The Barbarian single-target DPS challenge!

[HardRock]

Plus, I think it applies to actual "thorns" on gear, not "reflected" damage.

Are you talking about Contempt for Weakness? It's not related to thorns in any way. Ignore Pain will reduce a 10000 hit to 3500 and CfW will reflect half of the absorbed 6500 to your attacker, which is of course 3250 damage in that scenario. Thorns comes into play on top of this and neither is reduced by any form of damage mitigation.

CfW's strength lies in the fact, that it seems to reflect damage even to ranged attackers. There isn't many effects that are capable of doing this.

[Such Violent Storms]

That is correct. These skills, from my experience with theorycrafting (world of warcraft, gw, rift, diablo 2, as well, as warcraft III customs of all sorts and forms...), these skills pay a huge "burst" tax. Damage per amount of time invested is really important,... and if you can't cast something for a minute or so, that value goes down very rapidly.

You theorycrafted in GW? My god, so did I. I would sit in paw・ned^2 for HOURS making single and team builds. For both PvE and PvP (GvG/HA). It was insane.

Currently I like the first 2 top builds. I think adeptly using HotA with Berzerker Rage is really quite clever.

[ElementEight]

I think we can pretty much break up the problem like this:

-For burst, the 3 Boons are pretty much necessary. They provide an insane amount of damage in a very short period of time.
-30% from Marauder's rage is hard to skip as well.
-Then, the question goes by: Do you want to maximize fury generation and use Smash, or do you just want to focus on Frenzy?

for #1) Bash/Instigation + Smash
for #2) Frenzy/Maniac or Sidearm (depending on whether or not Maniac benefits all skills) + Best Served Cold

Hardrock/Superstate, get to work !

[HardRock]

To be honest, if Dread Bomb can be spammed with Relentless, then I don't think anything can top its damage if you combine it with a high Fury pool, Marauder's Rage and the 3 über skills.

If not, then I would swap Dread Bomb to Smash.

[ElementEight]

To be honest, if Dread Bomb can be spammed with Relentless, then I don't think anything can top its damage if you combine it with a high Fury pool, Marauder's Rage and the 3 über skills.

If not, then I would swap Dread Bomb to Smash.

Definitely, but now, since we have an answer(s), we have to study viability

[HardRock]

I thought the objective of this challenge was to come up with a build that could deal the most damage, without concerning ourselves with our health. I doubt there's anything better for this scenario than Relentless with either Dread Bomb or Smash. Now, where's my medal? (kudos if you know what game that's from )

[ElementEight]

I thought the objective of this challenge was to come up with a build that could deal the most damage, without concerning ourselves with our health.

Correct. This is how Elitist Jerks proceed as well. But if a strategy is deemed unviable (for instance, a non-tank warrior tanking in order to generate more fury for more damage), they take the next best thing possible. Which is why I noted multiple builds!

[Karpalo]

To be honest, if Dread Bomb can be spammed with Relentless, then I don't think anything can top its damage if you combine it with a high Fury pool, Marauder's Rage and the 3 über skills.

If not, then I would swap Dread Bomb to Smash.

I think it can be spammed, but it probably only counts the base damage of the weapon throw which is 120%

[Karpalo]

I'm really unconvinced by Thrive on Chaos as a whole, though; you have to worry about quite a bit of fury generation for a "mere" 25% IAS and 10% Crit. I don't think those will end up being worth skipping on Insanity, especially if it's not even possible to keep it up permanently. And then, if it is possible to do so, does it even yield the same bonus that 25% IAS + 10% Crit + 100% damage for 15 seconds would?

Generally i would say the same about thrive of chaos, but in a scenario where you are beating a training dummy it should come out on top in a form of increased fury generation, which means more dread bombs, and increased crit with the bonus crit damage. As long you can keep thrive of chaos rolling with this build, which you can't in real world, then it's better. Any other scenario i would pick insanity in a heartbeat.

Insanity is 1.25% crit, 3.1% AS and 12.5% damage on average divided for the whole duration. Perfectly looped thrive of chaos is that 10% crit and 25% constant AS boost. Naturally if you pair insanity with other cooldowns like earthquake it becomes notably more valuable. Anyways if we talk about 120 second fight total damage easily exceeds 50k % of weapon damage.

Pure frenzy spam with 50% crit and 100% thrive of chaos uptime with bash damage bonus would do pretty close to 60k % WD. If we assume 100% uptime on WotB that means it's close to 25 fury generated per second that's a dread bomb around every 5 seconds. With very rough napkin math that doesn't account usage of bash or revenge in the rotation we get nearly 70k % weapon damage in 120 seconds when we are using 1 APS weapon.

Edit: Damn actually i forgot to account battle rage. Anyways that's very rough rounding, simplified model that takes 7% crit from nowhere and doesn't account the dps loss of adding bash, battle rage or revenge into the rotation, but to be fair it lacks battle rage damage boost so actually it's bit short on damage. I would say that you can get roughly 6 times the character sheet weapon damage as a sustained dps in the ideal scenario. Add crit, crit damage and AS from gear to further multiply the damage.

[AlexanderBarin]

With Dread Bomb, wouldn't you run out of corpses to throw?