106 replies to this topic

[aerialus]

Few things about wotb.
Firs of all it isn't 20% difference in run speed. You compare base speed + 2 items with movement (24) + sprint (40). Note that character moves without any of these at base speed. So total speed after these buffs if base is 100%, is 164%.
Now if you add wotb to it, for another 20%, it makes it 184%. That is about 12,2% faster movement. Relative difference.

That also makes sense only if you kill elites instantly. This is not the case.
If you try to rend with dual wield, non crit rend will not kill elites before you are out of range (hp stops draining). If you aim for max exp, you can't wait for loot, need to be constantly moving forward. 2h setup costs you 1 rend to 100% kill elites, with enough gear. It is one quick burst combo, 100% success rate. You can't do this with dual wield, even with very high end gear.
If you need whilr on top of elites for few seconds with dual wield, you lose time, if you use hota (several hits to finish entire pack) you also lose time. You lose far more time on elites than the difference from movement speed.
Also you absolutely can't use any primary attack with wotb, you stop to reset wotb, with for example bash - you again lose time.

I'm running with this gear atm (nothing special aside from weapon and lacuni)

http://eu.battle.net...212/hero/599940

Ignore build, recently started using charge as lmb.
This gives me between 85-90 million exp per hour doing alk runs. No leoric signet. And I pick up some loot (gloves, jewelery, weapons, legendaries).
I think leoric signet would push it towards 100m, and if you ignore items altogether (just rend and forget), then it can go beyond 100m.

Here is nice tool to measure exp, it takes data from screenshots automatically, very easy to use:

https://code.google.com/p/xplogger-d3/

As for wotb barb, imo it requires different approach to be viable at mp0. You should focus on furthest tornado breakpoint as possible (max ias gear, EF and the other legendary weapon with +0.15 speed), don't get too high crit bonus. Stuff should die fast, but die rather to amount of ticks not to power of signle crits. If first crit kills trash instantly, we don't get much fury out of it.

Edited by aerialus, 04 December 2012 - 05:58 PM.

[thormond]

@up: wouldn't leap with pull rune + ravage on rend be better? u can do some tricks with leap to make it even faster in arreat crater 2 and to close gap to elitepacks

i used rend before and it was faster than HotA but when elites are dying so far behind me i cannot always collect all loot, and this bug with legendary pings not working still didnt get fix (blizzard cmon...)
additionally HotA is more fury efficient if u hit 2+ targets with Smash, since it has 0.8 coefficient, high crit and u get more fury from into they fray than you spend on HotA

EDIT:
i just did 2 runs without picking anything up (rend+ravage+pull leap), results are just as u described:
http://www.dropmocks.com/iBnIRM

but still i prefer to xp a bit slower with hota (killing elites in ~4-5 seconds on-screen) and dont miss any legendaries

Edited by thormond, 04 December 2012 - 06:58 PM.

[Turar]

Nice read that reddit post Aerialus. I'm currently experimenting with different builds and efficiency, I'm DWing though and I pick up every rare.

Using http://www.diablofan...atch-run-stats/ to track my efficiency.

[aerialus]

thormond, on 04 December 2012 - 06:23 PM, said:

@up: wouldn't leap with pull rune + ravage on rend be better? u can do some tricks with leap to make it even faster in arreat crater 2 and to close gap to elitepacks

As for leap. It is nice, as you can do some shortcuts, plus aoe also triggers battle rage, so good leap and refill fury. Problem is, I can't bind it to lmb. If i have rend bound to left button, it is so annoying when you accidently click some destructible terrain object or monster, barb stops and uses rend, slowing you down and wasting fury. If you hold whirlwind, and release ww button, while mouse happens to be on top of targetable object, it also uses rend..
And I feel in some situation charge gives some advantage in terms of movement after all. If you can do nice long sequence of charges, then you do save some time. Fury efficiency is also good, spammable fury generator.

When it comes to ravage. I'd rather used lecrate, but problem is reflect packs. I got just 3% life steal from belt, don't want waste passive, and skorn with ias gives you better tick rate from tornadoes, than skorn with leech. If you rend reflect health link pack with 200k dps unbuffed, low resist and armor, and just 3% life steal, you get owned. Rend with leech solves that problem completely, You can't die with this, despite being fairly glass cannon barb.

This is same reason why i dislike hota. If I smash reflect pack with extra health, can be lethal with just 3% ll.
Also note I got -10 rend cost, so it is halved. Fairly cheap in comparison to same gear with -5 hammer cost (can't spawn on belts).

And finally, the tool you guys use, If I understand it correctly, you need to write down exp for it to calculate exp ratios. Tool from my link reads it from screenshots, so you just need press 1 button at start and end of a run. You can even measure each area, what is exp ratio, very easy to use.

That provides very interesting results btw. I've done many runs, and sometimes in crater level 1, when you roll really high density of scorpions, peak exp from that area alone was above 120m/h, withour leoric signet. Quite interesting, ofc average run exp was lower, since you get significantly less from two starting areas, and overall keeps and fields of slaughter give less exp. Crater filled with skorpions - far superior exp to any other area in the game by far.

Edited by aerialus, 04 December 2012 - 07:13 PM.

[thormond]

aerialus, on 04 December 2012 - 07:07 PM, said:

thormond, on 04 December 2012 - 06:23 PM, said:

@up: wouldn't leap with pull rune + ravage on rend be better? u can do some tricks with leap to make it even faster in arreat crater 2 and to close gap to elitepacks

As for leap. It is nice, as you can do some shortcuts, plus aoe also triggers battle rage, so good leap and refill fury. Problem is, I can't bind it to lmb. If i have rend bound to left button, it is so annoying when you accidently click some destructible terrain object or monster, barb stops and uses rend, slowing you down and wasting fury. If you hold whirlwind, and release ww button, while mouse happens to be on top of targetable object, it also uses rend..
And I feel in some situation charge gives some advantage in terms of movement after all. If you can do nice long sequence of charges, then you do save some time. Fury efficiency is also good, spammable fury generator.

yea, i encountered similar problems but with enough practice i managed to overcome that, the trick is to avoid colision with your mouse cursor, releasing it if necessary and choosing empty spaces between mobs (pretty fun way of play, though). To get faster cast time i was using Shift+rend (rebinded to '~') so it's even easier to cancel animation

Quote

When it comes to ravage. I'd rather used lecrate, but problem is reflect packs. I got just 3% life steal from belt, don't want waste passive, and skorn with ias gives you better tick rate from tornadoes, than skorn with leech. If you rend reflect health link pack with 200k dps unbuffed, low resist and armor, and just 3% life steal, you get owned. Rend with leech solves that problem completely, You can't die with this, despite being fairly glass cannon barb.

This is same reason why i dislike hota. If I smash reflect pack with extra health, can be lethal with just 3% ll.
Also note I got -10 rend cost, so it is halved. Fairly cheap in comparision to same gear with -5 hammer cost (can't spawn on belts).

well i got some extra survi so it's not that painful for me ^ ^

Edited by thormond, 04 December 2012 - 07:35 PM.

[aerialus]

Testing some more with hota now, pretty good results. Turns out reflect isnt as bad as it used to be. Hammer can quite easily kill entire pack in 1 hit. We never miss drop that way. Combined with leap and pull rune, pretty decent effects. I use rune with stun, I think that aoe that stuns also triggers fury generation, not just targets affected by hammer damage.

[Zakumene]

cw30000, on 06 November 2012 - 10:45 PM, said:

2h suck. yes, faster kill, but cannot keep wotb up. I dw with a echoing fury and able to keep wotb up the whole time. only problem with the echoing fury is it high fear. really annoying.

I use cleave with the aoe on crit for my main attack, i can literally fill 120 fury in ONE swing on a pack of 5 mobs.

[thormond]

aerialus, on 04 December 2012 - 08:42 PM, said:

Testing some more with hota now, pretty good results. Turns out reflect isnt as bad as it used to be. Hammer can quite easily kill entire pack in 1 hit.

this is because RD doesn't trigger on killing blow

but i came to conclusion that rend+lacerate is the best right now for me, it's just killing ridiculously fast so i can even see the loot in the corner of my screen and eventually step back if there's any legendary
if i manage to get better skorn and crit lacuni mby there wont be even necessary to use that rune

Edited by thormond, 04 December 2012 - 09:13 PM.

[aerialus]

I think when it comes to efficiency, you can get better result by optimizing exact route character runs.
It should be all the time killing monsters, once you have to backtrack, or run through empty zones, you lose quite badly.

Two main areas where you can save a lot of time are fields of slaughter and keep depths. Core arreat is pretty easy to remember layouts, and never run into any dead ends.
In keep depths it is pretty simple, you should do one run though the area to one of the corners of map, and end run there. It sometimes might seem quite inefficien if you take into account time needed to make new game. If there is for example big room full of monsters, but you need run some part of map you already cleared, you probably still lose some of your exp/h score, despite fact there is so many monsters left. Essentially often it comes to just "wasting" half of the map, just to reach good exp/h score.

As for fields of slaughter, I feel like lot of time can be saved there. If you just run one simple circle, not try to reveal most of the map, check near edges, you kill less monsters but overall exp/h ratio will be better. Again it feels like wasting map, since you can literally see mobs at the edge of screen that you pass, but you will lose effciency if you turn around and kill them.
Another thing about this map, on very top of it, that part is pretty much empty. I'm not sure if it is best idea to run one big circle there, since area near entrance to rakkis crossing is just empty. It might turn to be better to just do small circle, through the middle of the map, and save a lot of time.

Edited by aerialus, 04 December 2012 - 09:18 PM.

[thormond]

yea, i came to all of these things as well

these are all the clues that are comming to my mind:

core of arreat:  don't chase succubi, just kill elites
tower of the damned: don't chase succubi, just pull as many mobs into tornados from sprint and kill elites
arreat 2: stick to the right side(always), use leap through the cliff in one/two layouts at right-bottom corner(hard to explain rly), then proceed to tower of the cursed 1 and use waypoint there instead of tp (sometimes you can even get an elitepack under the waypoint)
fields of slaughter: one simple circle to waypoint ofc
keep depths 2v: this one is kinda hard to say, still working on it

Edited by thormond, 04 December 2012 - 09:31 PM.

[Andead]

The charge-stomp-WW looked funny in the video so I gave the build a try.
My Scorn was terrible though, it didn't even have str on it, so I couldn't kill elites before the stun ended.
I switched to a IK Boulder Bracker that I had with 1580 dps, 340str, 180 CHD, 8% WW CHC and I switched my IK boots to Ice climbers.
This way I still had the 5set bonus and had more dps/HP than the IK boots.
Also IK BB being a Mighty Weapon I had no problems with fury so I didn't need to use Unforgiving. I used Ruthless.
This was on MP1. I tried MP2 also and fury generation was even better so I dropped Animosity and used Brawler.
MP2 runs were taking the same time as MP1 so I stuck to them and got from plvl 98 to 100.
It took almost 9h so that's about 72M XP/h.
I can't say it's faster than the normal WW spec with 2 shouts I was using, but it's definitely way more fun.

[aerialus]

Added 29% exp leoric sig to my spec, managed to break 100m/h, but still inconsistent
problem is, dropped damage to elites by replacing soj, and randomness of maps, and monster density
To get top score you have to roll high scorpion count in crater 2 map, preferably with 5nv already before going there.

[thormond]

i'll try breaking 100m with just 9% atk speed in gear(lacuniz !), using only high weapon dmg+cc+cd to make rend hit like a truck and since it doesnt scale with atk speed AT ALL (you can't spam it and it doesn't stack) - it's fast and cheap solution, but for that ill need some stuff like skorn with 200+ more weapon dmg than my current one, and leo ofc (saving gold for high end flipping though ...)

Edited by thormond, 08 December 2012 - 12:06 PM.

[aerialus]

Even ww spec, tbh, if you kill stuff with first crit, I'm not quite sure if ias skorn and overall ias gear is mandatory for this. Trash dies to first tornado crits anyways, if they crit for over 100k at mp0. So you get no benifit of it ticking faster, in terms of fury generation. There is also passive fury generation that is big part of this build.
I feel like with seriously overgearing content, no wotb build ias might not be that important, even for ww/tornado build.

[thormond]

anyway skorns are cheaper and are reaching higher average dmg cap, which makes it easier to reach that point when you can oneshot everything (at least with critrend, normal one would be like 50%-60% elitepack hp on max gear, but adding overpower dmg, leap dmg, and dmg from few procs of WW+tornados - it's still a kill)

Edited by thormond, 08 December 2012 - 01:48 PM.

[Morphos]

aerialus, on 08 December 2012 - 01:07 PM, said:

Even ww spec, tbh, if you kill stuff with first crit, I'm not quite sure if ias skorn and overall ias gear is mandatory for this. Trash dies to first tornado crits anyways, if they crit for over 100k at mp0. So you get no benifit of it ticking faster, in terms of fury generation. There is also passive fury generation that is big part of this build.
I feel like with seriously overgearing content, no wotb build ias might not be that important, even for ww/tornado build.

I don't think IAS matters for this build at all either. I also want to suggest again that you guys give Merciless Assault another shot. It doesn't gain speed, because of the animation stall at the end, but I don't think it loses it either... I think the increased speed from the charge itself cancels out with the stall and its the same as if you had just run that distance. But what it does do is #1 increase your fury generation significantly, meaning you can drop animosity and run both ruthless and weapon master, and #2 do near instant 195% weapon damage to an entire elite pack. Instead of overpower, my combo is to leap > rend > charge, making sure sprint is active. if you point it the right direction this will kill all but the highest HP elite packs without losing any time. I think being able to run both DPS passives along with the extra 30% weapon dmg on charge vs overpower more than makes up for any DPS loss from the killing spree bonus.

Edited by Morphos, 08 December 2012 - 02:41 PM.

[thormond]

well i was running Overpower + momentum, mby i should try this one instead, will see

[aerialus]

Changed animosity to ruthless, and picked overpower + charge, I found that if I use charge, I rarely use/need leap. Using rend as well, with this combo. Interesting variant, very good burst with charge+overpower.

[thormond]

when will i test all these? : (
i wanted to make a video guide to sum things up for folk to fight off this annoying WotB mainstream, but right now i can't really decide which one is best, when and why

Edited by thormond, 08 December 2012 - 06:15 PM.

[aerialus]

Hota is definitely faster when you have enough damage. Hota + charge, and then you don't need animosity, 2 dps passives and unforgiving. Takes some time getting used to playstyle with charge but it is worth it for sure, we just get more damage out of this spec, and never run out of fury.