Sorry if someone's already come up with and posted this build here; I couldn't find it in the last few weeks' worth of threads, but I might have missed it. To me this idea seems so good that I doubt I'm the first to think of it, but then again everyone seems to feel the same about their own build and they're all different, so who knows.
Conceptually this build starts with Bloodshed (alabaster Battle Rage), which I'm really excited about because when used with an AoE attack its total damage output scales with both your crit rate and the square of the number of enemies near you. This dovetails perfectly with the fact that the barb not only has two massively crit-increasing runes but also has four possible effects that pull enemies towards himself (like a vacuum, hence "hooverbarb"), while no other class has any, I think. The barb also has Bloodthirst, which gives a nice big chunk of life leech and goes a long way towards changing the "offense/defense tradeoff" paradigm into a "have your cake and eat it too" situation, especially when you add in a damage-reduction skill that gets more mileage out of each point of that life leech.
So to abuse Bloodshed as much as possible, we want three things:
a spammable AoE attack
as much crit% as possible
and as many enemies nearby as possible
Conveniently, the only fury-generating and thus infinitely spammable (semi-)AoE attack, Cleave, also provides the keystone of our efforts to get as many enemies nearby as possible, via Gathering Storm (indigo). Thus we get point #1 and some of point #3 in one skill. Of the other three hoovering skills, Call of Arreat (crimson Leap Attack) is the best as it has the widest radius by far and is tied for the lowest cooldown, making a nice way to get the ball rolling.
Next, the fact that we'll be surrounded by tons of enemies serves perfectly to fuel the two crit machines: Best Served Cold (alabaster Revenge), which takes advantage of those hits we're taking while providing even more health gain, and Killing Spree (crimson Overpower), which will probably be available constantly thanks to the combination of high crit rate, large number of targets, and AoE attacks. Not to mention the fact that both of these provide more AoE damage and thus more crits, more Bloodshed, and more Overpowers.
Finally, to stretch every point of Bloodthirst and Revenge health gain, a damage reducing skill. On the conditions that you don't have a whole lot else to do with your fury and that all your enemies will be close to you, which they will thanks to the constant hoovering, unruned Threatening Shout looks to be as good as runed War Cry, leaving the rune free for, say, some MF via Terrify (obsidian).
As for passives, other than Bloodthirst, Ruthless is an obvious choice, and as for the last, well, I like Brawler as it should be active pretty much all the time, thereby providing the largest damage boost and thus (via life leech) health gain.
As a fundamental rule, AoE damage is the most efficient way to kill (and thus also the most efficient way to gain health when using life leech), but there's a problem: enemies won't always be conveniently packed into tight, dense balls. One solution is chaining abilities like Electrocute; the uniquely barb solution is hoovering, which simultaneously provides another benefit via abilities, i.e. Revenge, that trigger when you're hit.
Bonus note: to demonstrate the power of this idea let me try a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation. Assume clvl 60, level 7 runes, and just for simplicity a 0% base crit rate and a +50% base crit damage. That gives us a total crit rate of 5% (Ruthless) + 27% (Best Served Cold) + 22% (Killing Spree) + 4% (Battle Rage) = 58%, with crits doing +100% damage thanks to Ruthless. If you've got just five enemies in your frontal arc, a single Cleave will do 120+4*60 = 360% weapon damage, times 1.58 to account for the expected increase in damage from the crits themselves, yielding 568.8% weapon damage. The expected 5*58% = 2.9 crits also deal a total of 2.9*55*5 = 797.5% weapon damage via Bloodshed. Add those numbers to get 1366.3% weapon damage, i.e. an average of 273.26% weapon damage per target (+60% from Battle Rage and Brawler for a total of 437.22%). In reality it'll be higher because your base crit rate will be a lot better than 0%, and you should be able to hoover in more than five enemies, but even 437.22% AoE weapon damage per Cleave (cheaper than free in terms of rage) ain't bad, no?
I like this build a LOT, great theory to back up your choices. Also, very well written post, that is much appreciated!
My only question is, how do you plan to deal with bosses? There will be many instances where you won't have a steady influx of mobs to proc your OP and Revenge.. I could see this build having a tough time where big, single-target burn damage is required.
Your native crit might be able to hook you up with enough OP/Rev procs to be viable, just curious.
Great post, this is a build I will definitely try. +1
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"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
I like this build a LOT, great theory to back up your choices. Also, very well written post, that is much appreciated!
My only question is, how do you plan to deal with bosses? There will be many instances where you won't have a steady influx of mobs to proc your OP and Revenge.. I could see this build having a tough time where big, single-target burn damage is required.
Your native crit might be able to hook you up with enough OP/Rev procs to be viable, just curious.
Great post, this is a build I will definitely try. +1
It's a good build, but I think every barbarian should have war cry with invigorate... just cant pass up that skill. I'd switch out overpower or revenge for it.
I can't see a reason why offensively this won't work. But, I can see too many reasons why defensively this absolutely won't work. I don't see Inferno difficulty being easy enough to completely avoid the majority of the defensive skills available. And considering that it will take some time to gear up your resistances and leech high enough to even try to manage a glass canon build, this seems like a build that won't even get off the ground.
Yeah, you guys are absolutely right about bosses (when I added the subtitle "for AoE PvE" I basically meant "for non-boss PvE"). For part of the game they might be manageable with just Cleave spam, but after that this build is going to require some pretty fundamental changes (by which point it won't even be recognizable as this build any more) when it comes to boss time.
As far as defense in higher difficulty levels though, well, of course it remains to be seen, but I think that if necessary there's room for some minor tweaks that would take you all the way through Inferno.
Brimueller: "completely avoid the majority of defensive skills available"? Because I took only Threatening Shout and skipped Ground Stomp, War Cry, and Ignore Pain? Ok, I guess you could say I took only 1 of the 4 defensive active skills, but then again, heck, I took no more than a quarter of the offensive active skills too, for that matter. Given that regardless of difficulty level you need to kill enemies to stop them from hurting you and to progress through the game, I find it hard to imagine Blizzard requiring a significantly higher proportion of defensive skills than offensive skills relative to the respective numbers available, especially for a build that produces defense via offense thanks to a large amount of life leech.
Also, I chose Threatening Shout over Ground Stomp, War Cry, and Ignore Pain after much thought. The uptimes on the Ground Stomp stun and Ignore Pain are so low that they're too situational to serve as the mainstay of your defense. War Cry is worth more thought, but if you compare unruned War Cry to unruned Threatening Shout, the former halves physical damage at best, while the latter halves all damage. Runes may bring War Cry up to a level comparable with unruned Threatening Shout. I think it makes sense that Threatening Shout would provide better damage reduction than War Cry to balance out the fact that Threatening Shout costs fury instead of generating it, has half the duration, and only works to maximum effect when all enemies attacking you are within 25 yards. So for some builds War Cry might be better, but I like Threatening Shout for this build because its three disadvantages are non-issues (it's not a fury-hungry build and is based around having all your enemies at point-blank range) and because its rune slot allows for further expansion of your defensive capabilities if necessary (i.e. you can use an obsidian rune when the going is easy, and pop in a golden rune for an additional doubling of survivability when the going gets tough).
TLDR version:
If more defense is needed, replacing Threatening Shout's obsidian rune with a golden should do the trick. As far as passives, Tough as Nails looks attractive, but there's no telling at this point whether it'd be advantageous to sacrifice +30% damage (and thus a large amount of healing via Bloodthirst) for +100% armor. I guess it depends in large part on the relative prevalences of physical and non-physical damage in the hardest (non-boss) parts of the game.
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Conceptually this build starts with Bloodshed (alabaster Battle Rage), which I'm really excited about because when used with an AoE attack its total damage output scales with both your crit rate and the square of the number of enemies near you. This dovetails perfectly with the fact that the barb not only has two massively crit-increasing runes but also has four possible effects that pull enemies towards himself (like a vacuum, hence "hooverbarb"), while no other class has any, I think. The barb also has Bloodthirst, which gives a nice big chunk of life leech and goes a long way towards changing the "offense/defense tradeoff" paradigm into a "have your cake and eat it too" situation, especially when you add in a damage-reduction skill that gets more mileage out of each point of that life leech.
So to abuse Bloodshed as much as possible, we want three things:
Next, the fact that we'll be surrounded by tons of enemies serves perfectly to fuel the two crit machines: Best Served Cold (alabaster Revenge), which takes advantage of those hits we're taking while providing even more health gain, and Killing Spree (crimson Overpower), which will probably be available constantly thanks to the combination of high crit rate, large number of targets, and AoE attacks. Not to mention the fact that both of these provide more AoE damage and thus more crits, more Bloodshed, and more Overpowers.
Finally, to stretch every point of Bloodthirst and Revenge health gain, a damage reducing skill. On the conditions that you don't have a whole lot else to do with your fury and that all your enemies will be close to you, which they will thanks to the constant hoovering, unruned Threatening Shout looks to be as good as runed War Cry, leaving the rune free for, say, some MF via Terrify (obsidian).
As for passives, other than Bloodthirst, Ruthless is an obvious choice, and as for the last, well, I like Brawler as it should be active pretty much all the time, thereby providing the largest damage boost and thus (via life leech) health gain.
In summary:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#bYcdUh!abU!caYZaZ
As a fundamental rule, AoE damage is the most efficient way to kill (and thus also the most efficient way to gain health when using life leech), but there's a problem: enemies won't always be conveniently packed into tight, dense balls. One solution is chaining abilities like Electrocute; the uniquely barb solution is hoovering, which simultaneously provides another benefit via abilities, i.e. Revenge, that trigger when you're hit.
Bonus note: to demonstrate the power of this idea let me try a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation. Assume clvl 60, level 7 runes, and just for simplicity a 0% base crit rate and a +50% base crit damage. That gives us a total crit rate of 5% (Ruthless) + 27% (Best Served Cold) + 22% (Killing Spree) + 4% (Battle Rage) = 58%, with crits doing +100% damage thanks to Ruthless. If you've got just five enemies in your frontal arc, a single Cleave will do 120+4*60 = 360% weapon damage, times 1.58 to account for the expected increase in damage from the crits themselves, yielding 568.8% weapon damage. The expected 5*58% = 2.9 crits also deal a total of 2.9*55*5 = 797.5% weapon damage via Bloodshed. Add those numbers to get 1366.3% weapon damage, i.e. an average of 273.26% weapon damage per target (+60% from Battle Rage and Brawler for a total of 437.22%). In reality it'll be higher because your base crit rate will be a lot better than 0%, and you should be able to hoover in more than five enemies, but even 437.22% AoE weapon damage per Cleave (cheaper than free in terms of rage) ain't bad, no?
My only question is, how do you plan to deal with bosses? There will be many instances where you won't have a steady influx of mobs to proc your OP and Revenge.. I could see this build having a tough time where big, single-target burn damage is required.
Your native crit might be able to hook you up with enough OP/Rev procs to be viable, just curious.
Great post, this is a build I will definitely try. +1
-Thomas Jefferson
It's a good build, but I think every barbarian should have war cry with invigorate... just cant pass up that skill. I'd switch out overpower or revenge for it.
As far as defense in higher difficulty levels though, well, of course it remains to be seen, but I think that if necessary there's room for some minor tweaks that would take you all the way through Inferno.
Brimueller: "completely avoid the majority of defensive skills available"? Because I took only Threatening Shout and skipped Ground Stomp, War Cry, and Ignore Pain? Ok, I guess you could say I took only 1 of the 4 defensive active skills, but then again, heck, I took no more than a quarter of the offensive active skills too, for that matter. Given that regardless of difficulty level you need to kill enemies to stop them from hurting you and to progress through the game, I find it hard to imagine Blizzard requiring a significantly higher proportion of defensive skills than offensive skills relative to the respective numbers available, especially for a build that produces defense via offense thanks to a large amount of life leech.
Also, I chose Threatening Shout over Ground Stomp, War Cry, and Ignore Pain after much thought. The uptimes on the Ground Stomp stun and Ignore Pain are so low that they're too situational to serve as the mainstay of your defense. War Cry is worth more thought, but if you compare unruned War Cry to unruned Threatening Shout, the former halves physical damage at best, while the latter halves all damage. Runes may bring War Cry up to a level comparable with unruned Threatening Shout. I think it makes sense that Threatening Shout would provide better damage reduction than War Cry to balance out the fact that Threatening Shout costs fury instead of generating it, has half the duration, and only works to maximum effect when all enemies attacking you are within 25 yards. So for some builds War Cry might be better, but I like Threatening Shout for this build because its three disadvantages are non-issues (it's not a fury-hungry build and is based around having all your enemies at point-blank range) and because its rune slot allows for further expansion of your defensive capabilities if necessary (i.e. you can use an obsidian rune when the going is easy, and pop in a golden rune for an additional doubling of survivability when the going gets tough).
TLDR version:
If more defense is needed, replacing Threatening Shout's obsidian rune with a golden should do the trick. As far as passives, Tough as Nails looks attractive, but there's no telling at this point whether it'd be advantageous to sacrifice +30% damage (and thus a large amount of healing via Bloodthirst) for +100% armor. I guess it depends in large part on the relative prevalences of physical and non-physical damage in the hardest (non-boss) parts of the game.