So I saved up for a grief and went berserk in travincal. I found Cham, Ber, Jah and tons of other runes during two days of farming. I havent found a Ber in 1.5 years of offline play but whatever.
So I have my grief, rhyme, IK head, arachnids, Highlords, fortitude, dwarfstar, nagel and IK boots.
What should I go for now?
Do you need Rhyme for survival at this point if you’ve got Fort and D-star? You could drop it for another Grief, or eBotD or eDeath. I usually run Gores as boots for barb, but do have IK Boots on my budget Trav Barb, since they’re pretty decent.
I use 2x Ali Baba on swap for horking, and you can add ist or lem to them depending on if GF or MF is your main goal (or mix and match). I guess you’d need another source of CBF though. Could come from Cham or even Trang Belt, but then you’d have to give up arachnids. TBH the +1 skill isn’t as helpful to Barb as to other characters, and the FCR isn’t really helpful since you’re using Fort and not Enigma so no tele (unless you’re using charges?), so it may not be that bad of a trade off.
What gloves do you have? LoH is usually my go to for the demon damage and IAS helps as well on most builds.
I’ve played around with Crown of Thieves vs. IK Helm for trav barb as well, for the leach, life, fire res and inherent GF, but only 1 socket and no MF, so IK may be better depending on your goals. IK Helm with Boots gets you that nice extra 25% MF bonus on the boots.
I’d approach it like this - what are you lacking in? If you’re having trouble surviving (with Dwarf-Star and Fort and Grief kill speed I’d assume probably not?) then the thing to get next would probably be different than what you want for more kill speed.
Are you horking? “Went Berserk” literally means using Berserk build?
Yes, berserk build and I dont have a switch for horking. I also updated to an arreats face that I cham’d so I currently have Gerke’s instead of rhyme, dont ask me why.
Yea, LoH as gloves. eDeath sounds pretty cool, is that basically a stat stick? Does frenzy become better than berserk if I have good enough weapons?
Thanks for the long answer.
edit: also damn, just realized what you meant with barb skills not being that wonderful.
Yeah good point, if you’re Berserking then the 2nd weapon would mostly be a stat stick, so what you need would drive what you wear there. That also means something like Death probably doesn’t make sense, since the mods that make it awesome like damage and CB wouldn’t come into play unless you actually hit with it.
I’ve traditionally used Berserk more as a 1 point wonder support skill for PIs, so someone else on the forum can probably give you a better answer as to Berserk vs. other skills. I’ve enjoyed both the WW and Frenzy playstyle, but Berserk is very common for a Find Item Barb.
I know there’s some playstyles that involve leap/tele in to a champ/elite pack, howling the minions away, then zerking the elite (or champions) to death that’s quite effective.
People enjoy more generalized Berserk builds as well, but I don’t have much experience in this area.
I’d say for general PVM play WW or Frenzy could be better with the appropriate weapons just for the sake of having better multi-target damage, but I am likely biased. I really like the ability to leach and hit a few targets at once. For more boss/champ/elite pack focused play, Berserk may always be better? Not sure.
Mostly I just meant that in general while + skills items are useful to barbs, they aren’t necessarily as good as the boost that other classes get from them. +skills is very important for a caster that gets “flat damage” increases from skills. Barb damage is tied to weapon base damage, and between items and skills you tend to have a lot of %ed already. So if you’re already at like 400% ED between items and skills, adding another 10% from incresaing the level of a skill is only 2.5% of a damage increase.
So items like Arachnid Mesh are more useful to casters than Barbs, typically, because that +1 skill is more beneficial to them. However, if you tele with Enigma or charges, the 20% FCR could be pretty huge. Often on barbs something like Nosferatu’s, Verdungo’s, or String of Ears are equally or more useful due to the life, damage reduction, leach, IAS, etc. bonuses that those items have.