Hello, I'm new to this whole posting-my-build-in-the-forums thing, but I've been having so much fun with this I thought it'd be nice to share. The name is obviously inspired by the Breaking Bad-inspired achievement, because when I got that (while using this build) I laughed like an idiot for probably longer than I should have. That moment cemented my absolute, undying love for Seismic Slam.
I started playing in the beta and my class of choice was the Witch Doctor, because wackiness. But when Diablo III went live, I rolled a female barbarian and she's become my main since. It was mainly the miracle of Seismic Slam madness that made me make her my main. It was fun, it EXPLODED and it felt exactly like a barbarian should feel. But then, I leveled up, started playing MP7 (never got to 10, never used the AH for buying anything other than BS materials, either) and it just wasn't viable, so I switched to Whirlwind with a bunch of life on hit and such. It didn't even remotely resemble the absolute joy of Seismic Slam, but it worked, I guess, so I kept playing that. But I always felt like I had been bared of the essence of being a badass barbarian.
Until now. Life steal got nerfed, I got a couple of life-on-fury-spent items, Bloodthirst got changed to life-on-fury-spent as well, probably other changes I'm not aware of and don't care about because I'm just having crazy amounts of fun blowing demons. Up. Blowing demons up. Backspace borke. Can't correct that now. Sorry. No, I won't go back and use delete, NERD.
I have no idea how well The Danger fares against other builds, I don't know what the metagame is, I'm not a super hardcore player, I haven't gotten past Torment III. This build is all about just feeling like a monster truck with biceps fueled by nitroglycerin. That's it. It's fun, it's a little reckless, it feels like what playing a goddamn barbarian should feel like.
The actual build, Jesus, just shut up already:
If you skipped the intro: I'm a little sad, but the gist of it is that this build is about having barbarian fun.
So, first things first, here's the setup I'm playing with right now:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#aekRSP!dYe!bbcaZZ
Most of it is up to you, what really makes the build is Merciless Assault'ed Furious Charge and Seismic Slam (rune is your choice; I like Rumble). With only two totally-absolutely-no-way-around-it required skills, it's cool that you get to play around with abilities you enjoy and you're not totally locked down by The Danger. Hell, you can even choose your rune of preference for Seismic Slam, isn't that super nice?
So, why Seismic Slam? Because it's awesome. Seriously, HotA is great but it just looks so whimpy. Why Furious Charge with Merciless Assault? Same reason. But also, because it allows you to perform The Move. That sounds interesting, doesn't it? What is The Move? Well, it's nothing new and it's the whole point of Merciless Assault, but I like giving things names. I'm writing the explanation on a separate paragraph to stress its importance and awesomeness.
Here you go: The Move:
The idea is that when you charge through 5+ enemies FC's cooldown gets reset, and you can do it again. Two FCs give you 30 fury; what costs exactly 30 fury? That's right, Seismic motherfucking Slam.
The Move is: charge into a crowd of enemis, charge again, turn around, Seismic Slam, keep on charging, keep on slamming.
If you have never done this before, please, do it now. Seriously, stop reading; just go on D3 for a bit, find a crowd and do this once. If you don't feel like doing that for the rest of your life forever until you die and then pass down the tradition through the generations until the Sun explodes, then you are a heartless husk of a human being and I have no respect for you or need for your eyes on my words. Stop looking at my words, you soul less bastard. If you couldn't stop yourself and it's now five hours later, welcome to the club, you beautiful son of a bitch.
I'll post a video when I have one, because it even looks fun, but for now you only get text. You could go and try it out like I asked you before, though.
Obviously, The Danger puts on a big show for big crowds, but that doesn't mean it can't make bosses swoon. I don't change up my build for bosses and it works just fine, although, admittedly, it's not as satisfying. The real revelry occurs on massive monster mash-ups. Sometimes you can clear whole crowds without ever clicking to move, just charge-slam to your heart's content. It's a thing of barbarian beauty. You'll love illusionists.
Et cetera:
As for the rest of the build:
Bash is my fury generator of choice but mostly because I have a belt that adds Bash damage. However, Punish makes it matter. Three attacks (maximum bonus damage) grant you enough fury that you can Slam after only one Furious Charge. It's not necessary, though, and you can choose whichever main attack you like the most, but I personally lean towards either Bash - Punish or Frenzy - Maniac.
I use War Cry to build up some fury when I can't perform more than one FC. Charge! would probably be an appropriate rune for it, since it nets you some extra fury, but I find myself very attached to Impunity. Knock yourself (back) out, though.
Battle Rage is just good +damage, and critical chance goes pretty well with this build, so I like it. I occasionally switch it for Threatening Shout (rune doesn't matter much as long as it doesn't make the monsters run AWAY from your Seismic Slams) for additional fury plus taking advantage of the Skull of Resonance I keep around. Charm 'em and slam 'em, amiright guys? Ugh, that's... yeah. (Currently trying out Leap - Call of Arreat in this slot, on attorneyatlol's suggestion. It already seems like a keeper: it's actually a fun skill and not just a boring +damage and it's also physical. Yay!)
Wrath of the Berserker is... Well, it's as barbarian as dual wielding two-handers (cough, Blizzard. Cough, I say). Nothing is really required in this build other than Slam and Merciless Assault'ed FC, but WotB is close. I mean, it's just awesome and explodey. Use it, don't be a party-pooper. Rune is up to you. I've been using Insanity exclusively, but I could see good arguments for Thrive on Chaos (turns it into a panic button) and maybe Slaughter or Arreat's Wail (although you probably already deal with crowds well enough). I think Insanity best serves your needs, though: it isn't redundant with Seismic Slam and barbarians shouldn't really use panic buttons. Also, it helps when there are fewer targets.
Passivesare also mostly up to you. Bonkers. Not set in stone, prioritize your fun, but here are my suggested passives:
Bloodthirst really comes in handy and it allows you to stand on a pool of poison, constantly generating and spending fury pretty much until everything that isn't you is dead. I imagine with enough life-on-fury-spent items, you could swap it out for something else you like, though.
Superstition is great damage reduction and it actually helps you accomplish the standing-on-a-pool-of-poison feat, by providing fury on receiving elemental damage to then be spent on SLAMMING your health pool back up.
I use Weapon Master as my damage passive because I like crit (you shold be using maces if you're going to smash and slam, you know). You should also like crit. It's pretty good with a Rumble'd Seismic Slam.
Items
I don't think you require any radical changes in your itemization for this build, but I'll make two particular notes:
1. As I said a billion times and am about to say one more: life-on-fury-spent. It keeps you alive, it works with your main and awesomest attack skill; just use it. Being alive is pretty damn cool.
2. All of the skills in this build deal physical damage (as a barbarian damn well should, dammit), so getting items that increase it seems like it might be a good idea. Wait, no, it deffinitely is a good idea. Get +physical damage when you can.
Outro:
Okay, so I guess that's all of it. I did a quick search and I don't think this is the kind of build that people are posting repeteadly, so hopefully you'll find it interesting. I know the cool thing is to have videos, but I have none at the moment. I promise I'll add some later. In the meantime, I tried to make the text at least mildly entertaining to read and I think any fun you may not have had reading this will be more than had when you try out the build. Well, that was an interesting sentence.
Anyway, this is the most fun I've ever had with my barbarian. I think the Whirlwind build, while effective, just doesn't feel very barbarian-y. I also found it repetitive and requiring very little input. I was kind of bored of it and dissapointed by how my barbarian ended up playing. The Danger is super fun, but also requires you to consider positioning, fury expenditure, etc. and to me that's just way more interesting and engaging. Not bashing (LOL) on Whirlwind, that's just the experience I had. Try it out.
Just go, have fun, smash everything. That's what barbarians are for.
A note on Merciless Assault that I forgot to mention: it works on objects! Yes! Meaning, each object you break with a Merciless Assault'ed FC, also reduces the cooldown by 2 seconds.
This means two things, a boring thing and a fun, awesome thing. The boring one is that you don't need 5 living targets to completely reset the cooldown; in a room with any amount of breakable objects, you can plan your trajectory to maximize your FC usage. Yawn. BUT! The fun thing is it also means that you can break BILLIONS of objects without spending fury at all. And if you mess up and can't FC instantly at some point, you can still SLAM the rest of them. Rooms full of objects are the super fast lane of the highway to awesomeness; just CHARGE your way around the room and end your rocketship's journey with a nice SLAM. It's pretty cool.
Have you tried throwing Leap - Call of Arreat into the combo? Helps guarantee you hit 5 targets for a new Furious Charge. Leap --> Charge --> Slam is a fun combo.
I have nothing to add other than this type of post is waaaay more interesting and informative than the "one sentence of explanation and then please watch my boring 20 minute youtube video tutorial" threads.
Leap is DEFFINITELY up there in skills I'm dying to work into the build.Before hitting 60 Leap and FC were two skills I considered must-haves on any build. The mobility is priceless and Leap is just lots of fun.
My problem right now is mostly about gear, which makes it hard to remove War Cry or Battle Rage. I will absolutely try swapping Battle Rage (it's probably the most boring skill I'm using right now) for it. Call of Arreat seems like a perfect fit, I will try that for sure. That's awesome.
Thanks, trainRiderJ, I agree. I still would like to at least put up one video somewhere, though.
EDIT: I edited the original post a little. I think it may read more like an actual build now.
Thanks for posting this build! I haven't played my barb in patch 2.01 because I was so busy riding the Lightning Monk/Cold Wiz wave, but I have to tell you that I really find this enjoyable. My gear currently sucks but honestly its fun in Torment 1 so far. I haven't tried other but when I hit WotB I feel like a beast! Thank you.
More Effort? Come on! The guy just wrote how he loves to play the game and how he wants to have fun! I think that is all the effort he needs to put here.
I am going to test this out! I am getting bored of the WW build I am playing at the moment anyhow! Cheers!
I think Weapon Throw is super fun, but yeah, I don't think it fits the fantasy I'm going for here. I like playing a barbarian that GETS IN YOUR FACE. Thankfully, Diablo 3 allows you to change builds at any time, so you don't really need to commit to one thing!
As for synergy... I'm not sure what to tell you. Mechanically, I guess there are a couple of cool tricks here and, broadly speaking, things work well together, but yeah, I can see how the abilities chosen don't weave a beautiful quilt of mechanical connectedness. FLAVOURFULLY, however: you're a rocket that explodes in the form of Seismic Slam. You deal only physical damage, every skill button EXPLODES (I have now completely phased out Battle Rage in favor of Leap, btw), you jump and charge around the battlefield, herding masses of monsters into the epicenter of your SLAMMING POWER and, when you deem it necesary, go INSANE with berserking wrath. All of that just screams barbarian to me and, most importantly, feels ridiculously fun. Just try repeatedly charging into a crowd, turning around and slamming a couple of times. If you don't love that, you're dead inside. I really need to post a couple of videos.
If you're a super min-maxer I'm totally sure there are better builds for you out there (hell, maybe this isn't so much a "build" as it is a "colletion of stuff that makes me happy in my pants"), but I have played the efficient builds and this is what I enjoyed most, by far.
Two things of note: it actually works pretty well, and what I provide here is a framework of stuff that I've had a lot of fun with -especially the combination of Merciless Assault'ed Furious Charge and Seismic Slam- and I tried to explain my reasoning behind it so you can disagree with me. It's not a cookie-cutter build. Just do your thing. Hell, tell me about the modifications you make, maybe I'll disagree with myself, too.
PS: If you really think the point behind this build is to use Bash to generate fury and then use Seismic Slam a couple of times, you need to re-read the OP.
I haven't even bought the expansion yet, but I see no reason why it wouldn't. You get new passives, a new passive slot and Avalanche, though, so there's obviously room for some heavy modifications.
As for items, I have been dual-wielding a lot, mostly because the best weapons I happened to find were one-handed. However, the increase in attack speed is really helpful because it allows you to heal up faster and more steadily through fury expenditure (not mandatory, but it's nice because when you're overflowing with fury is usually when you most need to heal up.) No idea of what the struggles of two-handers are. Sorry.
In my case, all skills deal physical damage, but you should focus on getting additional damage of whichever type your main skills deal. It's a good idea to use abilities that deal a single type of damage in order to focus your gear for that particular element/whatever. Damage modifiers are pretty common on gear now.
While toughness is a pretty useful guide of your over-all... well... toughness, damage is usually very skewed. It doesn't account for +X% damage to skills/elements, in addition to being as pointless as before in that it only accounts for your weapon damage+base damage modifiers and doesn't represent your actual output through skills.
I totally get the OMG-5%-MORE-DAMAGE tunnel vision, but you need to beat yourself out of that or the zombies will. I have started to favor greater increases in toughness over insignificant (2%) increases in damage and it's yielded very good results. Also! Consider what you want: just because a new ring says it provides 5% more damage doesn't mean it's better for you if, say, you rely a lot on crit chance and your current ring has that while the new one doesn't.
Not sure if I just stated a lot of obvious things, but hopefully that's helpful to you.
THE DANGER: Seismic Slam barbarian build
Useless Intro:
I AM THE ONE WHO KNOCKS. BACK. Yes. So...
Hello, I'm new to this whole posting-my-build-in-the-forums thing, but I've been having so much fun with this I thought it'd be nice to share. The name is obviously inspired by the Breaking Bad-inspired achievement, because when I got that (while using this build) I laughed like an idiot for probably longer than I should have. That moment cemented my absolute, undying love for Seismic Slam.
I started playing in the beta and my class of choice was the Witch Doctor, because wackiness. But when Diablo III went live, I rolled a female barbarian and she's become my main since. It was mainly the miracle of Seismic Slam madness that made me make her my main. It was fun, it EXPLODED and it felt exactly like a barbarian should feel. But then, I leveled up, started playing MP7 (never got to 10, never used the AH for buying anything other than BS materials, either) and it just wasn't viable, so I switched to Whirlwind with a bunch of life on hit and such. It didn't even remotely resemble the absolute joy of Seismic Slam, but it worked, I guess, so I kept playing that. But I always felt like I had been bared of the essence of being a badass barbarian.
Until now. Life steal got nerfed, I got a couple of life-on-fury-spent items, Bloodthirst got changed to life-on-fury-spent as well, probably other changes I'm not aware of and don't care about because I'm just having crazy amounts of fun blowing demons. Up. Blowing demons up. Backspace borke. Can't correct that now. Sorry. No, I won't go back and use delete, NERD.
I have no idea how well The Danger fares against other builds, I don't know what the metagame is, I'm not a super hardcore player, I haven't gotten past Torment III. This build is all about just feeling like a monster truck with biceps fueled by nitroglycerin. That's it. It's fun, it's a little reckless, it feels like what playing a goddamn barbarian should feel like.
The actual build, Jesus, just shut up already:
If you skipped the intro: I'm a little sad, but the gist of it is that this build is about having barbarian fun.
So, first things first, here's the setup I'm playing with right now:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#aekRSP!dYe!bbcaZZ
Most of it is up to you, what really makes the build is Merciless Assault'ed Furious Charge and Seismic Slam (rune is your choice; I like Rumble). With only two totally-absolutely-no-way-around-it required skills, it's cool that you get to play around with abilities you enjoy and you're not totally locked down by The Danger. Hell, you can even choose your rune of preference for Seismic Slam, isn't that super nice?
So, why Seismic Slam? Because it's awesome. Seriously, HotA is great but it just looks so whimpy. Why Furious Charge with Merciless Assault? Same reason. But also, because it allows you to perform The Move. That sounds interesting, doesn't it? What is The Move? Well, it's nothing new and it's the whole point of Merciless Assault, but I like giving things names. I'm writing the explanation on a separate paragraph to stress its importance and awesomeness.
Here you go: The Move:
The idea is that when you charge through 5+ enemies FC's cooldown gets reset, and you can do it again. Two FCs give you 30 fury; what costs exactly 30 fury? That's right, Seismic motherfucking Slam.
The Move is: charge into a crowd of enemis, charge again, turn around, Seismic Slam, keep on charging, keep on slamming.
If you have never done this before, please, do it now. Seriously, stop reading; just go on D3 for a bit, find a crowd and do this once. If you don't feel like doing that for the rest of your life forever until you die and then pass down the tradition through the generations until the Sun explodes, then you are a heartless husk of a human being and I have no respect for you or need for your eyes on my words. Stop looking at my words, you soul less bastard. If you couldn't stop yourself and it's now five hours later, welcome to the club, you beautiful son of a bitch.
I'll post a video when I have one, because it even looks fun, but for now you only get text. You could go and try it out like I asked you before, though.
Obviously, The Danger puts on a big show for big crowds, but that doesn't mean it can't make bosses swoon. I don't change up my build for bosses and it works just fine, although, admittedly, it's not as satisfying. The real revelry occurs on massive monster mash-ups. Sometimes you can clear whole crowds without ever clicking to move, just charge-slam to your heart's content. It's a thing of barbarian beauty. You'll love illusionists.
Et cetera:
As for the rest of the build:
Bash is my fury generator of choice but mostly because I have a belt that adds Bash damage. However, Punish makes it matter. Three attacks (maximum bonus damage) grant you enough fury that you can Slam after only one Furious Charge. It's not necessary, though, and you can choose whichever main attack you like the most, but I personally lean towards either Bash - Punish or Frenzy - Maniac.
I use War Cry to build up some fury when I can't perform more than one FC. Charge! would probably be an appropriate rune for it, since it nets you some extra fury, but I find myself very attached to Impunity. Knock yourself (back) out, though.
Battle Rage is just good +damage, and critical chance goes pretty well with this build, so I like it. I occasionally switch it for Threatening Shout (rune doesn't matter much as long as it doesn't make the monsters run AWAY from your Seismic Slams) for additional fury plus taking advantage of the Skull of Resonance I keep around. Charm 'em and slam 'em, amiright guys? Ugh, that's... yeah. (Currently trying out Leap - Call of Arreat in this slot, on attorneyatlol's suggestion. It already seems like a keeper: it's actually a fun skill and not just a boring +damage and it's also physical. Yay!)
Wrath of the Berserker is... Well, it's as barbarian as dual wielding two-handers (cough, Blizzard. Cough, I say). Nothing is really required in this build other than Slam and Merciless Assault'ed FC, but WotB is close. I mean, it's just awesome and explodey. Use it, don't be a party-pooper. Rune is up to you. I've been using Insanity exclusively, but I could see good arguments for Thrive on Chaos (turns it into a panic button) and maybe Slaughter or Arreat's Wail (although you probably already deal with crowds well enough). I think Insanity best serves your needs, though: it isn't redundant with Seismic Slam and barbarians shouldn't really use panic buttons. Also, it helps when there are fewer targets.
Passives
are also mostly up to you.Bonkers. Not set in stone, prioritize your fun, but here are my suggested passives:Bloodthirst really comes in handy and it allows you to stand on a pool of poison, constantly generating and spending fury pretty much until everything that isn't you is dead. I imagine with enough life-on-fury-spent items, you could swap it out for something else you like, though.
Superstition is great damage reduction and it actually helps you accomplish the standing-on-a-pool-of-poison feat, by providing fury on receiving elemental damage to then be spent on SLAMMING your health pool back up.
I use Weapon Master as my damage passive because I like crit (you shold be using maces if you're going to smash and slam, you know). You should also like crit. It's pretty good with a Rumble'd Seismic Slam.
Items
I don't think you require any radical changes in your itemization for this build, but I'll make two particular notes:
1. As I said a billion times and am about to say one more: life-on-fury-spent. It keeps you alive, it works with your main and awesomest attack skill; just use it. Being alive is pretty damn cool.
2. All of the skills in this build deal physical damage (as a barbarian damn well should, dammit), so getting items that increase it seems like it might be a good idea. Wait, no, it deffinitely is a good idea. Get +physical damage when you can.
Outro:
Okay, so I guess that's all of it. I did a quick search and I don't think this is the kind of build that people are posting repeteadly, so hopefully you'll find it interesting. I know the cool thing is to have videos, but I have none at the moment. I promise I'll add some later. In the meantime, I tried to make the text at least mildly entertaining to read and I think any fun you may not have had reading this will be more than had when you try out the build. Well, that was an interesting sentence.
Anyway, this is the most fun I've ever had with my barbarian. I think the Whirlwind build, while effective, just doesn't feel very barbarian-y. I also found it repetitive and requiring very little input. I was kind of bored of it and dissapointed by how my barbarian ended up playing. The Danger is super fun, but also requires you to consider positioning, fury expenditure, etc. and to me that's just way more interesting and engaging. Not bashing (LOL) on Whirlwind, that's just the experience I had. Try it out.
Just go, have fun, smash everything. That's what barbarians are for.
This means two things, a boring thing and a fun, awesome thing. The boring one is that you don't need 5 living targets to completely reset the cooldown; in a room with any amount of breakable objects, you can plan your trajectory to maximize your FC usage. Yawn. BUT! The fun thing is it also means that you can break BILLIONS of objects without spending fury at all. And if you mess up and can't FC instantly at some point, you can still SLAM the rest of them. Rooms full of objects are the super fast lane of the highway to awesomeness; just CHARGE your way around the room and end your rocketship's journey with a nice SLAM. It's pretty cool.
My problem right now is mostly about gear, which makes it hard to remove War Cry or Battle Rage. I will absolutely try swapping Battle Rage (it's probably the most boring skill I'm using right now) for it. Call of Arreat seems like a perfect fit, I will try that for sure. That's awesome.
Thanks, trainRiderJ, I agree. I still would like to at least put up one video somewhere, though.
EDIT: I edited the original post a little. I think it may read more like an actual build now.
http://us.battle.net...1/hero/11044013
I am going to test this out! I am getting bored of the WW build I am playing at the moment anyhow! Cheers!
I think Weapon Throw is super fun, but yeah, I don't think it fits the fantasy I'm going for here. I like playing a barbarian that GETS IN YOUR FACE. Thankfully, Diablo 3 allows you to change builds at any time, so you don't really need to commit to one thing!
As for synergy... I'm not sure what to tell you. Mechanically, I guess there are a couple of cool tricks here and, broadly speaking, things work well together, but yeah, I can see how the abilities chosen don't weave a beautiful quilt of mechanical connectedness. FLAVOURFULLY, however: you're a rocket that explodes in the form of Seismic Slam. You deal only physical damage, every skill button EXPLODES (I have now completely phased out Battle Rage in favor of Leap, btw), you jump and charge around the battlefield, herding masses of monsters into the epicenter of your SLAMMING POWER and, when you deem it necesary, go INSANE with berserking wrath. All of that just screams barbarian to me and, most importantly, feels ridiculously fun. Just try repeatedly charging into a crowd, turning around and slamming a couple of times. If you don't love that, you're dead inside. I really need to post a couple of videos.
If you're a super min-maxer I'm totally sure there are better builds for you out there (hell, maybe this isn't so much a "build" as it is a "colletion of stuff that makes me happy in my pants"), but I have played the efficient builds and this is what I enjoyed most, by far.
Two things of note: it actually works pretty well, and what I provide here is a framework of stuff that I've had a lot of fun with -especially the combination of Merciless Assault'ed Furious Charge and Seismic Slam- and I tried to explain my reasoning behind it so you can disagree with me. It's not a cookie-cutter build. Just do your thing. Hell, tell me about the modifications you make, maybe I'll disagree with myself, too.
PS: If you really think the point behind this build is to use Bash to generate fury and then use Seismic Slam a couple of times, you need to re-read the OP.
As for items, I have been dual-wielding a lot, mostly because the best weapons I happened to find were one-handed. However, the increase in attack speed is really helpful because it allows you to heal up faster and more steadily through fury expenditure (not mandatory, but it's nice because when you're overflowing with fury is usually when you most need to heal up.) No idea of what the struggles of two-handers are. Sorry.
In my case, all skills deal physical damage, but you should focus on getting additional damage of whichever type your main skills deal. It's a good idea to use abilities that deal a single type of damage in order to focus your gear for that particular element/whatever. Damage modifiers are pretty common on gear now.
While toughness is a pretty useful guide of your over-all... well... toughness, damage is usually very skewed. It doesn't account for +X% damage to skills/elements, in addition to being as pointless as before in that it only accounts for your weapon damage+base damage modifiers and doesn't represent your actual output through skills.
I totally get the OMG-5%-MORE-DAMAGE tunnel vision, but you need to beat yourself out of that or the zombies will. I have started to favor greater increases in toughness over insignificant (2%) increases in damage and it's yielded very good results. Also! Consider what you want: just because a new ring says it provides 5% more damage doesn't mean it's better for you if, say, you rely a lot on crit chance and your current ring has that while the new one doesn't.
Not sure if I just stated a lot of obvious things, but hopefully that's helpful to you.
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Twoflower-2131/hero/47336841