With the changes to perma crowd control in 2.3, Emitz and I decided to theorycraft about a new support class and setup.
Because the new threatening shout-falter and the change/fix to ignore pain-mob rule with pride of cassius, we came up with the "Buff Barb".
As expected, this is still a work in progress. We even made some changes already after making the video: wrath of the berserker has been swapped for rend-mutilate (Because better gear and paragon, toughness from wotb was not needed and 10% damage is a nice boost. Illusory boots are not needed with WW, added WW boots and currently trying st archew's gage).
The original build video can be found here. A video with the updated build should be coming soon.
To show this is more than a fun build, we used this with a 0CC Uliana monk, and got the #1 real spot on the 2 player leaderboard season (the first 3 spots are not from real runs). You can check the run here.
Please comment, give feedback and suggestions.
You can find our streams here and here. You can also check out our clanmate Dev for more theorycrafting or the build in action here.
I can not check the leaderboard at this point (don't have ptr installed on this computer) but:
- It is the highest (real) rank on the leaderboard at this point. Partly because not many people are "pushing" at the moment, but the next spots are 2 dps chars. If a monk can do this solo (again, I can not confirm) it seems 2 monks can not do it in a party for now. If anything, this does show the buffs are as good as a 2nd dps in the group. Also, multiple grift 67 failed because of the massive lag, so this 2man setup could and will go a lot higher if the servers were more stable (if you want to see what I mean, I can lookup a part of the stream, but ping goes over 2sec, impossible for the monk to survive).
- The items on this barb are far from perfect, if you can even call them good. At the point of recording, the barb had less than 15 hours of playtime, and those hours were before the 2000% drop buff, so that's the gear he would have "on live servers" (a bit higher because powerlevelled and carried on T10). I think the toxic gem isn't even level 25 in this video, basically missing another 10% group damage :). The monk had around 30 hours of playtime, most of it also before the buff. It is mentioned in the video 1 of his weapons doesn't have mainstat, and I think the other wasn't even ancient. You can not compare the run to someone with high paragon and perfect items, so the potential is even higher.
- Support chars always get better the bigger the party. As said before, the buffs from the barb are enough to replace a 2nd dps char. This means that 3 monks + 1 barb will "equal" the damage of 6 monks (I know this is not correct, but shows that it should in theory outperform a 4 monk group).
- Apart from looking at pure damage, there is also the huge toughness boost, a good amount of "normal" crowd control as we know it now (the stun) and the "introduction" of the charm, that is not affected by the crowd control immunity on the current ptr build. This will only increase in value as the difficulty goes up.
- The monk running in this video is also being theorycrafted. While he does run the "default" SSS build, this was the 0CC version with broken promises cubed and probably some sub-optimal passives and runes because of testing. This monk could not do a grift 66 solo. When we have time, we will check what he can do solo, to get a baseline.
- There was no "phishing" or "try-harding" in this video. This came from a streaming session with following actions: farm T9 (easier to get in than T10 because of queue) to get a grift key for the barb (again, very new char, he literally had no keys), use the key for grift, repeat. I think this 66 was completed on first try, it might have been the 2nd. Not saying the solo monks doing this level are try-harding already, but they might, and it might not be a fair comparison.
But since we do not have a baseline at this moment, I do appreciate your feedback that it looks like the value of this barb is low. At least, that's how I understand your comment. And that's 1 of the reasons why we wanted to put this post up: see how other people feel about the build, if they think there is value in it, get some input on different items to use, ...
So, while I was hoping for more in-depth feedback on the entire build, pointing out that the support build is not really doing anything for the party is very valid feedback
However, as I mentioned in all the points before, I think we should ignore the real difficulty that has been completed, and look more into how this would compare to other support chars, how to improve the build (both gear and skill) and maybe even think if there is still place for support in this game.
Anyway, please feel free to ask questions, drop your suggestions or plainly criticise the build, any feedback is greatly appreciated and will be taken into account.
Riff;-
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Hi,
With the changes to perma crowd control in 2.3, Emitz and I decided to theorycraft about a new support class and setup.
Because the new threatening shout-falter and the change/fix to ignore pain-mob rule with pride of cassius, we came up with the "Buff Barb".
As expected, this is still a work in progress. We even made some changes already after making the video: wrath of the berserker has been swapped for rend-mutilate (Because better gear and paragon, toughness from wotb was not needed and 10% damage is a nice boost. Illusory boots are not needed with WW, added WW boots and currently trying st archew's gage).
The original build video can be found here. A video with the updated build should be coming soon.
To show this is more than a fun build, we used this with a 0CC Uliana monk, and got the #1 real spot on the 2 player leaderboard season (the first 3 spots are not from real runs). You can check the run here.
Please comment, give feedback and suggestions.
You can find our streams here and here. You can also check out our clanmate Dev for more theorycrafting or the build in action here.
well since a monk can just do that by themselves easily looks like you're just along for the ride..
I can not check the leaderboard at this point (don't have ptr installed on this computer) but:
- It is the highest (real) rank on the leaderboard at this point. Partly because not many people are "pushing" at the moment, but the next spots are 2 dps chars. If a monk can do this solo (again, I can not confirm) it seems 2 monks can not do it in a party for now. If anything, this does show the buffs are as good as a 2nd dps in the group. Also, multiple grift 67 failed because of the massive lag, so this 2man setup could and will go a lot higher if the servers were more stable (if you want to see what I mean, I can lookup a part of the stream, but ping goes over 2sec, impossible for the monk to survive).
- The items on this barb are far from perfect, if you can even call them good. At the point of recording, the barb had less than 15 hours of playtime, and those hours were before the 2000% drop buff, so that's the gear he would have "on live servers" (a bit higher because powerlevelled and carried on T10). I think the toxic gem isn't even level 25 in this video, basically missing another 10% group damage :). The monk had around 30 hours of playtime, most of it also before the buff. It is mentioned in the video 1 of his weapons doesn't have mainstat, and I think the other wasn't even ancient. You can not compare the run to someone with high paragon and perfect items, so the potential is even higher.
- Support chars always get better the bigger the party. As said before, the buffs from the barb are enough to replace a 2nd dps char. This means that 3 monks + 1 barb will "equal" the damage of 6 monks (I know this is not correct, but shows that it should in theory outperform a 4 monk group).
- Apart from looking at pure damage, there is also the huge toughness boost, a good amount of "normal" crowd control as we know it now (the stun) and the "introduction" of the charm, that is not affected by the crowd control immunity on the current ptr build. This will only increase in value as the difficulty goes up.
- The monk running in this video is also being theorycrafted. While he does run the "default" SSS build, this was the 0CC version with broken promises cubed and probably some sub-optimal passives and runes because of testing. This monk could not do a grift 66 solo. When we have time, we will check what he can do solo, to get a baseline.
- There was no "phishing" or "try-harding" in this video. This came from a streaming session with following actions: farm T9 (easier to get in than T10 because of queue) to get a grift key for the barb (again, very new char, he literally had no keys), use the key for grift, repeat. I think this 66 was completed on first try, it might have been the 2nd. Not saying the solo monks doing this level are try-harding already, but they might, and it might not be a fair comparison.
But since we do not have a baseline at this moment, I do appreciate your feedback that it looks like the value of this barb is low. At least, that's how I understand your comment. And that's 1 of the reasons why we wanted to put this post up: see how other people feel about the build, if they think there is value in it, get some input on different items to use, ...
So, while I was hoping for more in-depth feedback on the entire build, pointing out that the support build is not really doing anything for the party is very valid feedback
However, as I mentioned in all the points before, I think we should ignore the real difficulty that has been completed, and look more into how this would compare to other support chars, how to improve the build (both gear and skill) and maybe even think if there is still place for support in this game.
Anyway, please feel free to ask questions, drop your suggestions or plainly criticise the build, any feedback is greatly appreciated and will be taken into account.
Riff;-