Ok so before You shout at me:
Dude PTR ended over a week ago…
I did test PTR on single player via the -launch startup parameter and hero edited barb specifically for this purpose.
I tested a lot of things but this time I’d like to concentrate on Grim Ward…
As to what I understand this skill used to have low usability due to it’s uselessness for melee barbarian.
I asume Devs inteded Grim Ward to be Physical Immunity breaker for throw barb, the only barb that is able to tolerate his foes running away… however this skill, still has nuances that need to be dealt with.
As of current due to game mechanics the Grim Ward skill can only be cast on “soft” corpse type which excludes a lot of enemies. like ghost like, soul like, and skeleton like mobs… while i can understand the first two classes beeing excluded logically wise, i don’t get why skeletons are excluded since the ward is just a pile of bones technically, so in theory Grim Ward should be usable on a skeleton type of corpse ( i mean even necromancer can raise skleletons from ghosts and other skeletons right?) so what’s wrong with barb making a bone construct out of skeleton bones?
secondly and this is even bigger concern:
Due to Grim Ward applying fear via terror curse “aurastate” Bosses, Champions, Uniques, and SuperUniques are totaly unaffected by the curse, so they are unaffected by the damageresist% debuff as well.
the solution to the no use aginst elites would be to change the aurastate to decrepify, and forgo the “runaway fear motive” in favour of “paralyzed by fear” where monsters get a significant debuff to movement and attack speed, and also take damageresit% penalty. This step is needed because decrepify does work on elite monsters and terror curse does not.
This is mandatory step to fix throw barb. Berserk is not a solution for them since double throw doesn’t benefit from it, and going melee for a throw barb isn’t really an option, since one would have to specialize in other weapon masteries for it, due to attack rating beeing too low to reliably hit anything otherwise.
You can claim: get a Lacerator all you want… Sure but lacerator doesn’t drop on classic, and throw mastery has been around since classic. Sure it was rearly used due to a lot of reasons, but lately when Devs decided to fix throw mastery for both D2R Classic and D2R Expansion, i think the time has come to solve the PI barier too, and before You say You can switch to fire and poison pots to finish off PIs, well I’m already aproching nightmare in classic and i haven’t found any throwing potions beyond what dropped twice from shrines ( which are always the medium tier ones in quantity of ~7 through a total of 4 acts.) I haven’t found any magical or rare throwing wapons either, in fact they don’t drop at all, in neither quality, besides ocasional weapon rack drop, or buying at town vendors ( i’m currently using two Balanced Axes 15%ed +2ar superior ones from Fara, the main act2 vendor). the plan is to get to high clvl and imbue some exceptional vendor throwing weapons, and later 6xpskull reroll them and pray to get something usefull.
the fact that throwing weapons vanish when at 0 quantity in classic doesn’t hepl either, but I can live with that. replenish quantity affix nor etherals are out ofthe question in classic as well, I can live with this too, just how to deal with them damn Physical Immunes as a classic throw barb?