is this a good barb build?

[Ehlert]

I dont know if it has a name or not but i was thinking of making a barb with fast speed, decent damage, and good defense... this is the skills i got planned out so far...

howl 1
shout 3
battle orders 15
battle command 5
taunt 17

weapon mastery depends on weapon but 10 points in it
increased stamina 1
increased speed 3
iron skin 5
natural resist 10

bash 1
dbl swing 10
double throw 1
frenzy 20

now i dont have gear planned out yet, but its based around frenzy it sounded good to me in theory cause hes fast, has a decent damage boost, good resists and defense. but would this build be viable for rushing and soloing in hell? input please.. also stats i havent planned yet either

[Freezing Rain]

Resists hit diminishing returns, and iron skin pretty much sucks. Taunt is worthless IMO, don't even bother. Also, max weapon mastery, it's better then having more points in speed, which isn't even necessary.

[calibansfury]

I dont know if it has a name or not but i was thinking of making a barb with fast speed, decent damage, and good defense... this is the skills i got planned out so far...

howl 1
shout 3
battle orders 15
battle command 5
taunt 17

weapon mastery depends on weapon but 10 points in it
increased stamina 1
increased speed 3
iron skin 5
natural resist 10

bash 1
dbl swing 10
double throw 1
frenzy 20

now i dont have gear planned out yet, but its based around frenzy it sounded good to me in theory cause hes fast, has a decent damage boost, good resists and defense. but would this build be viable for rushing and soloing in hell? input please.. also stats i havent planned yet either


No, not a good build. Look at the frenzy guides, it'll provide much more guidance around this. The big issues--

Max frenzy--that's the only thing that appears right on this frenzy build.

Battle Orders should always be maxed. Always. Wait, there's one instance where...no, no wait. Yep. ALWAYS.

Tragically, with this build, it's not always possible, honestly. Fortunately, with a good helm (like arreats or IK), dual echoing swords on switch, etc, you can still get a nice BO. This build is perhaps more delicate than any in terms of skill point allocation. BO will be among the last you will add to.

Putting more than one point into battle command makes no sense, so an arbitrary number like 5 is just bizarre. Given that you're going to be dual wielding with frenzy, defense is not that important, so shout would not be a good place to put more than one. Why did you pick three? Same goes with Iron Skin. Either go all the way with defense (which means a shield, and probably a conc or ww build), or don't emphasize it. With this build, there's no room.

Not maxing a weapon is just a bad decision. By not putting numbers in the wrong place for this build, you'll have plenty of points to max it. It MUST be maxed. Its not a decision, its a necessity.

Ten to natural resists is major overkill. By the time you put in 6 stat points there, your skill items will take it up to just about optimal. The diminishing returns is too dramatic after 6. Many would recommend just 1-3. For this build, I'd recommend three.

Here's how I suggest you do it--though I'm no frenzy master. There may be a guide which would contradict what I say here, and probably has a good argument why. But this build is by far better than what you've planned.

Max frenzy.
Max double swing.
Max weapons Mastery.
Max taunt. Some of this could be sacrificed for more nat res or BO, but that's all.
BO--all the rest.

The rest go to prereqs, with about 3 to natural resists. Only 1 to increased speed, since with frenzy you'll be flying anyway. More is not necessary.

When this is all done at about level 85, you'll be over 600% to damage, have over a 300% bonus to AR, and move like the wind.

Remember that points received from items don't add to synergy bonuses.

If you have the wealth, I'd recommend fortitude armor, dual grief or ebotd zerker axes, highlords ammy or maras for res and skills, ravens, res or leech rings (ebotd would obviously remove this requirement for leech, which would be nice), arreats for a helm (um'd), gores, dungos or tgods, dracs for gloves. If you cant afford this gear, do the best you can to get something similar.

It should be fine for soloing. Some troubles with physical immunes though. One point to zerk should take care of this issue. Without enigma, I wouldnt consider it a viable rusher. Better to go with a fire/ice sorc build (the "meteorb" build) so you can get teleport without a piece of gear like enigma. Much better for rushing, as would be a hammerdin. Frenzy isnt the best crowd control skill. WW for barbs is better, but hammerdins IMO make the best hell rushers.

Good luck!

calibansfury
uswest

[Swrd]

Defense is definetly not something insignificant if you're dual-wielding. With maxed shout and some points in iron skin you can easily achieve close to 20k defense without a shield. Leviathan as an armor would be great because it has very nice defense AND dmg reduction (combined with a string of ears/verdungo's you could get up to 40% pdr just from armor and belt)

I would always max shout before iron skin as well, because it starts at 100% defense increase (rather than the 30% of iron skin) and benefits the whole party. Once maxed along battle orders the duration will also be near 10 minutes with some +skills.

Crushing Blow is also very nice with frenzy. Because frenzy has so high attack speed it becomes extremely good. With stormlash and gores you could have nearly 50% CB and you wouldn't have invest so many points in frenzy's synergies.

This is what i would do:

20 Frenzy
20 Weapon Mastery
20 Battle Orders
20 Shout
20+ Prereqs and one point wonders such as Find Item and some points invested in Iron Skin

Helm: Arreat's, preferrably upped

Armor: Leviathan (just a personal favourite but there are many good ones such as Chains of Honor, Shaftstop, especially when upgraded, Fortitude, Stone, Duress etc)

Weapons: Depends a lot on the chosen mastery but I love flails on a frenzy barb, Oath scourge + stormlash would be great as would many axes and swords as well.

Belt: Verdungo's, String, tgods etc

Boots: Gores, WTs

Jewelry: Ravens + Highlord's is always good, many alternatives such as a Dwarf Star, Wisp Projector, Metalgrid etc but one Raven Frost is usually mandatory.

Gloves: Dracul's are your best bet.




Generally this build is easily capable of soloing hell but not very well suited for rushing, well, actually barbs are never very good rushers because of CS and oblivion knights. As calibansfury said, casters are usually the best rushers.

[calibansfury]

[QUOTE=Swrd]Defense is definetly not something insignificant if you're dual-wielding. With maxed shout and some points in iron skin you can easily achieve close to 20k defense without a shield.

This is what i would do:

20 Frenzy
20 Weapon Mastery
20 Battle Orders
20 Shout
20+ Prereqs and one point wonders such as Find Item and some points invested in Iron Skin

[QUOTE]

I can't say I agree here, but its the builder's choice. Neglecting two of the synergies begs the question--why make a frenzy barb in the first place? I believe by taking out Double swing and Taunt you've reduced your damage by about 320%. Who cares if CB kicks in, when doubling really crappy damage = still crappy damage? Just make a WW barb, then you don't have to worry about sacrificing damage, and a dual weilding barb (BvC style) needs little defense, since he moves so fast and ww's so rapidly (with high damage) that he's rarely hit anyway.

I can't think of a worse suggestion than maxing shout for this build. You'll need a lot more than high defense to compensate for your horrible damage, which you sacrificed for shout. The key here is that frenzy is fundamentally an extremely offensively oriented build. Move fast, damage heavy, nuff said.

Third--dude, you've got the skill points set up so that the build isn't finished until you're level 88 at a minimum. That's a little high, ain't it?

calibansfury

[Ehlert]

not really meteorb sorcs and that can take up to lvl 90 or so

[Swrd]

Defense is definetly not something insignificant if you're dual-wielding. With maxed shout and some points in iron skin you can easily achieve close to 20k defense without a shield.

This is what i would do:

20 Frenzy
20 Weapon Mastery
20 Battle Orders
20 Shout
20+ Prereqs and one point wonders such as Find Item and some points invested in Iron Skin



I can't say I agree here, but its the builder's choice. Neglecting two of the synergies begs the question--why make a frenzy barb in the first place? I believe by taking out Double swing and Taunt you've reduced your damage by about 320%. Who cares if CB kicks in, when doubling really crappy damage = still crappy damage? Just make a WW barb, then you don't have to worry about sacrificing damage, and a dual weilding barb (BvC style) needs little defense, since he moves so fast and ww's so rapidly (with high damage) that he's rarely hit anyway.

I can't think of a worse suggestion than maxing shout for this build. You'll need a lot more than high defense to compensate for your horrible damage, which you sacrificed for shout. The key here is that frenzy is fundamentally an extremely offensively oriented build. Move fast, damage heavy, nuff said.

Third--dude, you've got the skill points set up so that the build isn't finished until you're level 88 at a minimum. That's a little high, ain't it?

calibansfury

First of all, you've mixed crushing blow and deadly/critical strike. Crushing blow doesn't double your dmg, it takes a set amount of life off your opponent(with melee weapons: 1/4 vs normal monsters, 1/8 vs uniques, bosses, champions etc and 1/10 vs players and hirelings) making it a very fast way of dealing serious dmg to monsters with high life.

With +5 to all skills and another +2 to combat skills (Arreat's) this build's total ed% from skills stands at 383% (weapon mastery lvl 25, frenzy lvl 27 and then 1 point synergy from double swing and taunt each). That's 304% less ed than with 38 another skill points invested in taunt and double swing. Personally I'd rather be focusing on increasing my abilities to survive better than spending points on skills that do nothing but increase my killing speed by x amount of time (which isn't actually very much since CB already deals dmg very fast). Deadly strike combined with crushing blow is going to take my dmg to even higher levels (and by this I do not mean that deadly strike would double the life taken away with crushing blow because it doesn't).

You said that with my skill points allocation I would have "crappy dmg". This isn't true at all. Let's compare things a little, I'll use the weapons stated in my previous post:

My build:

Stormlash with 270%ed (not perfect ed) = 11 - 296 weapon dmg (154 average dmg)

Oath eth scourge with 300%ed (not perfect either) = 18 - 480 weapon dmg (249 average dmg)

Now frenzy dmg with 200 str points after gear and 383% ed from skills:

Stormlash= 76-2022 (1049 avg)

Oath= 123-3278 (1700 avg)

So, my average dmg with one double swing of frenzy would be 2749 points of physical dmg. With DS, higher ed% higher dmg weapons etc this could be enhanced to even greater amounts.


Your build using the same weapons and stats but with 687% ed from skills:

Stormlash: 110-2922 (1516 avg)

Oath: 178-4738 (2458 avg)

Average dmg with one frenzy swing: 3974


Now you're doing about 1200 more dmg with every frenzy swing. This sounds like a lot but when you look at the numbers, 2749 average dmg isn't too shabby either especially when I'm able to stand in the middle of monsters without being hit (due to my much higher defense) rather than taking hits all the time.

I have a BvC barb(NL), a frenzy barb (L) and a conc barb(NL) myself, and I'm making a singer right now.

Getting to lvl 85 shouldn't be a problem, with fast rushes you can get to lvl 85 in a few hours if you manage to find decent baal runs. It's the levels beyond 90 when it gets a lot slower. Of course in single player this would be a different task.