Whaaaaat, how have we not talked about this, yet? I’ve been playing it non-stop since it released in March. Easily my favorite game so far, and hands-down the most satisfying game I’ve ever played.
You play any of the multiplayer?
Lately, I’m into meathooking from a distance, quickswitching to the rockets, then quickswitching back to shotty to give them both barrels point blank on arrival. Absolutely bonkers combo for heavies and super heavies.
Yeah man it’s my favorite shooter since HL2. The gunplay is just so smooth and satisfying, and it really makes you feel like a roid-raged demigod. Haven’t tried the multiplayer. My first playthrough was on easy so I could just soak up the experience and story, so now I’m going through on ultra-violence so I can say I played it properly. It’s fairly challenging lol.
Haha precisely! After playing DE, I came to the realization that I’ve never played a shooter that felt so . . . right in every way. Movement, shooting, ripping a demon’s face off, chainsawing a demon and taking his bullets and using them to shoot his demon friend . . . it all feels so smooth, so perfect, so weighty and effortless.
I’ve been playing it over and over on Nightmare, but now I’m dabbling in the extra life mode. I feel mixed on multiplayer; I really want old-school deathmatch, but I can see how that would be almost impossible to balance.
For a futur patch I have 2 propositions :
Raekor :
2p : no change
4p : no change
6p : Every cast of Furious Charge grants a stacking effect that increases the damage of Fury-spending attack by xxxx % and 10 % damage reduction per stack for 8 seconds. 5 Stacks max.
With this change the charge is always central (load the 6p and Band of Might buffs + fury generation) and we are no longer obliged to charge the walls as actually.
I will see this new version around Seismic Slam but a HoTA version would also be possible but it may be time to specialize this set.
The focus is on the 6p bonus which is now at 5500% per stack, which may be too much for this new version. This change would be simple to implement and seems fun to me 
.
Immortal King :
2p : Call of the ancients last until they die + reduce the cooldown of WoTB, CoTA and Ground stomp by 3 second for every 10 fury you spend with an attack
4p : when WoTB is active your mouvement speed is increased by xx %
or double the base effect of WoTB or something like that
6p : > 4000%
A richer 2p with the addition of ground to help this build create groups of monsters. The 4p buffs Vile charge et give more mobility for the both builds. And of course more damage for the 6p to help the both builds.
I like the buffs to movement speed since IK HotA tends to feel pretty slow when you don’t have density to charge through. A hefty Damage buff to the IK Set and Remorseless/BotfM/GoJ is certainly needed as well. I also think more attack speed, either by increasing the buff on BotfM or another method, might be fun. Right now the loss of the attack speed from IB is compensated by EF, but it is pretty noticeable when that falls off on RG with no adds to rack up kills that proc it. Plus the chance to fear on hit secondary is problematic. Getting attack speed from somewhere else might let us drop EF to open the build to more options. Burning Axe of Sankis comes to mind, both with %fire damage and the Ignore Pain legendary bonus providing even more toughness. Exarian with the CHD bonus might be another interesting choice, since IK HotA has very high CHC, making CHD very valuable.
I do wonder if buffing the movement speed would make it play to similar to Frenzy, but without the drawback of having to keep the frenzy stacks. The builds already play sort of similar, and having such an easily met condition might be too much. On the other hand, Rend can be setup to get easy speed buff as well, so maybe it’s okay.
Regarding adding Ground Stomp, I guess you’d replace Warcry? Right now you can already (and I think to push high many do) replace that with Ancient Spear:Rage Flip for pulling/grouping reasons. Since that uses Fury, which IK HotA almost always plenty of, it already synergizes pretty well with the build.
Ground stomp is definitely a nice skill, but since we’re already proccing BoM with Charge, seems like using Rage Flip for grouping just makes more sense and is already possible without the 2PC set changes.
TBH if you were going to add another skill to the 2PC cool down, I think Furious Charge would be more interesting. You could drop Merciless Assault allowing you to use other runes. With only the IK set buff, Battering Ram damage would probably still be pretty insignificant, but Stamina might be interesting for the high density situations when you run low on Fury.
Dreadnought versatility of having more charges might be handy to help you charge in low density areas between packs for better overall mobility. Right now this wouldn’t be worth losing the cool down reset, but if that was taken care of by the 2PC bonus, it would open that up. This might be a more “balanced” method of giving IK HotA improved mobility, but not being quite so easy as getting an additional movement speed buff while WotB is active.
Cold Rush could proc the 2PC bonus for H90, allowing an easier time running the IK/H90 hybrid builds people have begun to theorycraft about.
I can see what you’re aiming at, but this wouldn’t actually get rid of wall-charging, just change the way you do it.
Charging a wall would still significantly reduce the time needed to acquire each stack.
So, whereas previously your cycle looked like:
Charge - Charge - Charge - Charge - Charge - (50-70 more Charges, all against a wall) - HOTA - HOTA - HOTA - HOTA - HOTA - (6 - 10 more HOTAs) , repeat.
Now, it would be:
Charge - Charge - Charge - Charge - Charge (still against a wall), HOTA, repeat.
In my suggestion, if you charge before the end of the duration, you refresh the 5 stacks.
Oh, hmm, so you just charge once every 8 seconds and for that you get a huge damage bonus to spenders? Then the set wouldn’t even really have any identity at all. Based on how big that damage bonus is, it would either be hands-down better than every other barb set or hands-down worse.
I think a simpler change that would at least remove most of the wall charging would be to make the stacks gained dependent on the number of targets hit. You definitely can’t charge through as many targets when you are running into a wall as you can when you are in an open space. That’s why Vile Charge Barbs only wall charge a bit on the boss, and other than that look for major density in big open spaces.
You could just make it “one stack gained per enemy hit”, rather than “one stack per cast of Charge”, as it is now.
Here’s an idea: what if Raekor as a FC build, with lots of built-in fury generation, would somehow remove the cap on fury (up to a certain level, maybe 5X the pool or something) for the duration of one’s Raekor stacks, which would increase the dmg of Raekor charge according to the amount of fury you have. This could also synergize with boulder toss to a huge degree - and I don’t have suggested numbers here but I think this mechanic would fulfill some necessary points for Raekor (if it were applied to the 6-p bonus)
On the one hand, this is a unique mechanic for the purpose of damage dealing that builds on the central skill of furious charge. It also allows you to implement FC items that bring in other unique mechanics if you choose, such as the movement bonus to FC dmg from Standoff (?)
On the other hand, using this mechanic makes a natural fury-dump option on COE cycle for Boulder Toss or Seismic slam rumble. This is already a way Raekor is played, and such an amendment to the set would further solidify and reward this playstyle as uniquely Raekor-esque.
this style of build would undoubtedly have some meta setup, but there remains some flexibility in this arrangement. One could go with the IK4R6 setup, or use a dual wielding setup with Standoff in the cube. It might be interesting to see if there were some advantage to using a 2H weapon for this build or not as a sort of hard-hitting big damage walloping kind of build that 2h weps suggest, though I suspect dual wielding will usually trump this for affixes and CHD.
Sounds like you should enter Free’s “Rebuild Raekor” competition.
Im all about it man, lets do it.
H90 2p doubles the duration of WoTB : what do you think about that ?
In my opinion :
You will tell me another build with Mortick and perma WoTB but there are not 36 solutions especially as the belt slot is locked (Pride of Cassius). Moreover, this seems to me to be an easy solution to implement.
Edit : with this setup and the perfect CDR on this build we have 1.13s of cooldown 
.
I think it’s a clever solution to the issues facing the build. The damage increase would still not be enough to bring the build up to near Rend, but it would definitely help.
Personally, I’m not really in favor, because I’m really glad there are builds - Leap, Frenzy- without perma-Wrath.
If the build acquired perma-wrath, i’d probably stop playing it…
I’d prefer them to not have to run Wrath at all, personally. It’s something I repeatedly mentioned liking in the H90 PTR testing thread.
CC vulnerability for melee builds is abhorrent set/build design though. And H90 running around not actually engaging enemies until Wrath is back up, because the build is absurdly frail otherwise, doesn’t feel good either.
This is my thought as well. It’s nice that we have some builds that don’t require perma-WotB or aren’t stressed about getting enough CDR to maximize WotB uptime. We already have IK designed to give perma-WotB (and while different, there certainly have been comparisons made between IK HotA and H90 Frenzy playstyles), and Zodiac Rend also achieves it quite well, so having H90 be different would be cool I think.
Between set design and supporting legendries I’d like to see H90 get the damage, toughness and CC reduction/immunity required to perform well without WotB. Ideally WotB would be completely displaced by something else. That one is trickier though to make another skill as valuable as WotB. Maybe do something with IP since that gets you your CC and damage reduction, but perhaps have the set bonus add a damage and duration modifier to it? Keeping high up time might be annoying otherwise, and as mentioned there’s no easy way to slot in PoC (without the 4th cube slot for S22 at least), but adding duration or reducing C/D might be too much overlap with PoC anyway.
My concern is that we get H90 buffed to the required damage without WotB, then someone still shoe-horns WotB in there and gets “game breaking” benefit, but I guess if we could make IP or another skill have very similar overall damage bonus to WotB, while giving defense and perhaps another benefit as well, then maybe we could get there.
Maybe we need a ring or amulet that gives a damage bonus scaled off our vulnerability to CC.
i.e. with no cc resist, you get a 100% damage buff. With 50% CC reduction you’d get a 50% damage buff. And with WOTB active you’d get a 0% damage buff.
Hi all!
After blizzconline will come new patch 2.6.11 or 2.7.
What barbs needs in next s23?
We need the raekor set to get a major rework and the IK set buff so that HOTA and vile charge become competitive.
I don’t know what should be done with Raekor, honestly. As for the rest, I think there are some easy kills:
Double IK damage
Remorseless to 600%
If my math is right, these 2 changes alone should put 3 builds into the 138-142 range (IK HotA, LoD HotA, Charge).
My dream list would include adding some real options for avalanche and boulder toss into MOTE. Like bouncing boulders that trigger avalanches each time they land. Not holding my breath for that one though.
Folks, remember that we already have a thread for this in GD: Barbarian Balance Requests for 2.7.2 (?)
If you have ideas or comments, best to chime in there.
Fixing the Raekor set is going to require either an overhaul to the set’s current design or major buffs to supporting legendaries Skular’s Salvation and Three Hundredth Spear.