Berserk barb equip questions

[Nest]

Ahoj,
let me first apologize for a very long post, I figured I'd give all the information you people might possibly need.

My semi-budget barb is doing ok at lvl 77 and in that he's my first successful barb in hardcore ever! The combination of selfcast fade + venom + enchant works lovely.
But, I can foresee running into attack rating problems and also need to increase damage to keep a reasonable killspeed beyond act3 hell.

Goals I would like to reach:
80 ias / 12 frame berserk - check
90 fhr - check
75% all resists - check (while faded)
enough (about 10k ?) attack rating - currently around 7400. multipliers are berserk, mastery, enchant
65+ % chance for double damage - currently ~30%
enough life for hardcore - only 2900 at the moment
any damage reduction (percent and integer. might run nilly soon!)
any magicfind or goldfind bonus

LCS berserk damage is 1900-5300 including my own enchant and venom, with 75% crushing blow.

My current equipment:
the good:
- obedience great poleaxe
- treachery duskshroud
- guillaumes ias socketed
- (low) ravenfrost
- string of ears
the bad:
- 8 str, 12 dex, dual resist ring - to be replaced by ??
- rare ammy +2 mastery, light res, some odd mods - to be replaced by highlords
- tearhaunch - to be replaced by goreriders
the dubious:
- magnus skin (with 35 life set bonus) OR laying of hands OR ??
charms:
- mix of resists, attack rating and life

Skillwise I'm looking at max BO and berserk, ~15 in mastery, 10 warcry, 4 natural resist, 1 leap attack and find item. I seem to have plenty of attack rating multipliers, so points in mastery might not be the way to go. Howl synergy might actually be more useful against tough monster packs than warcry (never used the skill, but one of the guide authors here likes it very much).

What I'm really looking for are ideas to get more base ar while also improving deadly strike and possibly life. To help with the latter, some strength on the items that replace my "bad" ones would save points for vita.

And since I'm a perfectionist with this guy: I would like to include some useful chance to cast spells.
All I can think of right now are dracs and souldrainers with lifetap or weaken curse. (Yes, I do use battle cry, but its radius is low and I'm busy enough keeping all mobs stunned.)

I can invest ~ 1 Gul and 3 Lum runes plus a bunch of PGems, so please don't throw any high runewords at me. :wink3:

One more thing: what merc would you use with a warcry/berserker like this?

Ideas? Thanks!

[peterpaulrubens]

I would max Shout and Howl before Mastery. Twice as much damage gain per point at the cost of a little AR (of which Berserk has a relatively large bonus already), and two excellent skills in their own right. Shout will make your merc really tough when coupled with BO, and when you face magic immunes and are forced to use your 1-point Concentrate it will help quite a bit. Never mind how much your party will love it.. if you're brave enough to party in HC.
Howl is a great skill for crowd control.. especially for a build that's going to have no defense, no shield, and kills one enemy at a time.

Life Tap won't return life to you when Berserking (magic damage not physical) so Dracs are underwhelming IMO. Soul Drainers also won't let you leech so those are sort of ho-hum as well. Personally I'd go with crafted blood gloves, Bloodfists, or Laying of Hands...

I'd probably use an Insight/Prayer merc. You won't be able to leech so some continuous healing will probably be welcome, and WarCry can burn up mana pretty fast so the Meditation will free you from mana pots.. Otherwise I'd use a A1 Cold merc.. her Inner Sight will work wonders for any AR concerns you'd have, and it's always nice to have a ranged attacker coupled with a melee build...

[crawlingdeadman]

the way i went was max howl, zerk, warcry, mastery, and bo (not in that order) i like the long duration of stun on warcry and the huge radius on howl. ofc you dont use both at the same time, but rather situationally. i was using a might merc with some random gear, but mostly to keep him from killing things for nili to ce i kept him dead.

for semi budget gear i was using to run dkeys:
arreat
oath highland blade (great weapon)
stormshield (i know a lot of people just use two handers, but i like block + dr)
lionheart (there are a lot of options, but this had a whole lot of mods i wanted and i had one already made)
LoH
low dungo
raven
rare ring with ar, and dex as well as leech (for if i'm using conc)
gores
highlords

i didnt have any trouble running dkeys as fast as a teleporter or at least near the time. i wasnt so pleased with my ar against hell baal, but slowly i have gotten a few ar grand charms and small charms (some modded) and i believe i have him up to 88-89% chance to hit.

ps. oath is awesome!

[Nest]

Thank you both for your replys.

peterpaulrubens,
I opted to invest into mastery as long as the deadly strike bonus keeps rising steadily. With the diminishing returns kicking in, I will now probably leave it alone in favor of a synergy. From the descriptions here and my experiences in CS that will likely be howl, the merc wont get proper armor to really benefit from shout any time soon.

Souldrainers would serve mostly for the chance to cast weaken. Blood gloves would be redundant, since i already have loads of crushing blow.
Do magnus skin really rank so low in your opinion? They give me nearly the same life bonus as bloodfists plus 100 attack rating, fire resistance and more ias. The fhr isn't needed with my current setup.
Dracs offer needed strength, lifetap for the merc (biggest bonus right there) and occasionally for myself and a bit of life/kill. They actually seem great to me right now.. :D

Insight/prayer is the merc I already use, good to know someone's of the same mind.


crawlingdeadman,
like I said I'll make a decent level howl my next goal. Thanks for sharing your experience. May I ask how you handled your mana needs? I can only imagine a bad blue potion habit.. :fortuneteller:


PS: I just remembered that obedience includes an eth rune for -25% enemy defense, so my chance to hit might not be so bad after all.

[crawlingdeadman]

i honestly didnt even bother with mana. i potted when i needed to but it wasnt all that frequently. i only bothered with it after i put enigma on him. i use an insight on my merc, but pretty much only need it when teleporting.

[crawlingdeadman]

the way i went was max howl, zerk, warcry, mastery, and bo (not in that order) i like the long duration of stun on warcry and the huge radius on howl. ofc you dont use both at the same time, but rather situationally. i was using a might merc with some random gear, but mostly to keep him from killing things for nili to ce i kept him dead.


sorry for the double post, but i realized i had too many skills listed as maxed for my guy. i checked him and i didnt max wc like i believed. i'd thought about it to increase the stun duration, but i had forgotten that i wound up not doing it that particular way.

if i had it to do again though (and for hc i'd think you would want the stun length high) i'd max zerk, bo, warcry, howl, then work on mastery or possibly get wc up a bit higher at least before finishing mastery. wc and howl are two amazing skills and with a 1point taunt make everything much easier.

[Damric]

I like magnus' gloves. For a berserker it has exactly the modifiers you need. A bloodfist or crafted blood glove could be better in some situations. Swap the other ring for another ravenfrost and it will also help for attack rating a lot. Insight/prayer is a very good merc, providing you more mana than you need, and descent life regeneration. You might consider switching to a might mercinary if you don't need the life regeneration, but experiment on that one. I'm guessing your obedience polearm chops through baal pretty fast. Honestly I never thought of using one like that, and it sounds good.