I have never played a barb on hardcore in D2, though I had 3-4 80+ softcore barbs, but I did have melee characters which had gone onto a 90+ in hardcore (fury wolf druid and a zealot). Using my experience In D2 I decided to reason about what skills I needed for my D3 hardcore barb. This is the build I came up with, however there are a few points I would be grateful for help on. http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#fgbeZU!Zeb!ZabbYb
1) Single damage skill for boss fights. I went with Frenzy, rather than Bash, runed crimson for more damage.
2) War Cry. Simply feels as a must with 100% more armor and Fury gain. Runed Alabaster, because I felt that other bonuses while good, only provided protection against either melee or physical attacks, while extra HP helps with both.
3) Threatening Shout. This is a must for any HC barbarian, i must say, making enemys deal half damage is golden in HC. Runed gold for even more protection.
4) Ground Stomp. AOE stuns are always good and GS also gives fury. I runed gold for more fury gain, rather than indigo, since I feel that mobs will try to swarm you anyway.
5) Here the things start to get a little complicated. I have a single-target attack, 2 protective abilities and a stun, now I need a spammable aoe ability. I have 3 fury generators already and 1 fury spender so i decided that Cleave is not that useful here and its a choice between Whirlwind and HoTA. And in the end I picked HoTA, for better boss damage (I got to burn fury, right?), extra damage and 15% extra crit chance. However I would like to ask more experienced people whether HoTA damage radius is big or small and whether it is suitable at all for killing swarming crowds. I went for indigo rune, since it increased the range of the ability.
6) Here is the second big question, I god 2 protective skills, 3 attacking skills, I now need an "oh shit button" or something that will heal me. There are 3 abilities that answer that criteria: Revenge, Call of Ancients and Ignore Pain. Revenge does damage and heals however its unreliable and only heals wekll when you are swarmed. Call of Ancients doesnt heal, but provides on-call meat shield and good damage increase, giving you time to leg it good and proper (always indigo rune, rather than gold. the other runes are a joke and gold simply does less damage that indigo, as maths can show). Ignore Pain does not do damage at all, but gives you 5 seconds (10 if runed Indigo, best in my opinion) of taking 1/3 of actual damage, giving me a chance to run away. I went for Revenge with a golden rune for more HP on successful attack as I expect tha main threat to my survival is to be accidental pulling of extra mobs and revenge shines under those conditions.
Passives:
Ruthless. Simply a must for any barb. Extra crit and damage on crit benefit every play style.
Superstition. I expect to play HC, mostly solo, therefore I need protective abilities, and this one helps me with caster attacks. I also expect that majority of boss attacks will be magical in nature (except Butcher) whicj should help too. The fury bonus is the icing on the cake.
Nerves of Steel. Another must to have for HC I feel. Becoming fat makes you tougher and I expect to stack Vitality at maximum level.
The possible passives to take, in my opinion: Weapons Master, Animosity, Tough as Nails, Relentless.
Weapons Master is good, but makes me sacrifice either huge damage boos in Ruthless or lose a defensive ability.
Animosity is decent but I dont expect to be at full fury a lot of time.
Tough as Nails. Might seem as first choice but the wording on armor shows that the 100% armor boost will be something like 600% armoe over 500% armor without. Not such a big bonus really and the thorns arte unreliable.
Relentless is good but what is the chance you will survivie when taken down to 20% anyway? I would rather not risk going that low on HP.
The main if in my build is whether GS+HoTAx2 will be enough to seriously dent swarming mobs. Also I mainly picked HoTA because compared to WW it seems to deal far greater single target damage and realistically I need to burn off fury on boss fights.
Looking at Seismic Slam, it has potential to replace WW and HoTA, but I am not sure yet.
I agree with most stuff you wrote in the first post except the following:
1) Seismic Slam will most likely be better than HotA for most situations, except boss fights. Keep in mind that Slam has knockback, which is very usefull if you are being swarmed. If you rune it with obsidian, it has a 70% chance of stun, so it's kind of like a knockback version of Ground Stomp. Or you can rune it for more damage, or lower fury cost, but stun is awesome IMO.
2) If you are picking Revenge mainly for the life leech, I would switch the rune to indigo. Indigo basically doubles the life you gain from Revenge, whereas golden gives "only" +50%. You get some fury from golden, but indigo almost doubles the damage output. I would definately pick indigo, unless you realy want that extra fury.
3) If you are taking a lot of damage (think inferno) it might actually be a good idea to switch out Ruthless for a more defensive passive. If you are using Slam instead of HotA you won't be doing very many crits anyway. Since you are playing HC (=stack +vit/life gear), and have both Nerves of Steel (=stack +vit gear) and War Cry alabaster (= +% life) you will most likely have huge max life. With Inspiring Presence you regenerate 2% of max life per second, which would be quite a lot, easily 200+ per second. Plus you save some fury as you won't need to recast Shout during longer fights.
Good point, Indigo it is for Revenge.
I will probably stick with HoTA, might even get Indigo for GS, since it stacks the mobs for you. But if WW does similar damage to single target (say even 80%) I will pick WW.
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1) Single damage skill for boss fights. I went with Frenzy, rather than Bash, runed crimson for more damage.
2) War Cry. Simply feels as a must with 100% more armor and Fury gain. Runed Alabaster, because I felt that other bonuses while good, only provided protection against either melee or physical attacks, while extra HP helps with both.
3) Threatening Shout. This is a must for any HC barbarian, i must say, making enemys deal half damage is golden in HC. Runed gold for even more protection.
4) Ground Stomp. AOE stuns are always good and GS also gives fury. I runed gold for more fury gain, rather than indigo, since I feel that mobs will try to swarm you anyway.
5) Here the things start to get a little complicated. I have a single-target attack, 2 protective abilities and a stun, now I need a spammable aoe ability. I have 3 fury generators already and 1 fury spender so i decided that Cleave is not that useful here and its a choice between Whirlwind and HoTA. And in the end I picked HoTA, for better boss damage (I got to burn fury, right?), extra damage and 15% extra crit chance. However I would like to ask more experienced people whether HoTA damage radius is big or small and whether it is suitable at all for killing swarming crowds. I went for indigo rune, since it increased the range of the ability.
6) Here is the second big question, I god 2 protective skills, 3 attacking skills, I now need an "oh shit button" or something that will heal me. There are 3 abilities that answer that criteria: Revenge, Call of Ancients and Ignore Pain. Revenge does damage and heals however its unreliable and only heals wekll when you are swarmed. Call of Ancients doesnt heal, but provides on-call meat shield and good damage increase, giving you time to leg it good and proper (always indigo rune, rather than gold. the other runes are a joke and gold simply does less damage that indigo, as maths can show). Ignore Pain does not do damage at all, but gives you 5 seconds (10 if runed Indigo, best in my opinion) of taking 1/3 of actual damage, giving me a chance to run away. I went for Revenge with a golden rune for more HP on successful attack as I expect tha main threat to my survival is to be accidental pulling of extra mobs and revenge shines under those conditions.
Passives:
Ruthless. Simply a must for any barb. Extra crit and damage on crit benefit every play style.
Superstition. I expect to play HC, mostly solo, therefore I need protective abilities, and this one helps me with caster attacks. I also expect that majority of boss attacks will be magical in nature (except Butcher) whicj should help too. The fury bonus is the icing on the cake.
Nerves of Steel. Another must to have for HC I feel. Becoming fat makes you tougher and I expect to stack Vitality at maximum level.
The possible passives to take, in my opinion: Weapons Master, Animosity, Tough as Nails, Relentless.
Weapons Master is good, but makes me sacrifice either huge damage boos in Ruthless or lose a defensive ability.
Animosity is decent but I dont expect to be at full fury a lot of time.
Tough as Nails. Might seem as first choice but the wording on armor shows that the 100% armor boost will be something like 600% armoe over 500% armor without. Not such a big bonus really and the thorns arte unreliable.
Relentless is good but what is the chance you will survivie when taken down to 20% anyway? I would rather not risk going that low on HP.
That is it, cant wait on your comments.
Looking at Seismic Slam, it has potential to replace WW and HoTA, but I am not sure yet.
Good point, Indigo it is for Revenge.
I will probably stick with HoTA, might even get Indigo for GS, since it stacks the mobs for you. But if WW does similar damage to single target (say even 80%) I will pick WW.