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Thanks for the vid Andrew, nice work!

First issue of business I'm debating on in regards to theorycraft...Broken Promises. EDIT: This is specifically pertaining to how good it potentially is for WW barbs, even more specifically, Lightning.

The reaction to this ring has been insane over how good it is. I'm assuming it *won't* get nerfed, but chances are it will. Personally, I hope to get to use Skull Grasp instead, and not having to re-roll or find entirely new gear without crit.

But, to actually look at it, what would the total "package" payoff be, for dropping all your crit modifiers, and rerolling, how would things look then?

I'm looking at your Barbie here as reference for Best in Slot everything;

Helm: 6% Crit --> + 15% WW dmg, or %life/resists possible. This is a decent pickup, especially if you lack 15% WW on boots.

Neck: ~10% Crit --> + 20% Elemental damage. This is a decent pickup to me, and one of the stronger affixes I'd consider re-gearing for. More research needed regarding breakpoints is needed to tell if Attack Speed might be even better, since WotB gives us +25% and we're definitely pushing new breakpoints.

Bracers: 6% Crit --> + 100 All Resists. No other attractive options, all mitigation rolls.

Gloves: ~10% Crit --> + 8% Attack Speed Increased. This is pretty beefy to me, and with perma-Wrath, we're definitely hitting some new breakpoints.

Ring: Here's the real pain in the ass, we have to find new RoRG's with Crit Damage% instead of Chance.

All things considered, it's not like Broken Promises is asking us to change every single piece of gear, I just wanted to analyze the new rolls what we'd be truly considered net gaining by not having crit chance anymore. So basically our Amulet gets to squeeze in some more Elemental damage, and our Gloves get to have attack speed, our helm picks up WW damage, and our Bracers get some extra defenses. "Net gain" of 3 offensive primary affixes and one defensive affix.

The hard part to figure this out to me, is if Broken Promises' crit buff is really as "permanent" for us as folks claim it is. The lowest we can have our crit is still going to be 18% - 5% base, 3% from Battle Rage, and Wrath of the Berserker adds 10%. The higher math folks on bnet have hashed it out, and it looks solid based on some testing. It just seems counter intuitive to me, Wrath is clearly meant to raise our crit chance - this is the definition of anti-synergy in a build. Without getting into the probabilities of it, you have to hit a few white hits five times in a row, which happen super fast for us, to get the 3 second 100% crit buff.

Also, if we look at your best in slot barb, I recall you saying you hover around a 70% crit rate ingame, correct? With permawrath, you're now 80%. The long point I'm coming to is, I'll go ahead and predict this ring is not that good for us - it's obviously very powerful, but I believe other classes that really can keep a base 5% crit rate are structured to get more value out of it. With 80% crit rate, the increased 25% attack speed on Wrath, you're critting pretty much all the time already, anyway.

So, if this Broken Promises ring is going to be any good to us DPS wise, I don't think it's critting is going to make any difference given how this build crits 24/7 anyway. Whatever DPS we'd gain would be found in the extra affixes we get to pick up, and that's the hard part to balance, especially vs Skull Grasp. This is all of course, assuming Broken Promises doesn't get some sort of internal CD or slight nerf somewhere.

I've been able to do grift 43 with this build (soft core). This is with out unity though. I've only tried 44 once and I got a really bad rift that wrecked me. If I got one similar to the 43's I've done I should be able to do that too.

Add an Odyn Son, higher leveled legendary gems (mine are low), higher paragon level (im not even 500) more ancient items and switching to unity if necessary and I see this build approaching 50...maybe.

My ancients are so tanky now though. Almost makes the bonus from IK lowering the CD pointless lol

span>TLDR: It might suck for those who enjoy it the way it is now, but Raekors needs to scale in a more linear fashion, and Barbs as a whole class need more durability - that way we wouldn't "need" the perma freeze CC abuse. Ultimately, baseline class adjustments/buffs are the answer, we're in this situation because of a few specific pieces of gear that push certain builds far and leave others in the dust.

I just took the TLDR version, since it's the easiest way to refer back to your post without doubling a wall of text

The Vile Wards were only such a mistake because of the Dreadnaught rune. My guess is that Blizz determined that either vile wards needed to be toned down, or the rune needed to be changed. Since there is a case in which the rune itself can be frustrating for party members, they decided to change it. While that's only speculation, it leads to the conclusion that the rational given in the blue post is true, it's just not all of the truth. They were going to make changes to the set (and/or supporting items) anyway, and decided to also address the issue of run forward and clump enemies. The fact that there are other builds that can do this (WD, Sader), doesn't mean it wasn't a good reason to change it.

As for the durability issues, unless they decide to Significantly change the damage scaling of monsters post GR 35 (or as someone else suggested, just stop scaling the damage after 40 or so), it's always going to be an issue. There will always end up being a class or build (or a few) that can go way higher through some broken mechanic that allows them to not die (or have the speed to make up for it), as long as damage keeps scaling, because there will always end up being the 1-shot wall and where ever it starts, builds (live M6 DH, FC barbs) that have built in mechanics to avoid damage (or do it without being near enemies) are going to be able to push a little further. If you change the baseline class, you just move the bar of 1-shot to a higher tier. If greater rifts are to be the measuring stick, they need some modification before builds can be properly evaluated. In the current iteration (even on the PTR), there's a 1-shot wall, and after that, the only thing that makes it harder is monster life vs your DPS.

That's not to say that barbs don't need a little love in their kit. It's just to say that other factors will prevent that from correcting some of the issues with reliance on perma freeze builds in higher GR.

Preface: I want to theoretically compare the value of some weapon combinations for barbarians after the 2.0.5 patch. The impetuses for this thread were other recent threads talking about the BK weapon set and Nubtro's Game Mechanics (barbarian) spreadsheet on google docs.

Bul-Kathos's Set
After patch 2.0.5, Nubtro reported that, not only can the whirlwind proc from the BK set now critical hit, but also that the damage itself scales with your critical hit damage and chance (before it crits). The damage amount also scales with your attack speed, but because the BK set seems to have an internal cooldown, attack speed doesn't influence the amount of procs.

Your critical hit chance and damage apply twice to the BK whirlwind proc, so bascially those stats are squared when factoring the average damage. The damage is reported as 1950% weapon damage / 6 seconds, or 325% weapon damage / second. This 325% is multiplied by your attacks per second and critical hit/damage, so if you have 1.55 attacks per second, 40% critical chance, and 400% critical damage, you can expect to do:

325% * (1.55) * (1 + .4 + 4) ~= 1310% weapon damage/second in a circular area around your character

However, the BK proc seems to be on an internal cooldown of roughly about 12 seconds (in my personal experience- 2.0.4, so this may have changed). This means that the average damage over time will be about half the active damage/second, or about 655% weapon damage per second. Because of the internal cooldown, attacking multiple targets doesn't really increase the value of the proc.

So the estimated damage of the BK set proc in these circumstances is roughly:

655% weapon damage/second per target (AoE) -proc coefficient doesn't really matter

Odyn Son
According to the information gathered in Nubtro's Barbarian spreadsheet, the reason why the Odyn Son proc seems so powerful is because it apparently scales with critical hit chance, critical hit damage, and attack speed twice.

i.e.: Your attack speed and critical chance/damage values are squared when multiplying the damage of an Odyn son proc.

The base damage of the proc is only around 100-120% weapon damage, but the base damage itself is multiplied by your critical hit stats and your attack speed. After this, the damage amount can be a critical hit, which uses your critical stats again, and of course the higher your attack speed, the more procs you can create (thus scaling with attack speed twice as well).

Let's say you have 40% critical chance and 400% critical damage. You also have 1.55 attacks per second and your Odyn Son does 100% weapon damage per hit (3 hits per proc). Each hit of the proc will do 100% * (1.55) * (1 + 0.4 + 4) =403% weapon damage.

(I think the above calculation is why a lot of people estimate that Odyn Son's proc does about 400% weapon damage. It does about 400% with those values of attack speed, crit damage, and critical chance, but it could do more or less.)

After you get this value, in our case 403%, the proc will hit 3 times, possibly all on the same target. These 403% damage procs can then critical hit again, boosting their damage further (by another 2.6 times in our case, on average), and the faster you attack (and the higher your proc coefficient), the more often you can trigger the proc.

So, say you have a 30% proc rate Odyn Son with the above stats. It does 1209% damage split between 1-3 targets. It will proc 30% of the time on every hit, modified by proc coefficient. Your attack speed dictates the number of proc chances, because there is no internal cooldown, so the damage/second is multiplied by your attacks/second.

This damage is estimated at:

562% (* proc coefficient) weapon damage/secondper target (split among 1-3 targets)