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?
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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:
- 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.
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?