Season 4 - Improve Concentrate Synergies

General Discussion
1

For Season 4, I urge the developers to buff Concentrate by improving the synergies as shown below (e.g. similar to Berserk synergy change in 2.4) to improve the viability of this defensive-oriented character and expand build diversity. The goal is to keep the proposed suggestions sensible and not drastically alter the design or fantasy so it can be taken into consideration.

If you’re a Concentrate Barbarian, you’re going to want to use Iron Skin to maximize your defense. Therefore, it makes sense to replace Bash synergy w/ Iron Skin as it better compliments the skill while adjusting the other synergies as follows…

Concentrate Synergies

  • Battle Orders: +15% Damage per level
  • Berserk: +3% Magic Damage per level
  • Iron Skin: +1% PDR per level

The reason Iron Skin and not Shout was to incorporate stronger tradeoffs with skill choices as Iron Skin is typically inferior to Shout past a single hard point invested because Shout gets the same per level defense bonus yet affects the entire party. Lastly, increase the effectiveness of Battle Orders and Berserk synergies by bumping up their respective percentages as shown above.

Concentrate - Skill Point Distribution

With the changes to Concentrate synergies shown above, here is a quick example of how you can personalize this build and offers alot of flexibility (assuming 110 skill points acquired by level 99)…

Warcries

  • Howl: 1 Point
  • Shout: 1 Point
  • Battle Orders: 20 Points (Max synergy)
  • Battle Command: 1 Point
  • Find Potion: 1 Point (MF w/ +skills)
  • Find Item: 1 Point (MF w/ +skills)

Combat Masteries

  • Weapon Mastery: 20 Points (Whatever weapon type you choose, max appropriate mastery)
  • Increased Stamina: 1 Point
  • Increased Speed: 1 Point
  • Iron Skin: 20 Points (Max synergy)
  • Natural Resistance: 1 Point

Combat Skills

  • Bash: 1 Point (Prerequisite)
  • Stun: 1 Point (Prerequisite)
  • Concentrate: 20 Points (Primary attack)
  • Berserk: 20 Points (Max synergy, alternate attack dealing w/ physical immunes)
2 Likes
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I like the idea to improve concentrate. Though, I would suggest revising synergies to provide stronger tradeoffs with skill choices. I’m assuming Bash was eliminated as synergy?

While some exceptions exist, generally;

Battle Orders, Weapons Mastery, and Shout will always be maxed with a concentrate barbarian, providing highly convenient synergies.

Lets assume single points are invested to Battle Command, increased speed, and Natural Resistance.

At level 99 that leaves 22 points to invest into other skills (assuming bash is eliminated) , which allows for

Berserk synergy to also be maxed

Or

Max Iron skin ( which is more beneficial to concentrate build )

+1% (+20% Magic damage at 20 ) is a very small bonus vs. utilizing Iron skin.

With that said, Berserk bonus is negligible compared to the utility of another defense bonus. Instead, I would suggest that Berserk convert 2.5% physical damage to Magic damage per level (50% at 20) AND 1.5% Chance of deadly strike per hit (30% at 20)

Wanting to see more trade off options, I would suggest that rather than weapons mastery provide - targets defense, for battlecry to gain a -3% targets defense per level from concentrate. This way, if a player decides to stack skills and warcry skillers, you very closely approach -200% Targets defense ( -100% in PVP (I think this works like this?)) with Battle Cry. Also, I would provide concentrate a flat attack rating bonus from Battlecry.

Considering the potential desire to stack warcry skillers with the above option, I would also suggest that Iron skin, not shout, provide synergy bonus.

Iron Skin: +10% Damage per level
Battle Orders: +10% Damage per level
Berserk: Converts 2.5% Physical damage to magic damage and 1.5% chance deadly strike per level
Battlecry: Provides +25 to attack rating per level AND Gains -3% Targets defense per level from Concentrate

1 Like
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Boring synergies that wont change the fact that ST melee attacks are awful and need to scale to absurd levels if their atk speed and weapon damage aren’t buffed.

You can hit like 2k% skill damage on leap attack after its change and its still not good enough on p8 unless you use grim ward for the 110% phys damage resistance debuff.

Berserk is so good because it ignores the fact that every monster in hell reduces your melee damage by 50% at the minimum and you can hit fast atk speeds with a griefpb.

Bash, stun, concentrate seem designed for big beefy 2handers and as such they need to have synergies that give innate crushing blow, deadly strike, or straight up grief damage (like bash does but needs to be higher).

If a lvl 30 bash had 100 flat damage then all the sudden it’d be useable with a beefy two hander. Have stun synergize and give 1.5% deadly strike and concentrate 1% crushing blow and now bash is a potential pvp and endgame skill, if not that an early easy option for crushing blow for leveling. Having innate crushing blow on a skill would dramatically improve the barb early game. Bash’s innate grief damage should synergize and carry over to stun and concentrate but at reduced % (stun gets 75% of it, concentrate 50%). Note: you can change deadly strike to chance of Critical strike. It doesn’t change much but keeps the flavor of barbs and their weapon masteries revolving around crit).

Stun should also hit the stun duration cap at 10 points (same as shockwave werebear) and every point after that should dramatically increase it’s attack rating. Bash would give stun flat damage 75%, concentrate would give flat AR to its attacks. The point being you want a lvl 20 stun to pretty much always hit like shockwave does (because its a spell).

Concentrate would get 50% flat bash damage so like 50 flat damage, it would be uninterruptible, and stun would give it 2% skill attack speed per point. This would incentivize players to use 2handed weapons over grief. 40% skill ias is no joke for 2h weapons which desperately need more ways to reach their final fpa breakpoints.

This way now you have bash for bossing as it will have high flat damage, 30% deadly strike and 20% crushing blow. These also help bring forward weapon choices that aren’t just grief or death (though they will still be good). And 60 points would also make bash a good option for nightmare farming bosses for the early barb experience. I guarantee you if bash worked like this Insight barbarian would be a thing for early leveling. You’d be able to reach nearly 100% critical strike chance and add 100 flat damage to an insight polearm, and bring a good aura to yourself and grps. 20% cb on a weapon with no CB is yuge. It would be an extremely powerful (albeit slow) way to progress as a barb that would top out by the mid late game when gear can cover the innate buffs a synergized bash would have. Not only that, these changes would give a mild buff to a5 2h barbs.

Stun would become a consistent st technical stun. Which is niche but at least it would be more serviceable than it is now. If anything stun should exceed the 10 second cap being that it’s single target. A max stun should stun for much longer than shockwave imo.

Concentrate would be your safe, fast attack that you would use surrounded or switch to from bash when CB loses its effectiveness on low hp targets.

1 Like
4

I’d rather not change the skill, but change 2-handed weapons to hit adjacent targets (like Diablo Hellfire barb, possibly at a fraction of damage).

1 Like
5

I like your idea of replacing Bash synergy with Iron Skin, bumped Berserk synergy by a few % points, and also think a new Battle Cry synergy offering raw attack rating fits the theme and will go ahead and update the OP…

Concentrate Synergies

  • Iron Skin: +10% Damage per level
  • Battle Orders: +10% Damage per level
  • Berserk: +3% Magic Damage per level
  • Battle Cry: +25 Attack Rating per level

In my opinion, Stun is a totally utterly useless skill, but fixing that mess is beyond the scope of this discussion. :stuck_out_tongue:

Why does Concentrate have to stay subpar? We are talking about reasonable changes to improve the viability of this build.

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6

Because IMHO, the main weakness of this and other similar skills is that it is one hit - one target. Any other considerations are secondary.
If 2H weapons were multi-target, many skills would become better automatically. There would be a choice between more defensive (1H weapon + shield) vs more aggresive (2H weapon) strategies.

1 Like
7

Respectfully disagree. I’ve been playing a Conc. Barb this season and it’s been a fun challenge. I like slower pace single target fights and don’t want drastic changes to the skill as flavor will be lost.

With that said, I don’t like the fact I have to whack the enemy 3 to 4 times to kill target. If I could kill in 1 to 2 hits would be much better. All the developers need to do is strengthen single target damage.

Lastly, dumping points into Bash is a waste and needs to be changed to Iron Skin or Shout. Simple improvements to Concentrate is all the skill needs.

8

It doesn’t need to be multi target they just need good synergizes.

Read my previous post. Give bash crushing blow synergy, deadly strike, and give it more grief damage and it will be good for early game bossing. Give conc attack speed, bash grief damage synergy.

All these other suggestions are not good.

You can’t just give bash, stun, conc meager little 10% skill damage synergies. As i said before leap attack can get up to 2000% skill damage and it still sucks without grim ward’s amp damage.

9

Did you even read my post?

These synergies are garbage. Conc is a single target attack and needs wildly better synergies that the same old boring “10% damage per point.” 400% skill damage for 40 points? a fortitude and gives 300%. 400 strength is 400%.

Conc is ST and gives a massive defense buff. It needs synergies that incentivizes players to go big D with a huge two hander and what they need are meaningful synergies that buff core stats like flat damage, and attack speed. Conc also needs to be uninterruptible.

10

Yes, but my concern is you are talking about overhauling multiple skills and I’m afraid the suggestions will be dead on arrival. I would love if the developers changed Bash by granting 1-2% crushing blow per level in addition to boosting flat damage, but the developers are only going to do relatively minor changes such as switching synergies (like Berserk in Patch 2.4). I could be wrong, but I think going forward we can only expect minor changes.

11

I like this idea and prefer it a lot, over aoe/splash which often gets suggested.

Btw, 2h attack animations are in dire need of improvement. I don’t like how Paladin is swinging a 2h sword as if he is splitting wood all the time. I was very disappointed when I saw they dint change the animations for something more sensible. Like what they did with Fury.

They somehow also made Zeal’s last 3 swings look really dumb.

1 Like
12

These aren’t overhauls at all. If anything they can treat conc like maul on werebear which would be interesting and wouldnt be hard to do.

Bash already has flat damage, it just needs more. Stun is bad and will always be bad so the best you can do is give it nice synergy boosting capabilities.

1 Like
13

If the developers are willing to put in the effort as you suggested, I will fully support. We can also propose minor changes as low hanging fruit as an alternate solution if they have limited time or resources.

14

Nobody is going to put 40 points into synergies for 400% skill damage for a single.target.melee.skill.

Until you understand that then there’s no point in even having a discussion about these skills because you’re assuming any buff is better than nothing.

Look at leap attack. They buffed it. You can reach like 2000% skill damage with +skillers. Where are all the leap attack barbs huh? Yea because it still sucks. Because it’s a single.target.melee.skill.

15

Flat damage on Bash is not real in a damage sense iirc. It only functions as a bonus for lifesteal, which uses the flat value in it’s calculations. But do correct me.

16

Respectfully disagree. I’ve been playing a HC Conc Barb this Season that just entered Hell and maxed BO synergy and chose to skip Bash synergy as it’s a waste. If Bash was Iron Skin or Shout, I would gladly pick it up for synergy bonus. I would be happy to settle with minor improvements.

17

Equip fortitude and boom, you have close enough defense and damage than what 60 skill points gets you. It’s an absolute waste and 1 player that likes to play suboptimal does not make a compelling sense for the devs to go out of their way to make mediocre changes.

And stacking anymore defense is just gratuitous for pvm and makes no real difference. You enjoy playing a pvp build in pvm, that’s great! It’s also a poor way to play.

18

I haven’t found a Lo rune yet, so kinda hard to make a Fortitude. How is replacing Bash synergy with Iron Skin or Shout a mediocre change? If anything, it’s a 100% improvement to Concentrate in my opinion and infinitely more useful for surviviability, especially in HC.

19

Assuming everyone has easy access to Fortitude is unreasonable. You forget this game can be played in many ways and that not everyone is playing bnet with D2jsp or whatever.

I think it’s a fair request to ask for build improvements. When synergies was introduced later into the game’s life anyway.

1 Like
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Yea it’s bugged because it still shows up in the tool tip damage calculations as if it applies like grief damage.

1 Like