With the recent change that gives Barbarians and Monks an additional 30% damage reduction, it seems they have become more of a viable choice for Hardcore mode. Especially the Barbarian, who gains further damage reduction through his main stat Strength and passives such as tough as nails. The Barb also has more than a handful of lifetap runes that will be vital to staying topped off while fighting. I plan to start up my hardcore Barb as soon as I hit level 10 in softcore on release night. I am still toying with the idea of going through all of the difficulties on softcore to gauge where the most difficult areas in the game are and how difficult they will be, but that depends on my initial success or failure with my first HC Barb.
There's so much damage reduction in this build, I have a hard time imagining myself ever dying. I might consider changing one of the passives to Ruthless to gain more effect out of Whirlwind and Overpower.
Hmm, this is good to know! I elected to go with a ranged class for my first HC main because of the life gain and damage mitigation concerns of a melee class. I'm still going with Demon Hunter though, but I'm more hopeful now that we'll NOT see everyone piling into ranged classes for the initial months of HC.
Take a look at the monk defensive skills...ridiculously powerful. On death, dont die, come back with 35% health and spirit, can happen every 90 seconds? dodge looks like it could easily approach 80%. Massive aoe healing. Finally, all your resistances can be as strong as your single strongest resistance. Those passives are potent! I guess we will see how it goes, but they definitely gave melee alot of survival skills, which is only fair.
Here's a build I'm look at
http://us.battle.net...ihUY!bVU!ZbZcab
There's so much damage reduction in this build, I have a hard time imagining myself ever dying. I might consider changing one of the passives to Ruthless to gain more effect out of Whirlwind and Overpower.
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