OoOber Bababa: the answerr

[dumbpig]

As most people know playing barb basically depends your connection, your gear, and some bit of skill, importance in that order. However, many people seem to have excessive trouble doing short whirls and/or doing desync tricks, mainly because if they use cable or dial up instead of DSL the short whirls dont execute consistently at the same rate on your computer vs the server.

The solution:

OoOber Bababa~

Eliminates the need to short whirl, increases damage greatly....

The whole idea behind caster killing is to have them in your whirl as long as possible while whirling outside that range as short as possible... u can do that either by short whirls with good connection, which approximates nonstop hitting, or by making your whirlwind hit more and move slower, lessening the amount of work that you have to do.

General Gear:

Botd ax or eth death cleaver
beast axe, or 108 stormshield
full plate engima armor
2x raven frosts
draculs's glove
highlord amulet
arreat face 40 ed
spider sash
rare boots with NO run walk, resist, fhr.

all of those gear pieces can of course be changed to accomodate things like necros and sorcs, by putting on fcr rings and such. the heavy shield/armor is there purposely to get more hits.

On a side note, if you wear a high defense duress for melee vs melee, your whirlwind, with this gear, gets nine to ten hits per whirl. :thumbsup:

Skills:

20 ww, 20 mastery, 20 bo, 20 shout, 1 in all the things that are supposed to have 1 in them, and rest of the points in iron skin.

NO INCREASED SPEED

If you have a crappy cable connection or a dial up or if your dsl is not the best quality, this build might be for you. Barb builds like mine which use 75 un/walk from gear and 42 r/w from the skill hit on average 2 or 3 times per whirl, which means we have to change directions and re-whirl like twice per second. This build, however, hits four to five times per whirl because it moves significantly slower, lessening the need to short whirl very rapidly.

This has a huge impact on your damage potential... 3 hits from my whirl is basically goes 1 botd, 1 botd+1beast, 1botd+1beast for 5 "total hits" since both weapons hit at once after the first frame. the slow-barb gets 1 botd +1 botd+1beast,1 botd+1beast,1 botd+1beast,1 botd+1beast, which is triple the damage of a 3 hit whirl, since a larger percentage of them are double hits. In addition, after coming out of a slow whirl, since you hit more times, theres nearly a 90% chance of them being open wounded even if the only open wounds u have is the 25% from draculs, since there are so many hits

Have fun hopefully this makes barbs generally tougher...

[BadLikeMe]

Hm.. i've heard of something in the game to this effect.

less r/w = more ww hits?

Does this also apply to when you switch from "run" to "walk"? Because this could greatly help me in bvb's, but i usually stay in run mode for more mobility.

[luis19]

Does being slowed/depryed/frozen affect the number of times ww hits as well?

[dumbpig]

WW is purely RUN speed, your run/walk MODE will not affect this

Yes, freeze/decrep, all of that stuff helps. Which is why i like it when necros use clay golem :D

The amount of slowness/fastness does NOT help in bvb, because both barbs approach each other and pass each other at the same relative speed.

for example, barb #1 is at 50 miles per hour and barb #2 is at 80 miles per hour, if they ww at each other it will seem like 130 miles per hour from BOTH persons perespective. however, being slow helps out physical damage/ar/def barb builds, since u have superiority in that area and want to stay in range as long as possible; an open wounds based bvb barb would want to be fast, since most of his damage comes from the fact of hitting and not from hitting often.

so if your bvb barb is a open-wounds user, use lots of inc speed; if your bvb barb is a physical/ar/def build, slower is better. on the other hand, if u see that the other guy has MORE open wounds than you, you want to tend towards getting slower since speed up gives him an advantage.

also, the benefits of this slow barb build vs casters is only apparent if your connection is bad and you can't short whirl very well... good connection, fast short whirls are even better since they have the same damage rate whiel changing directions all the time, as well as having the benefit of running faster

[luis19]

So exactly how much more do you hit as your r/w decreases.

For example, my barb usually uses 08 highlords+gores. If i take off that 60r/w how many more times do I hit?

[Anger-DRS]

Why 1.08 Stormshield? its actually worse then 1.10 you know

1.08
+3-297 Defense (3.0 per Character Level)
Damage Reduced by 35%
+30 to Strength
Indestructible
+35% Faster Block Rate
Lightning Resist +25%
25% Increased Chance to Block
Cold Resist +60%

1.10
+3-371 Defense (3.75 per Character Level)
Damage Reduced by 35%
+30 to Strength
Indestructible
+35% Faster Block Rate
Lightning Resist +25%
25% Increased Chance to Block
Cold Resist +60%
Attacker Takes Lightning Damage of 10

[luis19]

Monarch is a light shield while 08 is heavy.

[mrJ]

Edit: Beaten to it.

[BadLikeMe]

I just noticed something:

why enigma? this armor gives 45% faster r/w. Although i guess the + to teleport is worth the increase in speed in terms of mobility/hitting, or is it negligible?

[mcm]

You trading that 08 HL? I traded for one but within about 300 games it disappeared. GARR. It had the "Sun" artwork FWIW.
I've seen another on some cripple Ai barb, it was the "Beads" artwork (looks like a cross with a bead dot in the middle.. circular behind the embossed cross, NOT the pentagram artwork.)

[mcm]

With regard to enigma, if you're not really serious about dueling fast casters, or you're resigned to using dialup for all eternity, giving up the teleport probably isn't such a huge deal.
I can beat most wind druids without teleporting, even on dialup. That they often come looking for trouble probably helps that... muahaha.. In fact when I think about it I don't think a wind druid has even beaten my new barb when running and on dialup.. though he's probably only dueled 30 or so of them and only 2 of those I would consider "godly".

[mcm]

Though I should add to that, beating a fast cold sorc is improbable if you can't tele stomp.
Sorcs and necros are the only two classes that come to mind where tele-stomping is a NECCESSITY, and at that, a ping under 50ms is required for dueling good necros.

[Anger-DRS]

Monarch is a light shield while 08 is heavy.

Meaning? how does this affect a WW barbs ability?

[Halciet]

Meaning? how does this affect a WW barbs ability?

This being based on the theory that whirlwind is affected by run/walk speed where-in more spead spreads hits out over a larger area; heavy shields have a -10% run/walk penalty that is applied in a different manner than usual, meaning that two 5% run/walk charms don't make up for the penalty.

I fully support this theory, as Blizzard mentioned r/w affecting whirl back in the beta. No one has been supporting it though since they couldn't find a definitive yes/no from blizz since then.

-Hal

[dumbpig]

0% r/w, u hit six times just liek in 109

42% skill 75% gear gives around 90% effecitve r/w, meaning ww is twice is fast and hits half as much

this barb while dual wielding has only around 20% effective r/w with engima, so thats like 5 hits. with a heavy shield u can get the full 6 hits... however dual wielding is better since u hit with both weapons

in any case u need to short whirl and change directions about half as frequently, and have a less chance of getting interrupted. And u can max iron skin and be a bvb barb too.

108 highlords is onyl good for zons, i think... and only some zons at that, if u dont need the 20 ias. On barbs it'll lower your hit count by about 1, so if u were gonna hit 3 times, u now hit twice. Very bad on barb unless you are in a no tele league, in which case 108 hl is probably banned anyway heh

[luis19]

Yeah I was using it on my zon recently but im cutting all its costly gear. But since im pubby dueler and there are always alot of elements to stack vs, the 30 rw on highlords kinda makes up for the 30 I lose from switching to hotspurs.

Ill try that less r/w thing soon and see how it works.
So just the 30 r/w will bring my hits down by 1? Guess ill use regular hl now