because you still will die quite a lot until your gear really gets better. and repair costs hurt if you dont have that little bit of backup gold.
/edit:
waller arcane enchanted in limeted areas (festering woods, to be precise) is also not funny.
same with reflectdmg + electrified at the same time.
so I need more resistance (#1), more life on hit (#2) and very seriously, more crit (#3). I think my base dps is fine, I just have some bad luck when it comes to affixes right now. and seriously, I'm running out of gold.
invuln is pain. arcane is OK if you have space to kite. just kill them with cyclones from sprint and refresh BR. wallers are bit complicated but doable as well. sometimes its just about running in circles (if possible around some obstacle)
Play with what you feel comfortable with, and what you have fun playing. There are a ton of variations of this build, and all of them are just fine to play.
These are a series of video guides that I have made to show that you can gear out and play a damage based barbarian for far less gold than most think. I explain how to play the build, and how to set up your skills to maximize your damage, and what gear that you want to look out for while spending as little as possible.
With this build I am able to speed farm elites in act 1 and 2, and have progressed through act 3 and 4, albeit at a much slower and careful pace. I recommend sticking to act 1 and 2 farming in order to make gold, as kills/hour is what is truly important in elite farming. As it stands right now, the drop rate in act 3+4 compared the increase in difficulty makes for poor farming.
A short, text guide is just below the posted videos.
My stream: http://www.twitch.tv/notzizka#
I will post additional videos to answer questions and demonstrate this build's capabilities as I am requested.
I'm shortening this post by just linking my video channel.
https://www.youtube....notzizka/videos
For those of you who want a shorter text version, here are some key points:
The build:
1. The basic build
a. For added defense, swap Overpower for Warcry, then Animosity for Superstition
b. For extra healing, swap the Whirlwind rune Hurricane for Blood Funnel.
c. Frenzy can be swapped out with your choice of rage generator.
2. Battle Rage is your most important ability. If you don't keep it up, you will run out of rage and this will lead to issues.
3. Sprint' tornadoes are your main source of rage, not frenzy or whirlwind. If you don't have tornadoes down, you're going to run out of rage.
4. Wrath of the Berserker's main purpose is the immunity to CC that it grants.
The gear:
1. This build can work with very little gear and gets very strong as your gear improves.
2. The importance of stats for starter gear is as follow: Life on Hit > Crit %+ > Vitality > Resists
3. Added damage is something to look for as a luxury, strength and bonus crit damage both drastically improving this build performance.
4. Once base damage is high enough, Life Steal becomes and extremely dtrong stat, especially as it can be found in gear slots that LoH can not.
added note: Nobody should expect to spend next to nothing and start farming act 4 elites. This build is a great way to get started, and will easily clear its way through act1/2 with very basic gear. You can use that as a stepping stone to gear up a little more for further acts. Even so, I found that I spent far less on this build than an equally progressed tank barbarian would, and continued progressing much faster.
My YouTube channel - D3 Video guides
3 legendarys, around 1k loh from weapons alone, the neck is also quite brilliant. I can see how the build works, but I cannot see how that gear is worth "very little gold". and getting all of this from just inferno act 1 farming would just be too fricking ridiculous lucky.
however, I'm sure I'll give it a try. it's always refreshing to see a way-from-standard build work. hopefully it doesn't get nerfed. 1.0.4 is coming and as it looks like, there will be a lot of "class balancing".
My YouTube channel - D3 Video guides
hm, ok. so basically... what is the most important thing for that build? I guess, it is some vit up to ~30-40k, then crit, then str. and ofc, life on hit on weapons + amulet. or is it possible with close to no crit/loh as well?
@Maddog this build actually fairs surprisingly well against champ packs, especially with the immunity to CC that wrath grants. In later acts, you usually have to drop overpower for resist shout, unless you can play with a more defensively built barb in your group. I'm making a video of handling elites in early acts now, and I'll work on more videos for later acts tomorrow.
This build is strong because it works very well with very little gear, and then just gets ridiculously strong as your gear improves.
My YouTube channel - D3 Video guides
My YouTube channel - D3 Video guides
Just looked it up, and you can get over 200 LoH on a 600dps weapon for 20k. So....Yeah, there's that.
Once I got up to 500k I was finding extremely good main hands, easily comparable to or better what he was using.
It looks like my second video will have to wait until the morning, having an issue with my encode and I'm too exhausted to deal with it.
edit: I was able to clear act 1 with ease with about 1/4 the loh I have now, I just used resist shout to help with the damage, and you can subsitute the Hurricane rune out for Blood Funnel if you're still hurting for healing.
My YouTube channel - D3 Video guides
edit: I actually started this gearset/build as a cheap and easy way to get the inferno D Barb kill achieve, as I'm an achievement hunter. I then added the whirlwind setup and started to use it to farm elites when I didn't feel like playing hardcore. This spec is really meant for elite hunting, I was just showcasing how easy it was to kill belial with no effort even with the stricter enrage timer, something that I've seen overly defensive barbarians with much more expensive gear fail to do.
My YouTube channel - D3 Video guides
just few tips from someone who has started using this (to avoid frustration). battle rage is key here. without this you will die as you will not get enough fury. so start with BR, now sprint AROUND mobs (you wont be able to go through them withour whirlwind) in fairly large circle (if possible, harder in dungeons). when you are on full fury, keep sprint up, run towards mobs and hit whirlwind. you will go through them, drop more cyclones, etc. circling around whilst using whirlwind is good too. just dont forget to refresh battle rage. after some practice you will see it works like a charm. if you die its most probably due to lack of BR and no fury. for hard hitting mobs its best to kite them around so they walk into the cyclones. its safe way how to kill them. works nice for fast mobs too.
- shielding / invuln. minions totally rapes that build. no hits = no rage = no loh = no whirlwind = no sprint = dead.
- Mainly because of my quite low resistance, I got a combo molton firechains plauged shared health, also totally raped me. I was dead before I could get battle rage up. when I got BR up, I was dead before I could use wotb and spam WW.
- I have the feeling, that crits from the tornados from sprint dont give rage. so the sprint tornados are soley for loh procs (which works). Can someone confirm/reject this?
so if the affix combo doesn't include invulnerabilities and/or isn't a totally assraping elemental damage combination, that build is a very viable one for low geared barbarians. Yet you SHOULD have a fair backup of gold, because you still will die quite a lot until your gear really gets better. and repair costs hurt if you dont have that little bit of backup gold.
/edit:
waller arcane enchanted in limeted areas (festering woods, to be precise) is also not funny.
same with reflectdmg + electrified at the same time.
so I need more resistance (#1), more life on hit (#2) and very seriously, more crit (#3). I think my base dps is fine, I just have some bad luck when it comes to affixes right now. and seriously, I'm running out of gold.
My YouTube channel - D3 Video guides
Maybe I'm missing something, but I couldn't have the wonders of fury started.
I posted this while waiting half a minute to respawn. =p
P.S.: stats:
http://cl.ly/35090U0207132J3z1y2j
My YouTube channel - D3 Video guides
My YouTube channel - D3 Video guides
It seems I was trying to startup with the wrong sequence. However, I still don't feel comfortable going without the war cry.
My YouTube channel - D3 Video guides