Barbarian Wacries skills rework by Zax

Warcries Skills

I would like to present my changes to Barbarian Warcries skills just like I did it with Combat Masteries and Combat skill in links below:

Barbarian Combat Skills rework by Zax

Barbarian Combat Masteries Skills rework by Zax


Howl

NOTE: Nothing changed here, skill is fine as it is.


Find Potion

NOTE: Find Potion is unchanged but there is change in synergy from it to Find item.


Shout

  • New synergy from Iron Skin adding +1 Damage reduction for invested skill point.
  • Shout can be used in town

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NOTE: It makes more sense to level shout now, because its damage synergy to Concentrate skill. Shout can be also casted in town, its not fair to Barbarian that other characters can use support buffs in town so now he can do it too :slight_smile:


Taunt

NOTE: Nothing changed here. I wanted to do something better with skill making it worth leveling but it was very problematic, because skill function is hardcoded and there is nothing I could do with it even when I tried several hours. I wanted to be usefull on bigger area so you could pull a lot monsters to you, but it simply wasnt possible. Its possible to buff negative effects on it tho, but since barb mercenary is also using that skill and far more effectively than Barbarian himself, its problematic to not overpower it. So if anyone has some cool idea here, please share it.


Battle Cry

  • New effect -5% block chance bonus at level 1 with increase by -2% every level

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NOTE: Barbarian often struggle to hit monsters not only because of attack ratting, but also because of high monster block chance. This makes certain skills a lot less effective even if you have high attack ratting. So Battle cry now lowers enemy block chance making it easier for you to hit the high block targets.


Find Item

  • Skill no longer increase % chance on its own with higher levels and is fixed at 50% on level 1.
  • Mana cost was increased starting at 29 mana at level 1 and going down with cost by -1 mana per skill level.
  • Synergy from Find Potion is twice as strong now with 2% instead of 1% per invested point

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NOTE: Find item is great skill for finding items, but its quite useless on low levels because % chance of success is quite low. I decided to make skill effective right away but with higher mana cost so player cant just spam it easily. Invested skill points make it cheaper and there is also new synergy from it to Grim Ward. You can make Find item usefull now with just little skill investment and not just dumping like 30 points into Find potion/Find item to have decent % chance and you can save a lot of points which can go elsewhere. But it is still possible to max it of course by investing in Find potion if you want to go for that 90% chance.


Battle Orders

  • Base duration at level 1 doubled from 30 seconds to 60 seconds, additional duration per level is unchanged
  • Natural Resistances skill is synergy to Battle orders giving +1,5 Magic damage reduction per invested point.
  • Battle Orders can be used in town
  • Casting animation changed to make it more different than shout animation

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NOTE: Battle orders is like Shout possible to cast in town now, same reasoning as with Shout, its not fair to Barbarian that other characters can use support buffs in town so now he can do it too. Base duration was increased because I feel like it was way too short, almost not worth using it at first few levels because you have to keep recasting it all the time.


Grim Ward

  • Additional +5% damage taken synergy from Find potion
  • Slow effect changed from 0-75% to 5% at level 1 and +1,5% per skill level
  • Effective ranged halved
  • Can be used on all bodies like Find item skill
  • Can be casted from distance

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NOTE: I decided to make various modifications to Grim Ward to make it more usable as currently mechanic of casting kind of suck and it cannot be used on most undead monsters so there is almost no reason to use it over Howl which provides fear to all non elite monsters without special body requirement. I also added new synergy from Find item to provide more choices with leveling skills as I personaly hate to level up find potion just to have good Grim Ward.


War Cry

  • Synergies replaced by Stun+Battle cry and they are both at 9%

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NOTE: War Cry build is cool but it require way too many points to max it so now you can save 20 skill points and use it elsewhere as one synergy was removed and two active synergies were made stronger. War cry also now works nicely together with Battle cry as it removes block chance from monsters so War cry will not have issues to hit monsters with high block chance.


Battle Command

  • Can be casted in town
  • Bonus to +all skills is increasing by +1 for every 5 invested skill points (capped at +5 all skills)

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NOTE: Battle command always used to be one point wonder skill and there is no reason to level it up above level 1. I wanted to change that and add some benefit of investing more points so +all skill bonus is now increasing with more invested points. They have to be invested in skill, having +all skills on equip do not increase it. Battle command was also allowed to be used in town for same reason as with Shout and Battle orders.

Thats it for Warcries, feel free to make suggestions or share what you think about my changes.

3 Likes

Doing some fine work there Zax. Always a good read whenever you post your mod efforts.

Really wish I had the time to do this kind of thing myself. Thought about talking to someone on Phrozen Keep about soft coding some of those hard coded functions of Taunt or anything you else you might run into?
Not sure if this falls under data modding or not, though. Technically it’d still be data modding but I don’t understand the nuances enough to make that call.

Well i asked one of the most experienced d2r moder about it and apparently its impossible as its hardcoded server function tied with that effect.

@Zax is there a way to contact you via some PM?

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You can find me on our discord which is my d2r home base :slight_smile:

Under nephalem rank members on right side,same nickname as here Zax.

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I think the best change is the battle cry one cause a ton of bosses have block chance, which make barbs underwhelming in general compared to casters. The battle command one seems a bit too op imo, a lot of people use barb for the buffs on an alt account, an additional +4 skills from battle command is easily a 10-20% increase for most casters, so this change benefits casters the most after all. Additional all skills for barb himself is not that attractive.

I disagree as barbarian has a lot of buff type or passive skills so he will get a lot from +all skills stuff.

The changes i suggest are mostly for my mod so i dont care about how they will affect other classes. But yeah it would be probably too op using it on support barb to buff others.

I disagree. It is not too OP to gain more + skills from Battle Command because in order to gain +5 you have to sacrifice 19, instead of the standard 1, and barbarians are already greatly limited on their skills.