Rating
+8

XP/Pull Barb High Tier GR Speed Runs

by last updated Oct 28, 2015 ( Patch 2.3 )
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Skills

  • Ancient Spear Harpoon
  • Whirlwind Hurricane
  • Sprint Forced March
  • Ignore Pain Mob Rule
  • War Cry Veteran's Warning
  • Threatening Shout Falter
  • Inspiring Presence
  • Nerves of Steel
  • Superstition
  • Tough as Nails

Items

More Details

  • Legendary Gems

    • Gogok of Swiftness
    • Iceblink
    • Esoteric Alteration

Kanai's Cube

  • Shard of Hate
  • Pride of Cassius
  • Ring of Royal Grandeur

First and foremost are our set bonuses. We run 3 piece Cain's bonus, 3 piece Born's bonus, and 2 piece Bul Kathos bonus. This gives us the max amount of xp% bonus, some cdr, and a great source of fury generation. Ring of Royal Grandeur is in your cube so that you can get the 3 piece bonuses with only 2 pieces. For Born's you need to wear the shoulders and chest. For Cain's you have the option to wear any 2 pieces of gloves, boots, or pants; this gives you a handful of options for one of the other pieces of gear. I will go over those in a little bit, after I get the required parts of this build out of the way.

I put down 2 different belts as required, the reason for this is that you need both of the bonuses from Cassius and Chilanik's, but it does not really matter which one is in cube and which on is one your gear. You will want to wear whichever one you have a better roll for. If you do not have a Cassius with 6 second increased Ignore Pain duration, then cube that one, as every second that your group is missing IP can cause deaths, and the cube gives you the maximum bonus.

You can see that Cooldown Reduction is the number one priority stat on all gear. I cannot stress enough the importance of CDR on your gear. In order to run leoric's signet for max xp% bonus and still give your team permanent IP, you must have full CDR in paragon, level 50 Gogok of Switftness, and perfect CDR rolls on every piece of gear that can have it. If you do not have perfect, or at least close to perfect, CDR, you can run an Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac in place of your signet, but there will be a noticeable loss in xp per run if you do this. Zodiac is also a good choice if you are having a hard team keeping your IP up on everybody or they are dying a lot and you need to be able to cast it again on them when they revive, and before the last cast drops on the rest of your team. The rest of the stat rolls on your gear are relatively unimportant. I put stat priorities for all gear, but the gear is completely viable without them being anything special, as long as you have perfect CDR.

On to the extra gear options I spoke of earlier. Since you only need 2 pieces of Cain's gear, there is an extra space to do as you please. There are many good, viable options here. My personal favorite is to run Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan. These cause you to gain extra fury from the BK set, your War Cry, and your Threatening Shout while moving. Thanks to this piece, I never run out of fury, despite constantly moving with whirlwind, keeping sprint up full time, and spamming as many hooks as I need. Also causes you to not feel like you need the Weapons Master passive at all. Other good options are Frostburn or Stone Gauntlets; these cause mobs to have a harder time running away after being pulled in to your pack. Another very good option is St. Archew's gloves; these give you a big shield when you run ahead of your team and charge in to aggro new mobs. Also I have seen Illusory boots ran by some barbs, and they are an alright option, but I do not really suggest them for speed runs. Only value I have found for them is that you can run out of your pack of monsters without Hurricane or Ess of Johan pulling monsters with you; this can be very useful for pushing higher tier GRs, but not as valuable for speed runs where you should be popping mobs pretty quickly. Another place you have some options, is your amulet. I use Ess of Johan because I like how it pulls density together when I cast my spear sometimes. Overwhelming Desire is another great option because of the extra potential damage. Hellfire is viable for an extra passive, such as weapons master, but I wouldn't consider it as good as the other options.

On your bracers, definitely always run strongarms. Even if somebody else in your group has them, the damage buff stacks on each other. The most important stat to look for on these, is the increased damage buff. Try to get them with 30%.

For your cube weapon there are also a couple good options. The best option depends on the group you are playing in. If your main DPS in your group is a Static Charge monk, run a Shard of Hate so that your whirlwind shoots little snowballs that proc the static charge. Thunderfury is a good option in most cases because of the attack speed slow on enemies. Vigilance isn't a bad option for extra sanctuaries for your team. If your main DPS is a witch doctor, go look at a globe barb guide. I may write one myself eventually, but to put simply you can get extra damage for your WD with that build.

The next point I'm about to make is kind of a sad one. Brace yourselves... The game lags and we can't stop it. But there is hope. We can minimize it. As I'm sure most of you have seen, if you have been in higher tier rifts. When you get big packs of enemies together, the game starts to freeze up because of the mediocre servers blizzard has for the game and the high computation intensity for the game. You can choose to pick what seems the absolute most optimal and get bodied by maximum amounts of lag, or you can choose to drop a few options that seem ideal, but will cause your game to lag less. I prefer the ladder. So here is what you can do.

Efficacious seems more optimal than Iceblink right? Well ideally yes, but the DoT it applies causes another big calculation for the game, while iceblink just simply adds 10 to everybody's CC. Run Iceblink to reduce lag.

Area damage and Life on Hit. Be sure you have zero of both of these. Once again, both of these stats causes more calculations, and more lag. I know it seems bad to drop Life on Hit, but the amount you can get on gear from LoH compared to your Monk's healing should be pretty negligible. Yes that includes your weapons! Put a gem of ease in one weapons socket for a bit of extra xp, and ANYTHING EXCEPT an amethyst in your other one. Hell I don't care; leave the socket empty; put a flawed emerald in it. Just don't cause your group extra lag for a minimal amount of extra healing.

Try to get your group to follow suit on these things, and you will notice that you can pull far more density without lagging in your games.

Paragon Priorities

Core

Movement Speed
Vitality
Maximum Resource
Primary Stat

Offense

Cooldown Reduction
Attack Speed
Critical Hit Chance
Critical Hit Damage

Defense

Life
Resist All
Armor
Life Regeneration

Utility

Resource Cost Reduction
Gold Find
Life on Hit
Area Damage

For your core section, it is critical that you have the base 25% movement speed bonus on your character. It is fine to do it all with paragon, or partially on your boots, but make sure you have the max bonus of 25% because movement speed is EVERYTHING. I have tinkered with running the maximum resource points, and it is alright, but since I run Hexing Pants, I never run out of Fury anyways, so not really necessary. Just dump your spare points in vit.

In the offense Category, it is crucial that you have Cooldown reduction maxed out, the rest of the stats are relatively useless since it is not your job to deal damage.

Your defense category is listed in order of what should make you the toughest, although this can vary depending on your amount of vit, armor, and All Resist from other sources. If you are not already 600+ paragon, just tinker with what gives you the most toughness. The regeneration is last priority because your heal monk already should be giving you plenty of regeneration.

In your utility panel, the Resource Cost reduction is by far the most useful. Gold find is unimportant since everybody has billions of gold these days. And this may sound silly, but leave the rest of the points for this panel unspent. As I stated in the gear category, AD and LoH just cause extra lag and should be removed.

Build Guide

Do you guys want to gain paragon levels absurdly fast with minimally optimized gear? Well you're in luck because you can! With just a little bit of proper statting, you can farm with the best in no time. With this build I generally farm about Tier 72 or higher with my clan mates, with about 8 minute runs on average, generally adding up to about 250 billion xp/hour with xp pools. I know right? Welcome to the paragon grind of Season 4.

A little bit about me so you believe what I say. I am almost at 1100 paragon this season, I cleared a tier 68 solo in 13 minutes at the beginning of october which gave me a top 100 clear at the time, now it is about top 200. I have not had much time to push that since then. I also am about top 400 on 4p leaderboards with my pull barb. I intend to increase both of those rankings in the next week or two. I have done all of this while working and going to school full time, so I have had to be superefficient with my time. And no, I DO NOT BOT. This is evidence of how efficient this build is. I will try and get some runs recorded soon so that you can see the build in action. I also stream occasionally at twitch.tv/Pumpk1nz. Also here is a link to my exact build if you want to look http://www.d3planner.com/149268669. Come by and watch and ask me questions if you want. Enough boring talk about me, onto the build!

To start off, this build is meant to be run with in four man groups with 2 people in full xp bonus gear. You are one of them. The current group meta generally consists of you, the xp/pull barb, a healer monk, a sunwuko/exploding palm monk, and any high dps character. There are constantly changes to this meta and different viable options, but the majority of my explanation for this build will assume you are running in this type of group.

You have 3 main jobs in this build:

1. Scouting, aggroing, and pulling monsters.

2. Keeping the ignore pain buff on your team 100% of the time.

3. Making everybody move really, really, ridiculously fast.


1. In high tier greater rifts, the goal is to set up giant packs of monsters first, blow them up once you have done so, and then move on to the next pack, rinse and repeat. In order to do this, you must first find areas of high density, begin aggroing as much as possible, and then pulling as much as possible with your Ancient Spear. You are generally going to be the first in and first out of every pack of monsters. In my opinion, the Pull barb should generally be the leader of the party because of this very reason. Run ahead of your team (but not too far ahead, I will go over positioning in a little bit) and find an area with a lot of monsters that can be pulled together. These are generally big open rooms, but sometimes just wherever a lot of monsters happen to spawn. Once you have found this spot, notify your team that that is where you want to fight. If you aren't in voice chat with them, just drop a banner so they know where to go. You will often see beginner pull barbs stop there and start pulling monsters; this is an incredibly INEFFECIENT way to build density. The reason we call where we want to fight is because we aren't gonna stop there. Your next job is to aggro as many monsters as possible. Run around in every possible direction around where you want to fight until all the monsters in range are running after you. This way they do half the work for you. Now run into the center of the density pack, where your team should be set up by now and begin pulling any stragglers in. Ideally you will pull in all enemies in range before your group's dps pops the Exploding palms. If your dps is smart he will wait until you have pulled in all possible monsters, but let's be honest we don't play with smart people often. So hurry the hell up and pull in as much as you can. Once you have pulled in as much as possible, try to use ancient spear on everything to apply your strong arms buff. When the majority of the density has popped, it is time to rinse and repeat the entire situation.


2. Keeping ignore pain on your team 100% of the time can be a little trickier than it may sound. And honestly it sounds tricky. First of all, I go over how to get 100% up time on IP in the gear section, make sure you have that first. But there are some more subtleties to it than that. In order for your team to keep the buff from ignore pain, you have to cast it while they are all in range, and then stay in range of them throughout the duration. The moment you leave range of a teammate, the buff is lost for them and does not come back up until cast again, even if you return back in range! So it is critical to learn your range and stay in that range of your team mate. This gets hard in a few situations. First when you go to aggro more monsters into your pack, be sure you only go as far to aggro as you can without leaving this range. Second when your team is running only stay far enough ahead that your team is still in range of your IP and you are still in range of your monks heals. Third, and by far the most tricky to deal with, is when a team mate dies. When a teammate dies, they obviously lose IP, and then they can not regain it until after they come out of that black and white screen upon respawning, and remember it has to be cast once they are alive, not before or the buff won't come up on them until the next time you cast it. This is why deaths often begin to chain one after another once somebody dies. The irony of the whole situation is that often these deaths are caused by IP dropping in the first place. So don't let IP drop!


3. This is the most simple job. Make your team run really freaking fast. Although rend mutilate sounds like a nice skill for this build, in speed runs sprint - forced march is so much more important for getting your team to run really fast from one pack to the next. This is also why we run Chilaniks chain, for even more move speed from war cry. Once again make sure to stay in range of your team as you run to keep these buffs on them, and get everyone to move as quickly as possible from one good area to the next. Skip past all low density areas, it is a waste of time trying to make something out of what is not there. Just use your super fast group move speed to get to the next good area.


Other skill options:

As I said, rend is good for damage, but the move speed from sprint is just better. Also rend causes lag.

War cry runes: impunity is another good option. Depending on your group's resistances it may be better than Veteran's warning, also if you have a HotA barb as your dps, be sure to communicate with him which rune he is using, because you are wasting a skill if you are both running the same one.

Ancient spear - rage flip, I don't suggest this run for speed runs. You may see that many leaderboard pull barbs are using this. The strength of it is that it can pull monsters far further with much more ease. This can be useful in high tier pushes, but in speed runs it is a waste of time. The value is that you can pull elites along with you as you move. The weakness is that it cannot pull as much density. Since our goal is to just move quickly from one place to the next, it is generally a waste of time to try pulling elites along as you move, so stick with harpoon for speed runs.


Some small details that will improve your play(skip past this if you just want the basics, come back when you want to be exceptional!):

Harpoon is a complicated skill. Some things to note: You cannot pull through walls, you cannot pull over holes in caves, the part of the spear you hit enemies with DOES matter. Doorways are hell for a pull barb. Some enemies don't fit through doorways, some enemies only fit if perfectly centered. You have a few options to deal with them. One good option is to fight on the doorway. The strength to this is that you do not have to bother pulling enemies through, the weakness is that exploding palms will not hit as many targets. Another option is to run as far in to the room as possible so that the monsters have an easier time running in on there own. Another very difficult trick you can use when monsters get stuck on doorways, is to run back behind them, pull them away and directly centered to the doorway and then run back in and pull them through.

The position on the harpoon that you hit the enemy with judges how far you pull the enemy. The tip of the spear not only pulls an overall longer distance, but also a longer percentage of the distance from the monster to you. If you hit with a close spot on the spear you will notice that it only pulls monsters about half the distance between you, while if you hit with the tip, the monsters quickly fling all the way towards you. So try to learn to hit monsters with Just The Tip!

Overall, learning your hitboxes, on the maps, on the spear, and on the monsters will make you the very best like no one ever was.