The theme (and that Ethereal in particular, Blackbog’s Sharp) is worth about 7 GRs worth of extra damage. Not 10. Not 20. Not 30.
Let me say it again: that Ethereal is worth 7 GRs of extra damage.
148 - 7 = 141.
Nuff said.
4 Likes
Using your math, the best pound for pound clear is LebronJames with roughly 3600 paragon and 144. Take his toy away and it goes to 137 or so. Really good player. Not botting. The other guys, who knows? A 137 is nice and stuff, but its not in the conversation of the other sets. Below that there are a few 130s and 20s. It’s a fun build. It was easy to hit140 like the other sets, ppl would be playing it.
As a caveat, I loaded up a 120. Slight exaggeration on my part, but compared to how it used to play, a 120 was a 4 minute run on a super bad map. Now, it feels like I have a 20 GR weight on my shoulders.
Well, there are only 98 DH clears worldwide at or above 140, and of those the lowest paragon is 7k. Not what I’d call easy!
I doubt the Crusader AoV or WD Mundu clears are looking much better than that, either.
Hah, wait until next season for DHers…
AoV is really good this season, I’m getting close to 140 there. The sets that are out of control are firebirds (the bottom of the leaderboard is GR141) and inna monk (139 last place). Bone spear is my favorite caster spec, believe me, if it was as strong as AoV I’d be playing it.
I typically enjoy the content that streamer wudijo puts out. I’m interested to see what you guys think about his points in this video on barb balance.
https://youtu.be/2q-Ed0fh2xk
I agree that barb is in a pretty good spot as far as internal balance. He suggests giving the entire class a uniform bump in power, either through skills adjustment or some sort of item that buffs everything, like a Ring of Emptiness for barbs.
I’m all for barb buffs even though we do have the best class balance. If they wanted to give us a blanket buff it would be very easy and they could use an item most barbs already want to see used again. Give skull grasp the run it deserves. Simply change its damage to buff all damage to something like 100%. It would replace COE and it would be like 2.5 teirs worth of extra damage. Rage even suggested awhile back that they could put movement speed on it to help farming.
Not having a single s-tier build is kind of getting donkey punched. I think they downgraded rend to A.
Or bul kathos wedding band. If that ring doubled fury spenders, and they made madawcs sorrow double EQ damage against stunned enemies, you’d boost the whole class by the same amount.
Edit:whoops forgot frenzy…
Depends on whether EQs caused by Tribes + MOTE4 count as spenders (they do for the IB set, they don’t for F+R). If they did, with Leap you’d drop F+R and take Wedding Band + CoE instead, plus the new Madawcs. That would be a 2.66x buff for Leap over what it can do now, in terms of flat damage, with a bit less to elites… so you’d clear higher, but boss fights would take even longer! 
If they were to add a single item that was basically just +barb damage, Amulet would be the best slot. A bunch of our builds use Hellfire or Squirt’s, neither of which is really super powerful. A few other builds would lose EW set, but could get back about half of that by grabbing CoE, or a RoRG plus Aughild or Crimson. Six piece set zone is a no-go for obvious reasons. Bracer is a big problem since most of our builds rely on either Morticks or Parthans to stay alive. Belt would be an issue for Frenzy, Leap, and IK HOTA. Ring slot could work, but I think it would be messier making it work with our builds.
2 Likes
I guess it just depends on power. As much as I want to hate the grind of hellfire amulets it kept be busy for a good portion of my time in D3. At least an entire year off and on was just farming that item. They could expand the hellfire amulet to something similar to ethereals or make hellfire rings competitive. Maybe even create a set between both items. This would effect other classes though.
I disagree with a universal item solution, you don’t want to compromise your build variants, particularly in the jewelry department for +2GRs. It is clumsy, causes item lock and doesn’t fix power disparity that could easily be fixed by just tuning a set bonus or legendary item.
You already drafted good solutions, push for those, and try to get some new skills to play:
3 Likes
One of any item would be too generic unless they add totems. I would suggest buffing 1 main item from each major build. Some might carry over. Example:
Motviks Brace- grants every zerker rune and reduces cooldown on zerker by 50%
- would pretty much fix mote & savages by providing perma zerker
Id uncap all of the seismic slam items to hit whatever is in front of them with bonus
- add additional captain crimson pieces so builds with belts & boots can use it. Plus opens new options for all.
Stuff like that
2 Likes
Bulkathos wedding band is not a barb specific item. Silly as it sounds.
2 Likes
Yes, I agree. If they really wanted to just bump up the power of the entire Barb class, as Wudi suggests, it would be easy enough to just increase the 6-piece on every set (though, that would leave out LoD HOTA).
The overall list at this point is something like:
Raekor: rework.
Leapquake: item that helps with single-target.
Slam: Needs a good bit of extra damage to keep up with HOTA. You could double the power on both FotVP (to 1000%) and Fjord Cutter (to 300%) without causing a problem, as this build is currently about 8 tiers behind where HOTA 3X are going to be, post-buff.
Rend: I guess I would say that I’d have to really be able to see the future to make a confident recommendation here. It would suck for Rend to get buffed, only to get nerfed hard in the following patch. It would certainly be safe to do something like add a ton of movement speed to Skull Grasp, (as I suggested before), to make this a little closer in speeds to Inna and GoD.
Frenzy: Doesn’t really need anything, overall.
HOTA: Doesn’t need anything, post-Remorseless buff.
Charge: My gut tells me Charge is probably dead, though they could always do something with a Raekor rework to help this skill, possibly de-coupling it from the IK set. Or, if they leave it as is, they could just buff Vile Ward and Standoff a whole lot.
Barb as a whole: If you wanted to move all these builds forward one “maxroll tier”, i.e. from A to S, or B to A, you could just double all the set 6-pieces.
I did have another crazy idea for an item to help Leapquake. You could put this affix on Madawc’s: “The timer on Earthquake only begins after Earthquake kills an enemy”.
Right now, unless you are talking about speeds and using In-Geom, the most EQs you can actually have stacked up, on average, is around 9.5, because they last 8 seconds, and you can only apply them at a certain rate via Leap, TS, WC, and hard-cast EQ.
With this new item, it would be kind of like Stricken, but on everything, with the caveat that the effect would wear off after an enemy died. So your damage would always kind of scale up to match whatever you were fighting. If you were fighting a bunch of low-health trash, the effect would reset frequently, and you wouldn’t get too much of a damage boost. But, if you were fighting just an isolated elite, or an RG, then your damage would continue to build and build.
You’d lose Furnace, of course, so you’d be giving back a bit of that damage to elites and bosses. I’d have to think a bit harder about whether this would end up being OP. The one really serious issue I foresee is the possibility of lag. Eventually the number of EQs on the ground might be such that the game starts having trouble calculating all those ticks.
I guess you could apply a similar affix in a slightly different way: “The damage of EQ increases by 100% every second, to a maximum of 1000%. This effect resets after EQ kills an enemy.” (or, if 1000% is too much, it could be 50% / second, max 500%, or whatever)
That might be safer for the servers!
1 Like
That’s a pretty cool idea. Would definitely help with single target. It might make for a weird fishing incentive where you try to gather a whole screen of enemies with the same health and try to not kill anything until everything dies almost together. When you add in area damage it might do a number on the servers lol.
I had tried to come up with a way to keep some of the powers from ethereals by putting them on currently useless weapons. I think Madawcs sorrow might be a good candidate for this one:
Consecutive hits to enemies increase damage by 10%, up to 100%.
That should give both leapquake and rend some juice. For the lulz, here’s the rest of my list:
Grandfather: +1 to maximum damage per paragon level up to 800.
Wildwood: Killing Elite grants 30% movespeed for 7 seconds.
Monster Hunter: Reduce the damage of enemies hit by 25% for 5 seconds.
Empyrean Messenger: Consecutive hits to enemies increase attack speed by 3%, up to 30% for 3 seconds.
1 Like
How about the weakest class gets to keep ethereals? 
I like the idea, Poco, though I think some of the items would need further tuning to actually find use. For instance, even with the “+damage per paragon” ability, GF only ends up having similar weapon damage to Furnace. Meaning that if you used it for Leap, you’d be trading away 50% elite dmg for a marginal gain, or no gain, in elite damage. I don’t think any of our other builds would see a gain, either.
If that item remained an “all class” item, I’m also not sure what other builds for other classes would use it.
Yeah, wasn’t intending to have these as barb only, they were just ways to achieve a 2-part goal: give useless legendaries something that could make them useful, and have something from s24 carry over.
Even if the new items are simply in the conversation, then I think that’s a win.
Pretty sure the new grandfather could be used by wizards in one of the firebird variations, or maybe sader condemn.
I hadn’t thought of a good spot for the 10% up to 100 power, so maybe that could be on a class weapon in each class, like madawc, a 1H crossbow, daibo, etc.
and that’s why in my opinion after all these years, they should change the end-game and paragon system.
It’s so silly that we need to farm hours and hours to just get a little bit more power…
Agreed.
This not so much. A 20% buff is pretty sizable when you consider more flat damage on top of a build. But it is a hefty price to pay for that increase. 8k to 10k gons is a huge undertaking of EXP grind. Which is funny, considering 20k is the max paragon you can obtain. I think it’s silly that the top greater rift level has been blasted long, long, long before anyone will ever reach max paragon. While the only thing attractive about a paragon number that large would be to see how high you could push vastly under performing builds.
1 Like