A new idea struck me over the weekend for a Barbarian build (that is, new to me, probably a ton of people with simular builds out there aleady)

I was looking at random items on the official blizzard site, and SOJ caught my eye, and it made me wonder if by combining some items with reduced resource costs can I get any of the skills for 0 Fury cost.


So this is what I came up with.

I went out and spent all my money on buying my barb some gears with reduced cost to Hammer of the Ancients.

(-5 Fury) Immortal King's Boulder Breaker
(-4 Fury) SOJ with . (Can go up to -5, but they are very expensive, and SOJ is hard to search for on AH)
(-5 Fury) Mara's Kaleidoscope
(-4 Fury) Skull Grasp

That is a total of -18 cost. Hammer of the Ancient's normally costs 20 fury.
Then I combined it with Weapon Master (Adds +3 fury when hitting with a Mighty Weapon)

So end result, as long as I keep swinging my hammer I'm gaining Fury.
Then I noticed that Hammer of the Ancient's has a +1% crit per 5 fury.
My total fury pool at the moment is 134 ( so +26% crit chance)

The basic idea. Have a full fury pool up for most of the time, using Hammer to smash things to bits.
Hammer of the ancients does quite a lot of damage on a crit, and I crit a lot, and it hits multiple targets.



My build at the moment: (And yeah, I know its very much like the popular WW build, but that is what I started from)

Primary Attack: Hammer of the Ancients - any rune can work, but Rolling Thunder is the most fun so far.
Secondary Attack: Rend - Bloodlust

War Cry - Impunity
Battle Rage - Into the Fray
Sprint - Run like the Wind
Wrath of the Berserker - Thrive in Chaos


Passives:
Brawler (Might try replacing this with Animosity)
Ruthless
Weapons Master



Since I'm using a slow 2H Hammer I tried to get gear with attack speed on.
So far I have IK Irons with 5%
Lacuni Bracers 8%
Tal Rasha's Relentless Pursuit 8%
IK Boulder Breaker 11%

Still need to get some Inna's pants with str, but they are very expensive.



Any comments?
And gear / skill change suggestions?


After my initial tests I actually saw that -5 Fury can be created on a shield.
So I'm trying to get my hands on a -5 Fury shield with CC, and combining that with a good 1H Mighty weapon for some faster hammers.

I actually tested it out with a Storm Shield and Echoing Fury. So I didn't have free hammers (since fury is not a mighty weapon, so it gets +10% cc instead from Weapon master)
This worked ok. Attacks were much faster, and I'm guessing if you need to trigger on-hit lifegain its better. But it simply wasn't as much fun as the huge crits the 2H weapon gave me.
Both Rend and Hammer of the Ancients uses weapon damage, and my Fury was simply not doing enough.

You'll find this guide to a Thunderstrike Barbarian very useful. It's why I built a Barb in the first place and HotA Barbs can be a lot of fun. Remember that your biggest advantage over any other Barb build is smashing Elites, so if you want to optimize your playing time while still having loads of fun, make sure you run high-elite density places like Frozen Cave in Act 3 and Vault of the Assassins in Act 2.

One thing you're going to have a lot of trouble with is keeping up Thrive on Chaos. Since you're reducing the cost of HotA, you're generating a grand total of 2 Fury per swing. There's no way I can see you generating 25 Fury / 1 second so you're going to have to change to a different rune; Insanity will be giving you 1 million + Crits which is sooooo much fun.

There's no reason at all to run both Weapon Master and Into the Fray with a -18 Fury cost. This gives you a chance to try a different passive. Based on my experience, you're going to fall in love with the 3% Life Steal on Bloodthirst if you make the switch. 6% Life Steal (with IK belt) makes this build substantially less squishy and doesn't require any gear changes.

Critical Hit Chance is capped at 80% for Barbs and 90% under WotB so keep that in mind when you're gearing up given the +25% CC from HotA, +5% from Ruthless and +5% base CC. Meaning, you won't see any benefit above 45% CC on your gear. In my opinion, it's well worth getting as close to 45% as you can.

You look a bit low on Life. IK set isn't nearly as important for you, because you're generating so much Fury already and that opens your gear options substantially. Amethysts, shoulders and Pants are all great options for finding more life. You'll give up some Strength in the compromise, but your damage output is so high with 2H + HotA, it's a compromise on at least 1 piece of equipment that's probably worthwhile. It might be worth a spin around the AH to look for some a rare socketed set of pants with +Vit/+Life %, because you probably aren't getting much from the LoH.

Using Boulder Breaker you'll get your +AR IK set from just Belt+2H. If you keep your gloves and you even get the 3-piece melee reduction bonus. A really easy way to get more CC is the 2-piece Nat's Set bonus. Since you don't need 5 IK pieces, a set of Strength Nat's boots and Strength/CC Nat's Helm will get you between 4 and 7% more CC depending upon how much you get on the Helm while Nat's boots replace the melee reduction you're losing on your IK helm. You should be able to put together a very good set for 8 million and an acceptable one for as low as 4 million. You may benefit more from a 6% CC, -3 Fury Kaleidoscope than your -5 Fury Kaleidoscope, but that does remove some of the novelty and they can be difficult to find on the AH.

I have had fun with Rend (elites), Overpower (moar CC), Whirlwind (gets me out of corners), Weapon Throw (annoying ranged attackers) and Revenge. Try dropping War Cry to see if you can survive without out.

I tried Echoing Fury and discarded it, because it just wasn't as much fun. You might be able to build one that kills faster than a 2H, but there is less of a Smash Everything! feel to it, in my opinion. Staying with a 2H also lets you focus exclusively on Life Steal rather than both Life Steal and LoH.

Most of all, have fun! Keep switching skills until you find one you like and when you get bored with them, try a different set. If you want moar smashing! go with a Skorn. The socket + CD make for awesome damage even if you feel like you're swinging through molasses.

@ecocd thanks for the reply.

At the moment into the fray + sprint keeps me running between mobs, not so much while attacking.


Its true I can't really keep Thrive on Chaos up. I'm mostly using Wrath to break frozen, since I initially got killed often when I got frozen, so I'll try Different Wrath runes and see how they work out.

After doing some research I actually found that Skorn can get -5 Hammer of the Anicents fury cost, so I'm looking at buying one of them to see how it works out. For the time being I have a bid on a "Fury of the Vanished Peak" with -5 Hammer, 190 CD and a socket.

The big diff is the bonus from Weapon master.
Vanished Peak gives me the +3 fury, which makes the hammer free. And that is what I was going for.
With Skorn the spell costs me a whopping 2 Fury, and I get +10CC from Weapon master, so I'm guessing in the long run a Skorn will turn out to be better.

How can you determine if a specific spell is Crit capped? I saw your post on the UberCrit barb. But does that count for a specific skill as well? Since Hammer of the Ancients have a built-in crit bonus based on your current Fury pool. But this is not displayed on your paperdoll.

And lastly, can someone explain how Berserker Rage works.
I mean, as far as I can tell it is only useful for Fury Generating Skills. So even if I use 1 point of fury to cast my hammer (lowest -fury cost I can technically get is -19) it still won't trigger right.

@Bort There's a chance, that Berserker Rage triggers if you have full Fury when you attack rather than after the attack cost is taken into account. The Demon hunter passive that gives +damage to slowed enemies gives that bonus damage if the skill used slows the enemies (Entangling Shot, cold damage). The slowing triggers before the damage for each attack.

The crit cap on skills was simple observation. Using gear + skills, I was able to pump up my CC to well above 100% and was still hitting for normal damage regularly which means the 80% displayed cap was still in effect.

For testing purposes, it's not difficult at all for a Barb to go over 100% CC. With base (5%) +Weapon Master (10%) +Overpower (+10%) +Revenge (+10%) +Ruthless (+5%) +HotA (+25%) a Barb can have 65% without any gear at all (add in WotB for a total of 75%). Equip two 6% CC rings, a 9% CC amulet, 6% CC bracers, 6% CC Helm for 33% CC to get you up to 98% (w/o WotB) for 50k Gold or less. Shift down to Hell difficulty, trigger all your CC skills and run around smashing with HotA. You should be getting 95-98% Crits and you'll notice you're still getting a number of non-crits. Activate WotB and you should be getting ALL crits but you don't.

The game would fall to pieces if a class could have 100% CC up nearly-permanently, which is definitely possible for a Barb running Overpower, HotA and Weapon Master.

I first saw HoTA done by KingKonger and it made me start out on my barb... but I'm totally addicted to my WD right now tho ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgWjqxRTUcA

In the vid he's using sprint to keep up the movement between packs which is interesting.

@ecocd Tried Insanity for wrath. And yip, 1mil crits are pretty sweet. :)

I also bought that "Fury of the Vanished Peak"
Lost a bit of attack speed, but my standard crits are now in the 400k region.

Looking at it now I'm wondering why nobody know's about this thing, yet everyone knows about Skorn.
I realise Skorn is black damage, and Peak is Fire damage.
And Skorn always has CD and Socket, this doesn't always have the CD.

But for my purposes I see no real difference in using the Peak hammer and a Skorn.
Both have the same STR bonus range. Both have the same attack speed and Socket.
Guess it is because I'm focussing on the -5 resource cost for HotA, which is probably not the best stat to see on a Skorn.

@Bort My best guess is that the Immortal King's Boulder Breaker is superior to the Fury of the Vanished Peak in all but Critical Hit Damage potential which is easily made up by the inherent IAS, black damage and IK set bonus. Unless you're a CD junkie (perfectly acceptable, ofc), use the IK 2H weapon. If you're addicted to the IK Set bonus, it also gives you the opportunity to use an Andariel's Visage as your helm which is a fantastic dps boost for the price, because it lets you smash faster without give up much CC. Find a cheap 120% CD Boulder Breaker -4 Fury HotA on bid and you'll never look back. You'll lose the 1 million crits unless you get a lot of dps, but it's completely worth it, in my opinion.

The other thing is that there are probably only a hundred HotA Barbs on any server so no one is trying to get 2H Mighty Weapons of any kind.

Well... my options at the moment are:

1) Ik Boulder breaker (With gloves, belt, helm and boots), using Tal Rasha armour for attack speed.
2) Ik Boulder breaker (With gloves, belt, chest and boots), using Andariel or Mempo for attack speed.
3) Fury of V Peak (With IK gloves, belt, chest, helm and boots) So I lose the attack speed.
4) Skorn (With IK gloves, belt, chest, helm and boots) So I lose the attack speed.
5) Echoing Fury + CC and -HotA shield (With IK gloves, belt, chest, helm and boots)
6) 1H Mighty Wpn + CC and -HotA shield (With IK gloves, belt, chest, helm and boots)

As you can see all my options have the 5 IK set bonus, simply because I like it.

Options 1-3 and 6 has the +fury from Weapon master.
Options 4 and 5 has +10CC from Weapon master.

So far I have actually tried 1, 3 and 5.
My boulder breaker has a socket, guess I can try and find one with more CD.
My Fury has 190% CD and a socket. So thats a lotta Crit damage. I don't think the 11% boulder breaker speed makes up for the differance.
And my Fury was an Int fury with a socket but no additional CD.

So far option 3 is actually the most fun.
5 Has much faster hits, but the numbers are so tiny. ;)

@Bort

What MP can you run around on and it's not too painful? I'm slowly gearing my barb up again.

TBH my life is on the low side. I didn't really spend much on my barb gear. *[EDIT] except my SOJ

But at MP4 I still 1-shot a lot. (non-elite that is)
At MP6 I really need to concentrate when fighting elites.

So I'm trying your option 3 and I like it.
Also I've tried azurewrath with a shield and it's not as much damage but i love the freeze.
Just out of curiosity, how much did you pay for your Mara's Kaleidoscope and Stone of Jordan?

@berzerkerxx the Kaleidoscope was quite cheap. Under 1mil if I remember correct, but it doesn't have CC.
The SOJ on the other hand was rediculous. It's only 20% elite damage (so minimum), and it put me back 20mil.
You may also have noticed that my Skull Grasp sucks. It has int instead of str, and also no CC.

So basically I can do with better items, but they are all a real pain to search for on AH.

It would be nice if we could search for a specific skill on these items. Or even if I was just able to filter out all the non-barbarian ones.

For SOJ, you can filter by class. Just search by max stat. For a barb, select max fury.

You can also filter by damage to elites if you select all armor and 20%+ damage to elites. No other item goes that high.

Aaah, i didn't know that.

Because if you first select Stone of Jordan in the Unique item field you can no longer search for Max Fury.

But if you just select Armor - All armor types, you can search for Max Fury + Bonus Vs Elites.

Doi... would have saved me hours

Now why in the hell can we not search by skill also? huge pain in the ass to go through all the pages

What are peeps thoughts on making this MP10 uber viable?

I have plenty of keys but none of my chars can stick it out above about MP5.

Gear suggestions? I would like to spend all my cash on my barb... linky. Would like to keep WOTB up all the time and smash smash smash :)

@ninjax Having playe with this move over the last two months, the best I've done in keeping up WotB is to basically just add HotA to my Skorn-fueled Sprint/WW Barb (subbing it in for Rend) which has worked very well for me in the mid MP levels.

As a dedicated HotA Barb, however, I've never been able to consistently keep up WotB against elite packs. It takes a delicate balance of reduced HotA cost and CC gear. Crits on HotA (with Battle Rage, obv) are your primary fury generator so they have to crit fairly often. There's no way to go full HotA without at least -5 Fury HotA gear. If you go any lower than that, say -10 HotA, then a crit HotA strike on a single target restores only 10 Fury of the 25 fury/Second you require to keep WotB up. You can use more Fury with spamming Sprint, Battle Rage and/or Rend, but then you run into the issue that HotA "only" crits 90% of the time in the best case scenario. More realistically, you'll have a CC around 75-80% with HotA under WotB. That means it doesn't take much bad luck at all to miss 3 crits and run out of Fury. I still think Insanity is the best WotB rune for a dedicated HotA barb.

I've never found a build that isn't a little squishy on MP10, but my latest experiments with massive Life Regen helped considerably. The key was going full tank, dual-wielding Echoing Fury/Offhand, 60k life, 550-600 unbuffed AR, 3-4K Life regen, 8% Life Steal, 900 LoH (thank you socketed Perfect Star Amethyst+Blackthorne Pants), and 500 Dex for dodge chance. dps is definitely low for a Barb, but your life bulb fills up much like a WW/CM Wiz. Crits could still go over 500k under Insanity which ain't bad for 2+ aps. The fear on Echoing Fury is still annoying, but with Life Regen you at least don't feel like it's a complete waste of time. I didn't have much trouble with the Act 3 Key Warden when I was under WotB, but the slowing effect was terrible when I didn't have it. I was able to get away with -3 reduction on a SoJ and a few swings of Bash - Instigation to keep HotA going.

If you're really thinking about spending all your cash on your Barb, those are my recommendations. It really did require nearly a full set of custom equipment. I bought everything on bid so I wouldn't be taking a huge financial hit reselling them later. Some of the equipment was cheap, because Life Regen is generally a trash affix and some was expensive like the +500 on Chest Armor and Amulets and Life Regen Blackthorne's pants. Low supply, low demand, consistently astronomically overpriced buyouts. Nothing I bought was particularly useful for any other Barb build.

@ninjax, i have a nice uber build that is great in groups, which i can show you sometime. It involves both Rend / HOTA and maximizes dps by letting you use both DPS skills while standing in whatever plague/desecrate. I actually don't use any reduce hammer gear, but I've found you need fast attack speed (dual wield is a must) and decent ehp.

Posted by eleganthobo at 05/02/2013 08:40 AM

ninjax, i have a nice uber build that is great in groups, which i can show you sometime. It involves both Rend / HOTA and maximizes dps by letting you use both DPS skills while standing in whatever plague/desecrate. I actually don't use any reduce hammer gear, but I've found you need fast attack speed (dual wield is a must) and decent ehp.

Very interested myself. How do you keep up your Fury for HotA/Rend? They're both pretty Fury intensive skills if they're spammed. To stand in plague/Desecrate are you regenerating life with Life Steal/LoH or a fair amount of both?

I've love to get a more effective build than my tank above, especially for multiplayer.

My barb build is pretty much what eleganthobo described except I use a skorn and it's pretty impossible for me to keep WOTB up. I tried stacking atkspd but with my subpar gear it's pretty impossible even when on ubers where cm wizards are keeping stuff frozen.

I picked up a few gears (tal rasha's chest, unity with attack %, Ice climbers, IK gloves w/attack %) over the weekend and played around MP5 which was pretty much fine apart from arcane beams :P
I think I can keep WOTB up by stacking IAS. I forgot that I have some STR inna's pants that I should have tried as well. Amethyst in my Andy helm gives me a big bump HP wise too as I don't care about XP.

I think I'll still need at least 2 IK set peices for the resists, logical places are gloves & belt but that means no witching hour. Other option is gloves / helm but I get lower DPS without the attack speed. Maybe a CC mempo is the best use of money however.

I need to consider what to do with bracers as well, if I have inna's pants + prowlers I'll get 24% MS or I just stick with 12% from Inna's and use crafted bracers.

I don't have a high DPS main hand, only a spear with 1.2k DPS / attackspeed & socket. I guess offhand should be lifesteal/CD socket. I have a few of these around with lowish DPS. I'm guessing every alternate hammer smash will use the offhand?
Should I try have high attack speed on both weapons? I always get confused what to have where when duel wielding.

Been playing Miss HoTA barb quite a bit since patch and by myself I run MP5 with the odd death (usually the arcane/plague/whatever combo) sometimes catches me out. It's really important to reposition yourself when killing packs.

Played quite a bit of MP8 with a friends WW barb and we did pretty well but my friends WW had so much better survivability compared to me even though his gear was worse. The advantage of WW is not only the damage but you're constantly on the move. With HoTA barb you're just standing still.. and the new mob density can mean there's 30-40 monsters surround you it's hard to take so many hits at high MP even with using the stun rune, packs often are only stunned momentarily.

My AR is quite low though, when AH comes back up I'll be looking at CC mempo which will give me a bunch more AR and will craft some bracers to hopefully get some more there too. And maybe an EF.

@ninjax, I've found myself favoring a hybrid HotA/WW barb. WW usually runs Rend for Elites and Fury usage (powering Thrive on Chaos). Substituting in HotA for Rend has worked really well for me, especially with the Thunderstrike rune. It even lets me run a big Skorn, particularly if you're good at weapon swapping for elites without jeopardizing Thrive on Chaos uptime; I like 2H damage against elites.

If you're looking for more speed on your HotA barb and want to go dual-wield, you'll (mostly) love EF. The fear proc is super annoying, but the IAS boost if fantastic.

I encourage you to try it out for a half hour tonight with the only change from a standard WW build being HotA for Rend. you can play around with other runes from there to optimize it for your gear and playstyle. I was pleasantly surprised by how much it changes up the playstyle to make it much more interactive and hence more fun.

I wouldn't worry about MS. There are so many packs now that you're only moving 20 yards at a time before you're smashing again.

Thanks for the tips @ecocd, my WW barb mate was hassling me to give WW another go. For some reason I hate builds that everyone uses but with HoTA in there it might be passable :)

Yep, I saved a lot of money not getting MS on my ice climbers but i get 12% off Nat's pants so it's not so bad as while it might not be needed it sucks to walk around so bloody slowly. Still thinking on Prowlers, as they have IAS.. mmm attack speed.

I was considering swapping out thrive of chaos for Insanity and getting a HoTA SoJ to smash at high MP when packs take bloody ages to take down.

More food for thought and play testing needed!

I can tell you with absolute certainty that HotA Insanity is awesome. I think it works best with a 2H weapon, because there a few things as fun in D3 as seeing 7-figure yellow numbers floating up.