Especially considering the huge amount of emphasis blizzard is trying to put on elite groups being the best source of challenge/loot to add that real sense of "monster hunting" to the game as opposed to "run" farming. I honestly hope the elites in inferno are absolutely brutal.
It's hard to theorycraft without playing the game on inferno (or at all, for that matter) but I would hope that killing one group of elites would be at least as difficult as aoe'ing down 3 normal groups, if not more difficult.
Let me start by saying I'm happy to see a well thought out build post that explains your motives, ideas, and concepts behind your build instead of just posting the link and "hey guys look at me" followed by zero counterpoints to criticism. So props there.
Secondly, I should point out that barb is probably the class I've given the least attention to, caster/mage archetype at heart on most games. That being said this has kind of opened my eyes to barb actually having some fun builds in it.
Overall I like the build, it has a nice focus on damage multipliers though I don't know if I'd be quite as reserved to use earthquake only for elites/bosses but then again I don't know how frequently elite packs pop up. Assuming they aren't all over the place, I'd rather do a bit of herding to use your earthquake on multiple normal groups at once instead of saving it. "Don't waste it, but if you don't use it, then you have essentially wasted it" comes to mind. Though, again, it depends on how often elites spawn, I don't have a clue.
Let me know if you find the answer to how multipliers work additive vs multiplicative. In GuildWars it even mattered the order in which you applied the buffs.
I know one thing I currently don't miss is ETHEREAL ITEMS!
Sure the concept of having a weapon that did a lot more dmg but can't be repaired was kinda cool but the only problem was nobody would use it..
It would seem that you never geared your henchmen properly (they don't use durability) nor did you ever use any great runewords like breath of the dying. How about eth Titan's Revenge(replenishing quantity)?
Point is, I loved finding great ethereal items.
On to the question...
I absolutely will not miss the looting style. Specifically, constantly holding a key to see what's on the floor and needing to compete to actually click/grab the loot. No fun at all
Transferring is another big one, Choices of either bothering a friend or waiting by yourself in a game waiting to perm it and then hope it doesn't crash or you disconnect or get a random temp ban out of nowhere (happened all the time)
A somewhat damage focused build, obviously feel free to change things around but the base of this build is Ray of Frost runed to cost no AP making it spammable and somewhat eliminating the need for a signature assuming you aren't trying to use sigs to generate AP. Also important here is the cold blooded making the single target Ray of Frost cause itself to deal extra damage.
As for disintegrate, you wanted an extra beam so I runed convergence as Ray of Frost should always be your single target beam, may as well make your multi-target beam more multi-target!
Meteor-comet to compliment the already chosen cold blooded from Ray of Frost
Wave of Force in there for somewhat of an "oh shi-!" button if you get caught off guard by projectiles or swarmed, this is also why it's runed for reduced cost, can't have an "oh Shi-!" button and have it fail b/c you're out of AP.
Slow time compliments meteor-comet well for this build anytime that you're AoE'ing.
Obviously the sparkflint familiar is just to add to that "damage focused" build I mentioned. Most importantly this should be a fairly effective beam-happy build for you.
Note that this build assumes you have enough skill to avoid getting hit through use of wave of force and slow time.
1) Bam Margera is a super douche (scientifically proven to be detrimental to a class build)
2) Your build can't do any effective damage. All damage dealt from this build is base damage without taking advantage of any of the fantastic dmg multipliers that wizard has access to.
3) build is entirely focused on AP (re)generation even though you have zero AP intensive spells, extremely wasteful. You'll never dip below 90% AP and this is NOT a good thing, it means that you could and should be using more powerful spells. the only remotely AP intensive spell you have is blizzard which is runed to not cost much, you're not accessing the full potential of the class by any standard
4) related to point 2, but you're overbearingly focused on survivability. You're already a ranged class so you should innately be staying out of the line of fire, there's way too much defense here and as a result it will take you 30 minutes to kill what would take others 2 minutes to kill. Best defense is a good offense, anybody?
I guess my biggest problem with this build is that anybody using just meteor-runed-comet with cold blooded passive will be able to do more single target damage with AoE spells than you can with single target spells....
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Secondly, I should point out that barb is probably the class I've given the least attention to, caster/mage archetype at heart on most games. That being said this has kind of opened my eyes to barb actually having some fun builds in it.
Overall I like the build, it has a nice focus on damage multipliers though I don't know if I'd be quite as reserved to use earthquake only for elites/bosses but then again I don't know how frequently elite packs pop up. Assuming they aren't all over the place, I'd rather do a bit of herding to use your earthquake on multiple normal groups at once instead of saving it. "Don't waste it, but if you don't use it, then you have essentially wasted it" comes to mind. Though, again, it depends on how often elites spawn, I don't have a clue.
Let me know if you find the answer to how multipliers work additive vs multiplicative. In GuildWars it even mattered the order in which you applied the buffs.
0
It would seem that you never geared your henchmen properly (they don't use durability) nor did you ever use any great runewords like breath of the dying. How about eth Titan's Revenge(replenishing quantity)?
Point is, I loved finding great ethereal items.
On to the question...
I absolutely will not miss the looting style. Specifically, constantly holding a key to see what's on the floor and needing to compete to actually click/grab the loot. No fun at all
Transferring is another big one, Choices of either bothering a friend or waiting by yourself in a game waiting to perm it and then hope it doesn't crash or you disconnect or get a random temp ban out of nowhere (happened all the time)
0
A somewhat damage focused build, obviously feel free to change things around but the base of this build is Ray of Frost runed to cost no AP making it spammable and somewhat eliminating the need for a signature assuming you aren't trying to use sigs to generate AP. Also important here is the cold blooded making the single target Ray of Frost cause itself to deal extra damage.
As for disintegrate, you wanted an extra beam so I runed convergence as Ray of Frost should always be your single target beam, may as well make your multi-target beam more multi-target!
Meteor-comet to compliment the already chosen cold blooded from Ray of Frost
Wave of Force in there for somewhat of an "oh shi-!" button if you get caught off guard by projectiles or swarmed, this is also why it's runed for reduced cost, can't have an "oh Shi-!" button and have it fail b/c you're out of AP.
Slow time compliments meteor-comet well for this build anytime that you're AoE'ing.
Obviously the sparkflint familiar is just to add to that "damage focused" build I mentioned. Most importantly this should be a fairly effective beam-happy build for you.
Note that this build assumes you have enough skill to avoid getting hit through use of wave of force and slow time.
*edited - spelling/typos
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1) Bam Margera is a super douche (scientifically proven to be detrimental to a class build)
2) Your build can't do any effective damage. All damage dealt from this build is base damage without taking advantage of any of the fantastic dmg multipliers that wizard has access to.
3) build is entirely focused on AP (re)generation even though you have zero AP intensive spells, extremely wasteful. You'll never dip below 90% AP and this is NOT a good thing, it means that you could and should be using more powerful spells. the only remotely AP intensive spell you have is blizzard which is runed to not cost much, you're not accessing the full potential of the class by any standard
4) related to point 2, but you're overbearingly focused on survivability. You're already a ranged class so you should innately be staying out of the line of fire, there's way too much defense here and as a result it will take you 30 minutes to kill what would take others 2 minutes to kill. Best defense is a good offense, anybody?
I guess my biggest problem with this build is that anybody using just meteor-runed-comet with cold blooded passive will be able to do more single target damage with AoE spells than you can with single target spells....