4 replies to this topic

[malvar]

Hi everyone,

some of you might remember me asking for advice on my barb some about a half year ago and what you told me back then really helped me a lot.

Yet i am now again at a point, where i could use some help on what to do next with my gear.

First of all here is my profile:

http://eu.battle.net...21/hero/2137619

My current budget is around 20m but as i consider selling my monks gear i might get a bit more together in the near future, so if you happen to think of any massive upgrade for me that is a bit out of my budget, feel free to still tell it to me.

About my playstyle:
I am currently farming a slightly extended Alkaizer route in Act 3 on MP0, but as soon as Patch 1.0.7 hits, i might want to move on to higher monster powers.

For now, my biggest concern though is that i am still running out of fury from time to time, even though i got 5 pieces IK and Unforgiving. (I also cant keep WotB up for a long time but i guess thats pretty normal on MP0)
Any advice considering higher MP would be helpful too of course.


Looking forward to your answers,

malvar

[krantsi]

Hi malvar,

first of all, DROP UNFORGIVING, it's useless in pve. If you want to increase your fury regen, choose animosity. That said, I'd suggest you not using either of them. Use bloodthirst/nerves of steel/tough as nails/etc, depending on your gear.

Then to your gear itself. Your crit chance is good enough so that it should not cause the problem with your fury regen. The biggest issue i think is your attacks per second: you have only ~1,5. This results in your tornados ticking very rarely, thus not being allowed to crit often enough and also hindering your overall dps. There are couple of easy solutions:

1. Replace your offhand. You should get sword/dagger or axe with ias. While your at it, get lifesteal to your offhand also. This allows you to drop bloodthirst (which is what you should use instead of unforgiving )  from your passives, since you need at least ~5,5 ls on higher mp's and you achieve that with your belt & oh.

2. Replace your rings and/or amulet. Since this will most likely cost you a lot of money and many uber boss -runs, I would not suggest replacing all of them. You can get for example one new ring with your offhand if you have enough cash.

So tbh, I'd get a new offhand with str, cd, ls and a socket (with decent dps) and MAYBE a new ring with str, ias, crit chance, and avg dmg. Getting the lifesteal to your offhand is a key here if you want to play higher mp's, since it gives you an access to a defensive passive which counters your low surivability a bit. Your dps is good enough so that you wont need loh anymore, though it's not a bad idea to have some of it in your gear, like in blackthorne's pants as you do atm.

Also, if you want to play higher mp's gradually start increasing your vit. I'd start with shoulders and belt. Replace Hardened Wrath -rune in your War Cry with Impunity. Get all res to one more slot, so that you have at least ~500 unbuffed.

Not sure if listed everything I meant to, will add something later if anything comes to my mind.

I hope this helps.

Edited by krantsi, 22 January 2013 - 08:00 PM.

[malvar]

First of all, thanks for the advice!

What i probably should have mentioned, is that i dropped quite a bit of LS and HP in order to keep my MF capped while i am farming on MP0. When i will move up to higher MP, i will of course replace Unforgiving with Bloodthirst as well as my MH with one that has LS on it, probably the echoing fury i was using before i started focussing on mp0 runs.
I also got some ilvl 61 shoulders with 217 str, 64vit, 71ar and 11% life that give me quite a boost in terms of my hp pool and of course theres always the option of replacing my helmet gem with a life% one.

So, in terms of survivability i could easily get to the point where i can survive even on MP10 but i just dont do enough dmg for it to make sense, which is why my current goal is mainly to improve my rage generation and dps.

So much on what i forgot to mention.

About your idea of replacing Unforgiving with Animosity, i guess thats quite a good idea. (still talking about low mp farming of course)
I will definitely try this though after reading its description i am already wondering why i didnt think of that myself. *facepalm*

About the Offhand: So far i thought that my current one is quite good as it has quite some str as well as 98% cd + socket but as it seems i might have been to focussed on paper dps there.
If i will get a replacement there, should i focus more on its stats or is the dps more important? (rltw ignores the oh dps, doesnt it?) Somewhere i've also read that Echoing Fury is a very good option as oh for its attack speed increase also counts toward the mh. if that is correct, should i try to get a decent one of these or would you still recommend to just aim for a fast sword/dagger with good stats?

Also: Should i try to get more IAS on my gear, even if that means to drop some other important stats and maybe even lose a bit on paper dps or would that be a bad idea?

Again thanks for your advice and for any more suggestions i hope you can give me on what i just wrote.

Edit: I just managed to find a sword with 1.4 attacks/sec, 337str, 90% cd, a socket and 770dps (just 20 less than the spear i had before) for 700k. While it still has no LS (which i wont miss for now), i think it was a pretty good deal. I now moved up to 1.6 attacks per second and gained around 2k paper dps which is nice too.
Would you suggest to stick with that one and put my money in some other gear first? (If not, i wasted only 700k which wouldnt be so bad either:) )

Edited by malvar, 22 January 2013 - 08:35 PM.

[krantsi]

Ok, so I wrote a massive wall of text in to my notepad but I'm going to try to summarize it up a bit.

So your ABSOLUTE main focus is to farm the lowest mp's as efficient as possible? Let's focus on this then.

In this case, your survivability is fine. Your problem with not gaining fury is mostly because of the low aps (and maybe to some extent the lack of experience in playing ww-barb?). This is going to be hard to change, since ias costs a lot, especially if you dont want to lose some other nice stats, like mf, cd, vit etc. Basically, only slots I think you could get cheap ias upgrades are your gloves, ring (replacing unity) and MAYBE your mh.

Have you considered getting a mighty weapon as your mainhand? I know, you would lose some mf, but your fury gain would grealty improve. This would compensate your lack of aps at least a bit. The main problem here is the loss of 10% cc, but tbth, I dont think it would matter. You would still have 45(?)% cc with battle rage and ruthless, right? So this might be the best solution for you as of now. Obviously, if you're planning to farm higher mp's you can throw that mighty weapon right out of the window, but since your main focus seems to be in lower mp's, I'd strongly recommend you to consider this option.

I'm gonna be honest here with you. If I were you, I would just forget mf, especially since you're pretty high paragon level already. Start to gear so that you can farm ~mp3-mp5 as efficient as possible. For that, you need more survivability and some other things I mentioned in my last post. I can give you some more advice if you choose to scrap the whole mf gear -thingy .

As for some of your questions: your new oh is fine for lower mp's, yes. Don't get ef as your oh, they cost a lot and i'm not sure how the fear on hit proccs on oh (i've heard it doesn't in which case ef would actually not be that bad. I wouldn't go there tho.). You should always try to get a higher aps, but as said, it's not easy especially trying to maintain your mf and being on a budget at the same time. And yes, rltw ignores your oh's dps. This does not mean that you shouldn't get a high dps oh in the future tho, since rltw is not your only source of damage.

Phew, your case is a tough one. Sorry if it seems I make little sense here, it's really, really hard to give you an unambiguous solution here. Feel free to ask more and I will try to clarify things as good as I possibly can.

Edited by krantsi, 22 January 2013 - 11:40 PM.

[malvar]

Ok, first of all, i guess the main problem making it so hard for you to give me good advice might be that i didnt exactly know what i was actually aiming for. What you told me so far already helped me to move one step forward though, so i think i can define my goals a bit more clear now:

In the short terms, i want to improve my MP0 farming a bit in order to do as many paragon levels there until the next patch will hit.
In terms of my fury generation, what you told me so far, already helped me a lot. Switching that one passive combined with my new oh mostly solved that part of my problem, so i want to focus on pushing my dps a bit more next as i still leave some monsters alive if i just run through them. But all in all i can't complain too much for now.
About my MF: I am 12% over cap currently, so i will be able to switch one of my mf items soon without losing my capped status. Maybe you happen to have an idea on which item to go for?

My mid term goal is about what you suggested for me to do: Move on to higher mp. Like i said, im planning to wait for 1.0.7 to hit before i will do that and i hope to be at around paragon 60 by then. I also will probably drop as much MF as i need by then and focus only on gear efficiency by then.
For now its just that farming mp0 is the most effective way for both drops and xp and while i stick with it, i can easily afford to lose some other stats in order to keep mf capped.

So, first about my short term plans:
You were suggesting i might change Unity for something with IAS. Were you thinking of any specific item that would be a good (and affordable) choice or should i rather just look for a nice rare ring?

Besides that, i by now came to the conclusion that investing too much in my mp0 gear would not make too much sense anymore, so i will focus my planning from now on on my post 1.0.7 gear for higher mp farming. Which brings me to some more questions that i can bother you with:

First of all, i am wondering, for how long it makes sense to keep my 5piece IK bonus before i should drop the helmet and look out for a mempo. (fury generation shouldnt be that much of a concern on higher mp, so i will probably be fine with just the 3 pieces bonus) Also i am unsure about which other set part i should exchange and what would be a good replacement.

Besides that, i guess that one of my main concerns will then be to get new weapons.
About the oh, you already gave me some advice and after thinking about it, going for ls there is probably the better option compared to trying to get that on my mh.
Speaking of EF, i have read that its proc rate is much lower when using it as oh but it still procs, so probably it's not the best option overall but maybe still something to consider when it comes to cost efficiency?

Where i am mostly clueless is though what to aim for on my mh then. A bit of advice on where to set my priorities here would therefore be very helpful to me.

Also i could use some advice on how to divide my budget on the single items. I think that until 1.0.7 hits, i should be able to get around 50m together, either by farming or selling my monks gear or if neither of it works out, i might just invest a few € in the rmah to cover whats missing. (When the game was fresh, i sold some stuff there, so i still can justify it to myself by saying that even if i spend another 5-10€, i will keep a positive balance on real money auctions )

About my defensive stats, i already mentioned that i have some shoulders that (even though they look horrible) are probably not that bad (i wrote their stats in my last post) and would improve my hp pool by quite a bit. Together with a hp% gem, i guess that would put me in a position where i would only need another few slight improvements to be fine, though i would of course prefer to stick with a ruby for the extra xp, if i can afford it.
But mostly, i would probably have to get more dps for higher mp farming to be effective.

Well, to make it short: Any more specific advice on how to improve my gear toward this goal would be great. (By specific advice, i mean not only which stats to aim for, which is helpful too of course, but also which parts of my current gear to replace next and what kind of replacement to look for.) Another question that i am unsure about, is whether i should try to improve all of my gear a little (i guess i am already past that point) or rather buy few, more expensive parts and stick with the rest. (Thinking of it, i guess i already mentioned that how to divide my budget is one of my big concerns.)


About how i will change my spec: I actually intended to go for bloodthirst as my third passive, aiming for ls somewhere around 8% but as you said, that ~5,5% would be enough, i guess there is a better option? Maybe that one (dont know the english name as im playing with a german client) that increases my dmg when im surrounded by enough monsters would be the best option for farming? If so, what would you suggest for Uber-Bosses, sticking with bloodthirst?

Besides that, are you sure that 20% more ar is better than 20% more armor? I actually thought that both are equally good and therefore it would be best to buff the one that i already have more of to get the most extra defense...

Well, thats all my new questions for now. I hope i am not being too complicated.

And thanks again for giving me so much advice, you are really helping me a lot!

PS: If by "wall of text" you didnt mean a lot of completely unformatted text, that would have been fine for me too. I don't mind reading a long post at all. (Also i am probably not the one to tell anyone to make it short as this is obviously not a strength of mine either.^^)