Thank you, LotM! I appreciate the shout-out! To be honest, I’m not much of an IK HOTA player, and all the credit goes to Basshead for keeping this build guide alive. Regardless, I do think the Barb community is incredible, and I’m grateful to everyone who contributes to keeping our standards high.
Good luck on your pushes!
Maybe try out using COTA:AF rather than TAO? I know this cuts your toughness in half, but if you take WC in the 6th slot, this being doubled is pretty helpful…
Or could try out using the Weapons Master passive.
Yes I was thinking that as well. Only had a short test period to start. Took forever to get everything ancient rolled right. I’m not using any augments on my gear.
Also need to test seasonal build next week. Thinking its just going to be putting Remorseless in the 4th cube slot and going back to IB for weapons.
Did a little testing in a few 120’s… the “classic” setup with CoE definitely felt better to me than cramming H90 in there. Tried using COTA:TAO with Weapons Master, but this did not work that well: still seemed unable to generate enough fury.
So I got fury sorted with savages switching to Ancient’s Fury and had to switch to Aquila in the cube cause it was still squishy and even with that my life is super yo yoing and I’m dying a lot. I’m only only 110s with 2400 paragon but no augments. Will try out classic build and see how it compares.
While responding to an IK suggestion in the Community thread, my brainstorming juices got going, so I figured I’d add some Season extra cube slot ideas here, since we’ve already been talking about some.
For the extra cube slot seasonal buff, in addition to the things already listed, I had a few more ideas.
Cube EF in the extra slot, and wear Remorseless and Burning Axe of Sankis or Exarian. %Fire damage and free IP from Sankis seem valuable in both damage and toughness. I know the build is already pretty tough so maybe the IP isn’t really needed. The other option would be Exarian. Since IK HotA has at or near 100% CHC, the CHD on Exarian is essentially a straight damage buff as I understand it, so getting the extra 31 to 35 CHC should be pretty valuable.
Not sure if either of those will compete with wearing IB and cubing Remorseless with the extra slot though. In theory wearing Sankis would be better than just adding Magefist in the cube, since it has the same %fire damage but also gives you the IP bonus. I’ve never used it though, so I don’t know if the chance is high enough that you have good up time or not with HotA attack speed.
Something to definitely test. I’ve been leveling a barb on the seasonal ptr in preparation for Thursday. The goal is to do all testing at 1000 paragon and 100 level gems no augments.
I think the IP effect procs when you get hit, not when you attack. So your attack speed may not matter.
Assuming you essentially have 100% CHC (and near-maximum rolls on CHD), Exarian will give about + 5% damage. Sankis is definitely better.
So I guess the question is: is EF (in cube) + Sankis (in hands) as good as IB?
Well, I did a bit of messing around in d3planner, and it looks like getting 5 EF stacks will generally give you a boost of around +50% damage (though of course, you won’t always have 5 stacks). An extra elemental roll gives you +14.29% damage. Combined, that’s about a 71% maximum damage buff, with the uncontrollable effect of periodic doubled toughness from Sankis/IP thrown in.
In comparison, IB’s attack speed buff gives 20-21% extra damage, all of the time, which, combined with the 30% straight damage buff, is about 56% extra damage, plus about 18% more toughness from the extra armor.
The slightly higher base weapon damage of the Sankis setup is offset pretty evenly by the higher base speed of the IB setup.
So, that means that if you could keep 5 EF stacks up for the entire rift, you’d do about 10% more damage with the Sankis setup than you would with the IB setup. That’s obviously not possible, but in a good rift, you’d probably be able to stay at full stacks a fair amount of the time while in density, which is when you would make most of your progression. RGs with adds would theoretically be better since they’d help with EF stacks, but those adds would also eat some of your Stricken stacks. Of course, they’d eat your Stricken stacks if you were using IB, too. Against RGs without adds, you’d be at a significant disadvantage vs the IB setup.
Bottom line, I think the IB setup will be better overall, for most players, most of the time, though not by a huge margin.
Doh good catch there!
Thanks for mathing it all out! I s thinking CHD was more valuable than it is, thinking it was straight damage at 100% CHC for some reason, bu obviously it’s about the percent increase from CHD without Exarian to with.
Similar good points on the IB comparison!
So based on that, IB worn, GoJ, and Remorseless in cube seems like a more consistent setup.
Yes I believe this will be the strongest option wearing the full IK set.
Hello,
Thanks for giving this a try.
Yes I did encounter fury issues. There are several ways around it, but the easiest and most reliable was to cube the cota shoulders, instead of morticks. I had to resort to a lifesteal affix on one weapon for recovery. I also use Animosity to cap my fury for the crit and free a ring slot for avg dmg. And i slot relentless.
An variant is to switch the rune on cota to ancients fury. In this variant , as i still had fury issues sometimes, I swapped the furious charge rune to the stamina regen one. That solved all issues with regards fury. Also use animosity and relentless.
Ive been toying around with war cry: charge and removing furious charge for threatening shout. It seems savage doubles the fury gain from those shouts. which also has proven useful.
All in all i dont know exactly how best to balance the fury regen with the removal of shoulders. But there are several ways to do it.
Edit: I have had more trouble integrating sustainable sources of hard cc in the build. I am currently running primal ef, freeze on belt, and the freezing rune of furious charge. Ofc id like stun on gloves and some mie cc on weps, but dont have that yet. If you think of something else, id be happy to integrate it.
Edit 2: if going ancient fury regen rune on cota, wouldnt stone gauntlets in cube solve all toughness issues?
Edit 3: The solution requiring the least equipment slots, is perhaps to go rcr on weps, shoulders, gloves and topaz in hat. With a switch from lpfs to lph. I have not tried it , but when i think of it, it makes the whole issue mute.
Edit 4: So, ideally, it would probably look like this : d3planner. com/575410032
In season 22, Im hesitating between removing the rcr, for the ancient shoulders, or slotting a hard CC source, like Madawc.
Edit 5: so ive tested a dozen gr 120’s without any ancients fury source, but cota : toe and 30% rcr + animosity + templar
And i have not encountered fury issues, allowing me to use the freeze rune on furious charge.
I have also experimented with the cold rune on ground stomp instead of charge, (for the 8 sec cooldown in synch with bom, and for the longer stun + slow (for the feaered mobs)), and for the moment its performing quite well, and definitely quite impactful on overall dps through the activation of the savage 2 dmg bonus.
So after finally getting some testing in I do think the core build with wearing Little Rogue/Slanderer and putting Remorseless in the 4th cube slot will be the move for Season 22. Its the most consistent as far as fury management and damage/armor/attack speed.
Why not integrate savages, now that 30%rcr covers fury management?
It’s been tested, but incorporating H90 results in problems maintaining Fury (no Fury shoulders) and having to use the RoRG in the Cube. It’s doable, but not optimal. Check a few posts up for the reports on testing.
Yes, except the option of rcr wasn’t further tested. I wouldn’t bring this up if I hadn’t faced the same issues and found alternative solutions.
The current setup I am using/aiming for has more toughness and more damage than the traditional, one, without fury issues.
Here is an example. https: //ptr .d3planner.com /659721185
Now if you or one of the experimented Barbs (like Basshead ofc) would try this and not find it workable, I wouldn’t argue more, but in this case this variant is confronted with a bit of “Old school resistance”. 
Hmm…
So, let’s start with this: I’ll grant you the “more toughness”. That seems like a given, between using S+B, the shield itself, and doubled War Cry.
But, I really don’t think you’re going to be doing more damage. Let’s look at some numbers:
Basshead’s proposed setup with IB will attack faster, most of the time. This S+B setup will reasonably range in frame rate between 18F and 10F, depending on how many EF and PE stacks you have. The IB setup will range between 12F and 14F. It’s not unreasonable to just take the midpoint in each case, since you obviously can’t keep up all those stacks, all the time. So that’s 13F average for IB, and 14F for S+B, or a 1.07x speed multiplier for IB.
You also have:
1.3x IB damage
1.5x CoE damage
1.19x damage due to higher crits (this takes into account both significantly higher CHD, and slightly lower CHC)
1.15x damage from Rampage (a rough estimate based on how many stacks you can keep up, on average)
1.0x multiplier from Brawler (basically a wash with S+B’s doubled BR dibs)
So that’s a 2.85x multiplier, total.
The S+B setup has:
1x-2x damage, depending on CC uptime on mobs
1.04x higher weapon damage
1.14x higher elemental damage
That would give you up to a 2.37x multiplier, total, assuming you could keep up 100% CC uptime on your enemies. But that is obviously impossible. In reality, depending on whether you use Cold Rush, Ground Stomp, fear/stun/freeze on armor, or a combination of all of those, you can keep more or less 100% CC uptime only for the first 7-8 seconds of the fight, after that your uptime drops to 25-27%. If you assume you can get in a big burst of damage right at the start of a fight with a densely packed bunch of mobs, I think you could estimate the H90 2-piece multiplier at 1.5x, if you are being VERY charitable (more likely it is between 1.3 and 1.4).
So: actual (generous) multiplier for this option is 1.5 * 1.04 * 1.14 = 1.78x
That means the IB setup has a damage “base” about 60% higher than the S+B setup.
You do have doubled Bloodshed with S+B, which is great. But because your damage base is considerably lower, you only end up doing about 25% more damage via Bloodshed. The IB setup does a lot more damage via AD: about 64% more.
All told, when fighting in good density you can expect to do at least 22% more total damage using the IB setup. You’ll also kill RGs faster, particularly single-target ones, in which case, with neither setup being able to use PE or EF, your speed advantage with IB will grow from 1.07x to 1.29x, which basically “double-dips” because you not only do damage faster, you also stack Stricken faster.
You’re also going to have some mechanical issues with the setup you have here. If you don’t take Charge, even all that added toughness may not save you in a high push when you’re pinned in place and multiple molten explosions go off in your face. You also might just get stuck fighting right next to, rather than inside, an Oculus circle, with no way to reach it.
If on the other hand you take Cold Rush, you don’t have enough CDR here to keep up 100% uptime on BoM, which is obviously not ideal. You can also only reposition once every 9 seconds, which means you still might get blown up by molten or miss out on a juicy Oculus.
Anyway: all this said, this looks like a fun setup. If you can record video, I’d love to see some of your gameplay.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
The s%b build was a fun variant, an attempt at removing bom eventually.
The build is on the tab before the s&b, sorry for the confusion.
So, allow me to copy your template analysis, and proceed with the build I am defending here.
Both Builds use Istvan with cubed Remorseless, so no difference here.
Basically the differences are as follows:
IK6/S2:
Thats it. Same ad. The passives can be the same, apart for animosity.
So double bloodshed and 1.3 dmg from cc vs. 1.5 coe --> thats the dps comparison
And Double War Cry and one slot of LpH vs 3-4 item property slots that the classic build can dedicate to toughness. --> thats the toughness comparison.
All in all , not so much difference, but it looks like there is more dps and toughness on the savage side.
Ultimately, it would be great to forego BoM and Charge for Threatening Shout and Unity, but I gather something along 5k paragons would be needed.
With regards the being stuck issue, I use the teleport potion. Its not great, but at least you avoid dying because of this issue most of the time.
Hmm, I am not finding the tab you’re talking about. Can you repost?
A few preliminary questions / comments:
Where are you getting that cdr? 10% from paragon, certainly. But you are taking a Topaz in helm, right? Weapons could be something like AD-CDR-RCR, but of course then you lose both some STR and DMG%…
I guess gloves can be CDR - CHC - CHD - AD, and shoulders STR - RCR - CDR - AD. That gives 27.5% RCR and 23.82% CDR before any rolls on weapons are considered. That’s enough CDR to get Cold Rush under the 8 second threshold.
Is that enough RCR? I’m unclear whether you are taking CotA:AF or CotA:TaO. If the latter, then you might very well be able to drop WC in favor of TS. If not tough enough to run Falter, then Demoralize would add both defense and offense (via grouping). Or, if taking CotA:AF, do you even need the RCR?
Passives are Brawler/Berserker, Animosity, Ruthless, Rampage?
Clever!
If you actually had 5.1% CC on belt/gloves/helm, and 2.6% on each weapon, you would end up with about a 19% chance to CC on each hit, in which case you probably wouldn’t even need Cold Rush, and could take Merciless instead.
Edit: OK, just saw your link, I will take a look…
ptr-d3planner-com/561759683
Edit: Many thanks for giving this a second look. Dbl Bloodshed FtW!
In d3 planner, i slotted shoulders and 1 weapon slot on cdr, to allow for ad and rcr on gloves.
[quote=“Rage-13139, post:111, topic:355, full:true”]Is that enough RCR? I’m unclear whether you are taking CotA:AF or CotA:TaO. If the latter, then you might very well be able to drop WC in favor of TS. If not tough enough to run Falter, then Demoralize would add both defense and offense (via grouping). Or, if taking CotA:AF, do you even need the RCR?
[/quote]
No CotA: AF. RCR is here to replace that ability. At 120, I extremely rarely saw my fury globe move with 30 ish RCR. To be safe, and to take acct of tougher mobs in higher GRs, I slotted 40% RCR in the d3 planner build. However I dont know if it is enough for 140+. I have never reached those GRs.
Rampage, Animosity, Ruthless, and passive of your choice i suppose. Rapage is still useful at 120-125, dont know above. I use relentless personally, I really love that passive.
EF has 20% fear alrdy. But the fear is both a blessing and a problem with the build… for obvious reasons.
Funny how Monks have no use for
https://-diablo3-blizzard.com/en-us/item/sledge-fist-Unique_Fist_012_x1
but it could do wonders for some Barbie variants.