Seismic Slam is my personal favorite. The whole reason why I play babarian is his/her power. Seismic Slam gives you great feeling of being extremely powerful. Try it with the Shattered Ground rune and you'll know what I mean.
It's not only visually awesome, but works beautifully with the right combination of strategies and skills. It has no cool down: when positioned correctly, its knockback gives you the Babarian's best crowed control IMO. It has great range. This helps both pushing away ranged attackers, and gives you safety when you are facing hard hitting foes. It does decent damage (though it can never be your primary damage output).
Here's what I do:
Fast hitting mob: Seismic Slam towards my side / back to prevent a complete surround. Revenge with occasional leap backwards usually keep me alive as I cleave the mob down.
Hard hitting foes: This is a challenge for barbarians like me who heavily relies on revenge for health recovery. Revenge activates at X percentage of time you are hit, regardless of how hard you get hit. I find myself sometimes having to jump out of combat 2-5 seconds after engagement. It's not fun having dangerous foes chasing you when you are low on health and potion is on cooldown. Seismic slam helps greatly here. Jump out of the action, slam the foes so that they cannot get closer to you. Many of these hard hitting monsters are resistant to knockback. But at least you are not getting hit, and you can get your heath back if you activate ignore pain with Ignorance is Bliss rune.
Here's my current build: Seismic Slam with Shattered Ground, Cleave with Rupture, Revenge with Vengeance is mine, Leap with Iron impact, Ignore Pain with Ignorance is Bliss, Call of the Ancients with the Council Rises as a panic button in case everything is on cooldown.
What i found really cool is having relentless passive when you got 25% of your life left you can cast spells for no fury, so i drop to below 25% and then from distance i spam seismic slam non stop until enemy dies xD
I've seen a lot of people talking about how Seismic Slam is not a good skill to use, but in my experience I've seen the opposite. I love the rune that gives it a 70% chance to stun, combined with ground stomp, and bash/frenzy (depending on if I'm dual wielding or using a two hander) with their respective runes that add a stun chance, and Furious Charge runed with the cooldown reduction per enemy hit. So far it's making bosses quite easy, and most packs, even ones with tougher affix combinations managable.
Seismic slam is great but I haven't used it much. Being able to keep hard packs in hell(and inferno ofc but I am not there yet) away from you when needed is for sure very valuable. For me though it sort of goes against what I enjoy when I play a barbarian. I like to do the crowd controlling with for example stomp and charge. Always having to be in melee range to do damage or apply the effect. Slam feels more of a hybrid build for me. Doesn't give me the same sense of awsomeness and brutality of being a "pure barb" that laughs at danger and feels no fear. To express it abit silly :P
Yep, love Seismic Slam. Huge damage, large radius, massive critical hits. The knockback is very useful for taking on powerful groups, and of course the graphics and sounds are just too damn sweet and powerful to shake a stick at.
Just had a cool experience with seismic slam. Haven't played much multiplayer, first game was yesterday, hell act2 a little bit of questing. Anyway so the dude I played with yesterday joined my game and we played up until the quest where you are getting Zultan Kuuls body. After we had played for about an hour a great 2-hander dropped with obscene amounts of damage range. At first we couldn't get things to work that great for us, he tried out whirlwind with it. However I specced this build: http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...SVg!deb!YZZccY and he went for a seismic slam range build.
What we did was basically I just rotated aoe taunt and stomp and tanked. When either of those effects wasn't active he ran away and spammed seismic slam with the 15fury rune cost. It really worked out great. Was the only way we could get it to work. He tried whirlwind build at first but wihtout a shield you die very fast if mobs so much as poke you.
Just thought it was kinda cool with two barbs one tanking and the other glasscannon, building rage while under the protection of taunt and stomp. And then play as a ranged character for a while.
I find hammer of the ancients to be better damage most of the time (smaller AOE but more often than not makes up for it in damage). However, in hell and inferno where going melee without incredible gear (or some extreme tank gear+skill setup to let someone else do the killing) is probably not very wise, and thus seismic slam with strength from earth works great. The extra AOE is just a bonus for me, with the real benefit being a ranged attack that is stronger than weapon throw.
Seismic slam is visually great and has the "feel-good" quality but you detach yourself from those emotions, you will find that it is really too little damage for too much fury spent.
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