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IK Ancient Spear Boulder Toss

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Skills

  • Weapon Throw Balanced Weapon
  • Ancient Spear Boulder Toss
  • War Cry Impunity
  • Battle Rage Bloodshed
  • Wrath of the Berserker Insanity
  • Call of the Ancients Duty to the Clan
  • Nerves of Steel
  • Animosity
  • No Escape
  • Berserker Rage

Items

More Details
  • Legendary Gems

    • Bane of the Trapped
    • Zei's Stone of Vengeance
    • Iceblink

Kanai's Cube

  • The Furnace
  • Tasker and Theo
  • Convention of Elements

The Build and Playstyle


The main aim of the build is just to generate Fury as quickly as possible and have as much Fury as possible to dump into a Boulder Toss. As such, getting Maximum Fury increases (Base 100 Fury, 12 Fury from Mighty Belt, 20 Fury via Animosity passive and 50 Fury using Paragon points) gives us 182 Fury at most. Using Tasker & Theo to have the your Ancients attack faster will help generate Fury as well. Ideally getting some attack speed on your gear will help generate Fury faster, but as I'm playing Hardcore, I've opted for more defensive stats like Vitality on my weapons and gloves.


The basic playstyle is to keep your distance from mobs, and try to aim your Weapon Throw at a mob which is at least 20 yards away. So if a mob is standing in front of you, try to move aside and Weapon Throw something that's further away so you can generate more Fury from Arreat's Law's power. Once your fury is full (usually after around 3 Weapon Throws coupled with your Ancients generating Fury), throw the Boulder! Generally you want to have full Fury just before the Physical cycle of your Convention of Elements ring, and you should be able to get 2 boulder tosses off before the 4 seconds is up. With just random gear that I had available (ancient Doombringer and ancient 300 Spear, Arreat's Law in cube), I was able to critically hit for between 8 and 12 billion during the Physical cycle, and there are definitely damage improvements if I had an ancient Arreat's Law and could use The Furnace in the Cube.


The build as listed is a good Torment 10 to Mid Greater Rift 50s build. If you were to push higher Greater Rifts (55+), I would probably consider using Illusory Boots instead of Tasker and Theo so you can move around mobs easier, and use Unity in the jewelry Cube slot (and Unity on your follower) to start with. After that, you could also change the Call of the Ancients rune back to Together As One for the damage mitigation, and drop the Iceblink Gem for Bane of the Stricken, and gear up a Templar follower with a Thunderfury Attack Speed spec to proc your Bane of the Trapped (common Demon Hunter option). If you need more advice on this please let me know.

Passives


Barbarians have a lot of great passives, as I'm playing Hardcore, the core 3 passives I use are: Nerves of Steel (cheat death), Animosity (fury generation and maximum fury) and No Escape (extra damage for Weapon Throw/Ancient Spear). As your 4th/5th (if using Hellfire Amulet) passives, my main choice is Berserker's Rage and Ruthless for more damage. Other decent passives are Rampage, Superstition, Weapons Master and Bloodthirst.

Gems


Zei's Stone of Vengeance works well as the Barbarian is now ranged and wants to stay more than 15 yards away. Since the Bane of the Trapped gem's rank 25 affix doesn't work due to the range, we need to find alternatives. After some thought, the Cold rune on the Call of the Ancients was the best choice as the Ancients use a fair few AOE abilities that should in theory apply the chill effect and also provide a 10% critical chance boost. Couple this with the Iceblink gem, and assuming you have Critical Hit Chance on all of the standard pieces of gear and your Critical Hit Chance should be over 85%. One of the worst feelings is when you dump your entire fury into a Boulder Toss only for it to not be a critical hit.

Weapons


There's some variation available here. The simplest option is to dual wield The 300 Spear and Arreat's Law. As the legendary spear loot table is very limited, crafting a handful of rare spears and using Kanai's Cube to upgrade the rare spears will generally result in these two weapons popping up. While I was crafting, I only found an Ancient 300 Spear and I had a spare Doombringer around so I made use of that for it's Physical Skill % increase and 5 primary stats. If you're going this route, you need to use the Arreat's Law power in your Kanai's Cube in order to generate the Fury required to spam Boulder Tosses out.


Another alternative would be to use a Heart Slaughter but I haven't tested this. Again you would need to use Arreat's Law in the cube, and I suspect the slow attack speed might hinder your Boulder Toss Fury generation a fair bit. Also as a Hardcore player, having only 4 primary stats on the weapon (one taken up by Physical Skill % increase) makes it a bit difficult to use, but potentially a viable alternative for Softcore.


*Note* Unfortunatelly due to the weapon choices not being Mighty Weapons, it isn't possible to get extra Maximum Fury rolls on the Secondary slots of the weapons.

Other items


Most of the other items don't have much room for change, one of the main things to note is to get Maximum Fury increase rolls on the Secondary slot of your Immortal King's Tribal Binding belt.

Paragon Priorities

Core

Movement Speed
Maximum Resource
Primary Stat
Vitality

Offense

Critical Hit Chance
Critical Hit Damage
Attack Speed
Cooldown Reduction

Defense

Resist All
Armor
Life
Life Regeneration

Utility

Area Damage
Life on Hit
Resource Cost Reduction
Gold Find

Only thing here to mention is to spend your paragon points maximising your fury before putting points into Strength.

Build Guide

Hi everyone, in a melee/close range Diablo 2.3 meta, I was looking for a build that could make use of the Zei's gem and attack from range. The only nice options seem to be using a Witch Doctor with Helltooth Acid Cloud or Carnevil Darts. So I started playing around with this and couldn't find a specific build for it. It basically takes the 6 piece Immortal King set and pairs it with an Ancient Spear: Boulder Toss build rather than the more common builds out there.


As an overall general comment on the build, it's obviously weaker than the HOTA/Rend/Seismic Slam builds that is more common with IK builds, but it's a fun alternative to try out if you have the pieces required (which aren't even hard to get if you already play an IK build of some sort). It definitely requires a bit of aim, and can be random when sometimes boulders just don't appear to hit (9 yard radius for boulder toss feels a bit too low).


I will add some video highlights of some gameplay when I get a chance, in the meantime feel free to ask questions, I'm also streaming a fair bit on Twitch these days, so you can also ask questions or catch me at:http://www.twitch.tv/CrayonsMinD