I'll look into the screen-grabbing my equipment sometime later this week. It will take a lot of digging to find the prices I paid, but I'm curious myself of the total cost.

It's the Thunderstrike Barbarian build courtesy of ProzaicMuze. His guides are amongst the best I've seen for everything. He plays for fun, not for farming or XP efficiency which is where I'm at with the game now so they're perfect for me.

He works fairly well right now. It's a build that works well against elites while not giving up the ability to smash mobs. In terms of budget, it's easily the best Barb build I found this weekend. I smashed through MP2 only dying to the very worst elite packs when WotB was on cooldown.

I realized I'm too low on Strength for practically any Barb build so I'm working on upgrading my Belt and Helm, in particular. The fun thing is since I'm running Boulder Breaker / SoJ instead of Skorn / Ring, someday, I'll get to replace the IK Gloves with some crafted AB Gauntlets at some point. My boulder Breaker is probably top 10% of available Boulder Breakers and cost under 2 million Gold. Try winning a Top 10% Skorn for 2 million Gold. I love my Lacunis, but I bet I can probably craft higher dps CC Strength Razorspikes in only 20 tries.

A HotA Reduce SoJ is arduous to find on the AH and there were only two -3 Fury HotA SoJ's available in the entire AH on bid (25 pages of rings). The Buyouts are literally 80-90% overpriced compared to what I won on bid. The tip on D3RMT to use a stopwatch while sniping saved me millions. It's a miniscule market and SoJ's are notoriously finicky, but I might look into flipping these if i have the time.

I cheaped out on my Spin2Win gear so it sucks. Given how OP everyone says the build is, I had no idea how much they cost to gear up a decent one let alone a good one. That said, one a Gold-for-Gold basis, a HotA Barb is going to run circles around a Spin2Win Barb, especially for Plan and DE hunting since they smash Elites and Uniques. With more Strength, I bet I can efficiently smash my way up in MP4. I'm pretty excited to get on the server tonight.

@ecocd Thanks very much. I run HoTA on my barb as well with crap gear (& love it as it makes me actually feel like a barbarian!) but have stopped playing while I enjoy speedfarming with my WD.

I'll get back into my barb in due course and appreciate the tips! Thanks to flipping I have gold to play with now, so will try pick up an SOJ and look into boulder breaker to see if it out DPS's my duel hand.

I have seen another players incorporate sprint into their build just to help keep wrath up between mobs but I didn't have 24 movement speed and didn't find it helped much probably due to my crap gear i couldn't maintain it.

@ninjax People use Thrive on Chaos for WotB on HotA builds? That seems wholly unnecessary. The whole point of the build is to be able to smash Elites and if you can't smash an elite mob in 15 seconds of WotB, you're playing with too much MP. If you just want to smash mobs, go for Whirlwind. HotA is at its best as a mid-to-high MP boss killer build.

Regarding SoJ pricing, I got my -3 HotA SoJ for 6.5 million on bid. I saw another -3 with a bid at 10 million last night. There were no bids on a -2 HotA for 3 million with 2 hours left. I would say you shouldn't spend more than 10 million on a -3 HotA SoJ unless it has a high Elite Damage Bonus. -2 HotA shouldn't go above 3 million. Finding SoJ in those price ranges is going to be difficult, but that's the going price right now if you want to be able to sell it later without taking a huge loss.

Oh and Reduced Fury gear is terrible with Thrive on Chaos, because you can't actually use your Fury fast enough to keep the cooldown ticking up.

@ninjax As promised, direct links to screen grabs of all of my Thorns gear.

Link 1

Link 2

@ecocd

Thanks interesting to see how you went about it :)

Still trying to snipe a decent SOJ. Some of them are priced pretty crazy right now.

I had made a Thorns/Throw Barb a while back just for kicks. He is geared on my p10 Barb in my profile (not my main Barb). He has about 28k thorns damage and was fun to use with a Schaefer's hammer as well. But I found the throw build made it a little more fun then just standing there and getting hit the whole time. That and taking out ranged monsters.

I will be interested to see how they implement the Thorns buff they talked about in the last Dev Q/A. If they infact use their proposed idea of allowing the main stat damage modifier to be applied, I can see where the damage gets absurdly high. Without any gems at all, the strength on this barb is ~1600 so the multiplier would be 28k thorns x 160 mainstat ~4.4m damage per hit. Ouch.