2.6.6 and Barbs: A Measured Response

Yeah, I can see that. I love pushing and optimizing, but hate the process of getting there. If I could, I would just purchase GG gear from a vendor and be on my way.

Maybe this Season, I’ll try to slow down and enjoy the journey. Is it still full of repetitive, mind-numbing tasks, though? I recall it being akin to some bounties in how utterly boring it was to get your Gift.

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yeah, I am like that as well.
as soon as I have all the items required for my build (which is fairly easy) and the only thing left to do is running GR’s for more and more Paragon, it stops being interesting for me, because the progression kinda stops (and just progressing in Paragon is kinda boring imo).

Progression in other games like D2 was much better imo. In D2 you did not just went from lowest tier legendary to BiS without an intermediate step (and that just within a few days), but you sort of progressed (illustrated in a simplified way) from the 5th best item to the 4th best item to the 3rd best, to the 2nd best to the best in slot item (so to speak) and that required time.

This progression or “the carrot on a stick” (a definitive end goal, aka BiS gear) is keeping me going.

A few month (or even over a year ago) I made a graph that is trying to illustrate the difference between D2’s and D3’s progression, maybe you can relate:

~https://imgur.com/flFJux3
~https://imgur.com/FtOv8uD

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Not to trample too hard on numbers, but you neglected to plot the point where you finally realize that having a paladin with Exile equipped is the only way you can legitimately solo-farm torches.

Secondly, as endgame PvE is largely irrelevant almost immediately after you hit 80, your power curve can only be relative to PvP, which means that it’s all relative to your reflexes and understanding of cheesy paladin mechanics. I pick on that class specifically because of dyssynchronous charge and the invisi-hammers/smites that follow.

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I understand what you mean.

The graphs are very simplified and if I am honest, it also has an influence of my personal idealized idea of how progression should be. I think that was even my intend to illustrate that when I initially made these graphs many month or even over a year ago.

You gotta find something in Seasons that you like in order for it to be enjoyable. Set yourself a goal and go get it. I get more enjoyment out of hitting 70 for the first time, 100 for the first time with a cobbled together patchwork quilt of items than I do squeezing one more GR out of my NS Barb. You get a sense of actual progression, not just a free +5 GR level from an item update.

I honestly think you should give seasonal Barb a go Free. That power gap at mid-high NS paragon is really small compared to how bad it is in seasons, especially if you don’t play meta for paragon and just run some off-meta drunk fun GR’s with your friends. It’s an entirely different perspective on the state of the game.

It is still full of repetitive, mind-numbing tasks, but so is non-season. I mean, all you’re going to do is run bounties, rifts, and GR, so what’s the difference?

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I have not played Non Season since season came out other then the down time. Themes have helped somewhat last 2 seasons where not to bad. Playing IK Hota/Lon was a challenge not because of Lon but because of the lack of chooses for the build lol. Still I got 130hrs or so out of it mostly farming ancient gear. The days of 400 hr in a season are gone for me. I play Poe when I get bored it has better end game content learning curves a pain :slight_smile:

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If I play Season 18, it would be to gear an Impale DH (again). But it all depends on when my new computer is finished. Currently eye-balling CPU prices to see if Core i7-9700k drops this month. Core i9 isn’t worth it, and I don’t want to deal with AMD’s fussy motherboard issues.

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I can’t argue with the choice, that was my S15. Whatever choice you make, have fun. That’s the real point of it all.

I’m probably going DH for UE this season as it’s been awhile.

This has been a major problem for Barbs and LON. We face the same problems with LOD, too. Our supporting legendaries are outdated and many of our community favorite LON builds are laughably weak. With updated legendaries, we could have some viable options for LON builds into the 120-130 range, where we currently plod at GR 100.

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I have a few questions.

First, would barbs be content if ww had dust devils removed? Trading it off for a massive damage increase?

If wall charging was fixed, what kind of buff would be needed to replace it? A pure attackspeed buff to give the illusion of wall charging, or just a major damage boost there aswell?

These are the harder builds to play, so I just wanted some insight if the fixes were though of.

Losing Dust Devils would nerf the build into the ground. That’s not an option because it nukes our AOE damage potential.

That’s tricky. Attack speed isn’t the issue. VC wall-charges to maximize damage over time (not DOT) against single-targets, mainly RGs. R6 HOTA wall-charges to more quickly build Raekor stacks and to trick the EW set into coughing up the max damage bonus (see my R6 HOTA guide for more info on that). For VC, losing wall-charge means you need more time to fight the RG. For R6 HOTA, losing wall-charge means losing a significant # of Raekor stacks over the course of a rift, possible de-synch between Fire and Wrath cycles, and a 100% multiplicative damage bonus.

For both builds, I estimate the loss of wall-charging would result in a 3-5 GR drop in power potential. More realistically, I think the drop would be much larger (4-6 GRs) as RG fights for both builds would suddenly become a much bigger problem.

Wall-charging likely stems from some aspect of game code that allows mobile objects (characters) to “stick” to objects and terrain. You can also stick to certain holes and crevices. It’s dependent on mouse position and angle of contact, so I’m guessing some code string treats walls and objects (and holes) as the same for determining collision.

Can it be fixed? Hard to say. I’m not a coder.

If it were fixed/removed, how could we compensate? The supporting legendaries would need a substantial buff–not hard to do given that the supporting legs for both builds are among our best for our class. Many would argue that IK HOTA should be the superior HOTA build, and I’m inclined to agree, but I would prefer that build be buffed as opposed to R6 nerfed (see our Remorseless idea in the proposal).

Okay, so the dust devil rune could be changed into a larger hit box for ww, that would solve some of the aoe issue, but also, it wouldn’t change the aim of attackspeed and ad stacking, because this build favors them both.

Now the damage bonus I said needs to be massive, to have them clearing at a equal speed to other top performing builds. Why I say this is because the kill speed is far too slow, only counteracted by the amount of enemies you can kill at the same time. On top of this, it could help reduce lag to a reasonable degree.

Well, that was only to raise the speed at which you could charge, sort of giving a psuedo wall charge. But the difference is that oyu can wall charge out in the open, and the speed would be more or less the same. Regarding how to fix the bug, it could be as much as they treated twisters from a wizard, where they wouldn’t stick to the wall.

The big reason for me asking this is that I keep hearing the difference between a proper high clear and a standard chill clear. To make both these closer to eachother, you could effectivly make people feel as though even at lower levels it’s stronger.

Now if you only raise the damage then we’re only pushing the main problem a few gr levels higher. I’m asking to raise the level at which people can pick up barb and feel that everything is connecting, everything is flowing properly. Now if you have to employ tactics like wall charging or excessive mob gathering, then the build will have a huge difference between top clears and bottom clears.

Another option might be to getting the Blood Funnel rune for free from the WotW set instead of Dust Devils, but also redesigning the Hurricane rune so that instead of sometimes pulling enemies towards you, it increases the radius of Whirlwind to xx yards (and maybe slightly increase WW’s damage a bit).

That would give us a choice to either take Dust Devils or Hurricane for AoE.

Skills haven’t been touched since 2.6.1 (two years ago), so it’s unlikely they will ever again be significantly modified. If you want changes, approach it from items, which we know for certain are being altered. I won’t discuss the possibility of skill changes, so if y’all want to continue the discussion, please address the problems via items.

And, just to cover the bases, don’t suggest items that completely alter how skills work.

I suspect it works exactly like Twister Wizard, but the problem here is the character, not an object, getting “fixed” on terrain. Not sure if that truly makes a difference, but we have to consider that variable player input makes this especially hard to fix.

What problem? Wall-charging is the problem. The fact that Raekor is better at HOTA than the IK set is, for many, the problem.

This can be achieved by buffing supporting legendaries.

I was mostly talking about ww there, if it stays as it is atm, it’s gonna be a working build if the damage is raised, but not a great build.

A great build will have a high average clear, not just a high max potential.

I would rather have it as a mobile firebats build, with powerful focused aoe. Something that makes others feel happy when the barb joins a public game, not just for the buffs they bring.

I just feel as the dust devils are the main reason ww barb is being held back from what it could be, what it could become.

Not sure what you mean. We’ve never suggested that the optimal way to fix WW is to only buff Skull Grasp. Rend needs to be addressed.

Our List 1 only buffs Skull Grasp, but that’s a last resort.

WW has problems for group GRs that no amount of buffs will fix; at best, it will only ever be a good solo push/ solo and group T16 speed build. We suggest other builds for group DPS in our proposal for good reasons.

They’re only part of the problem, but let’s be honest: skills aren’t getting revised. And you don’t need to revise skills; if they address Rend properly, such as what we do in the proposal, you’ll alleviate many of the build’s problems and make is significantly stronger.

im not gonna make it up but maybe a kathoas set to go along with item set

I don’t understand. Can you clarify?

If players are still lagging from Whirlwind in some density/pushes it’s possible they might circle back to Whirlwind changes as a performance update. But I’m not sure how beneficial it would be to the server ultimately. Definitely a long shot to expect any skill changes of that magnitude.

The wall glitch is an interesting problem.

The ideal solution would be to make IK/LON much stronger HOTA builds. Raekor would then become a Slam or Toss build again like it originally was.

Maaaaan…
This thread is so long,
it would be insane if they ignored it.

Nev, Please tell us you’re reading this