Thanks for the speedy reply, I will run to the top and check that out!
What build are you playing around with this season? Frenzy actually feels pretty good personally, I’m on the leaderboard with a 113 with trash gear lol
The hurricane rune works really well now. A lot of people in the barb channel have commented that blizz might ninja improved it
I will give it a shot, I think I got spoiled from last season learning how to play raekors with sanc WW
I’m actually not playing this season. I don’t know if you heard, but I am retiring from Diablo for good sometime fairly soon. So I am working on cleaning up some resources I’ve generated over the course of my time here, plus a bit of pushing in non-season.
And then, sometime in April, I’ll take my leave…
Oh…
No I was unaware. Are you just leaving Diablo 3 or the whole franchise? Plans to play something else?
Although I have not known you long, Rage, it has been a pleasure to be able to learn from all the knowledge and resources you have gathered and put in place for us. I wont forget you for that. I thank you for all the friendly advice, without it I’m not sure I’d still be so passionate about my barb…
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Some of the general details on my retirement are here:
Thanks for your kind words. I’m glad I’ve been able to steer you in the right direction. It’s always nice to feel like I’m making a positive difference.
If you can, just pay it forward- help out anybody who needs a hand or some advice, whenever you’re able.
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You should try s28 before you go. It doesn’t take a lot to get going. Enryu did 150 the first day lol.
Tried some more runs after adding augs, GR 150 down in 6:49, 1.7K para (17K str),
Satisfied with a better record than Necro 
Now, I’m done with Raekor this season, gonna start Frenzy push at 2K!
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Me too! Getting my gear now. Plus saving gems for augs. 1k paragon now. Altar almost fully unlocked just need the staff. I should just zbarb 150 & get unlocks but honestly im having fun not rushing.
What gems did you run? And did you use TS-demoralize?
Trapped, Stricken and Zei’s.
I’m using TS-demoralize, but you can put IP or WC instead if you don’t think it’s tanky enough.
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A fellow on Youtube asked me why I don’t bother to get the extra 200 Fury from Weapon Throw when fighting in density, and I realized that I’ve never really given a thorough answer to this question here on the forum.
My reply to Zavek in post 668 of this thread goes over a lot of the stuff you need to know if you want to use Weapon Throw to deal more damage to your target (ideally a single target). But I’d never really explained in full why some of the stuff I explain there doesn’t apply when fighting big hordes of mobs.
The answer I gave on Youtube follows below.
You’re talking about the 200 extra Fury from using Weapon Throw, right? You want to know how you get it?
You don’t.
Let me explain, because it’s kind of complicated and a bit counter-intuitive.
There are basically two factors in why it’s just not worth it to use Weapon Throw for extra Fury when you’re fighting big packs of mobs. The first is your overall attack rate, and the second is Battle Rage: Bloodshed.
First, your attack rate. If you just Charge, ideally as short a distance as possible, and then use Boulder Toss, you can produce a 150 Fury Boulder more than 1x a second, maybe something like 1 every 0.7-0.8 seconds. But, if you want to get to the full 350, it takes a lot longer. First, you have to Charge once, to get your Fury to 150. Then you have to start hitting with Weapon Throw.
But, the way Arreat’s Law works is that it gives you 1 extra Fury for every yard between you and the mob you hit with Weapon Throw. So, if you’re only 10 yards away, you get 10 extra Fury per hit. To get the full extra 50, you need to be 50 yards away. And, in a Greater Rift where you’re pushing and there are tons of mobs everywhere, it’s extremely difficult to keep those mobs 50 yards away from you, because they’re always going to be running right at you.
So, the best you’re generally going to manage is probably something like 25-30 yards of distance. At 30 yards, you’ll get the bonus 30 from Arreat’s, plus the base 9 from Balanced Weapon, so 39 per hit. And to pick up 200 extra Fury that way, it’ll then take you 5-6 hits. Weapon Throw attacks quite fast, about once every 12 Frames, or 5x/second, but that still means it’ll take a full extra second or more to get from 150 to 350.
At that point, you’re finally ready to throw your Boulder, but that brings us to the other part of this answer, which is about Battle Rage: Bloodshed. When you’re fighting in density, most of our damage doesn’t come from direct hits with Boulders, it comes from Bloodshed. That’s because of the way Bloodshed calculates its damage, as well as the mechanics of the wave of Boulders.
Let’s say that each Boulder you hit with does 1x damage. Raekor 6-piece makes your initial Boulder spawn 10 more Boulders that shoot out in a sort of cone shape. That’s 11 Boulders total, and if they were all to hit a single target, you’d do 11x damage. But, you really can’t get them all to hit a single target, they spread out all over the place. The most you can probably have hitting one mob under normal circumstances is maybe 3, while the other Boulders hit other mobs further away. So a couple mobs near you might get hit by 3 Boulders and take 3x damage, a few more, a little further away, might get hit by 2 Boulders and take 2x damage, and mobs still further away will just get hit by one Boulder and take 1x damage.
Battle Rage: Bloodshed deals damage equal to 20% of your Critical Hits, and is also discounted by the Proc Coefficient of the damage dealing skill, which for Boulder Toss is 47.1%. And, with this build, about 90-93% of our total damage comes from Critical Hits, with the remaining 7-10% coming from regular, non-Crits. That means the equation for the damage dealt by Bloodshed is:
1x (damage of 1 Boulder) * 0.2 (Bloodshed %) * 0.9 (% of damage coming from Crits) * 0.471 (Proc Coefficient) * X (number of hits on targets).
For just one target hit, that’s 1 * 0.2 * 0.9 * 0.471 * 3 = .25, or .25x extra damage. So that mob you threw your Boulder at takes 3x from being hit by 3 Boulders, and .25x from Bloodshed, for 3.25x total. Here, Bloodshed is only doing 0.25/3.25 = 7.7% of the total damage to that mob.
But, in a good rift, you can be hitting A LOT more than 1 target with your Boulder Wave. For instance, look at the fight I have starting around 8:40 in this video. Here, I’m probably hitting 50+ mobs with each Boulder wave, and some of those mobs are getting hit by more than one Boulder, so the total number of hits is probably ~75.
So at 75 hits, that equation becomes 1x * 0.2 * 0.9 * 0.471 * 75 = 6.4x
Instead of doing just a little bit of extra damage here, Bloodshed is doing 6.4x, compared to the 3x a mob is taking from being hit by 3 Boulders. So the total damage to that mob is 6.4 + 3 = 9.4x, and Bloodshed is dealing 6.4/9.4 = 68% of the total damage, more than two thirds. And, it also deals that much damage to everything within 20 yards of me in every direction, not just the mobs I’m directly aiming at.
So, let’s now return to the part of this example where we filled up our Fury to 350 with Weapon Throw. In addition to taking longer to actually get up to 350, we’re also now standing in the wrong place! Because in order to hit as many mobs as possible with Bloodshed, we need to have them within 20 yards of us, and we’re standing 25-30 yards away from the nearest mob, and maybe even further away from the center of density. To actually deal damage with Bloodshed, we then need to Charge back into the middle of all the mobs before finally throwing our Boulder, which takes still more time.
Bottom line, even though a Boulder at 350 Fury does 2.25x the damage of a Boulder at 150 Fury, it takes 3-4 times as long to actually get your Boulder charged up and then thrown from the optimal spot as it does if you are just doing Charge-Toss-Charge-Toss. It’s just not worth it to use Weapon Throw in that situation, because it’s actually costing you damage.
Where Weapon Throw IS very useful is against the Rift Guardian. Here, you are generally just fighting one target, so Charge is not good at generating either Fury or Raekor stacks. And, Weapon Throw also stacks Bane of the Stricken very quickly. So against the boss, Weapon Throw is really essential. You try to keep distance between you and the boss, keep hitting with Weapon Throw, and just throw a Boulder whenever your bubble is completely full.
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Excellent answer as usual. I’m amazed at how you can find these numbers. What led you to the boulder toss proc coefficient of 47.1% for example?
I think this also illuminates a part of pushing strategy: it is better to lead elites into density than it is to wear them down with weapon throw and stricken stacks. I was very guilty of doing this initially until I realized it’s a waste of time and raekor really strives in big density. Keep WT for the RG.
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Easy answer: it’s listed on the site D3maxstats, for all runes for all skills. It’s probably in other places, too- not sure if it’s somewhere on D3planner or not.
Less easy answer: But, some of the numbers on D3maxstats are definitely wrong, so I re-tested. ANY TIME you want to test a Barb skill or effect for proc coefficient, there’s an easy way of doing so:
Step 1: Dismiss your Follower
Step 2: Get rid of all healing. No life per second, life per hit, life per fury spent, life per kill- nothing.
Step 3: Put BR: Swords to Ploughshares on your skill bar.
Step 4: Put the skill you want to test for Proc Coefficient on the skill bar.
Step 5: Go find a Skeleton in Cemetery of the Forsaken and let him punch you in the noggin a time or two.
Step 6: Hit the skeleton with the skill you’re testing. Repeat until you get a critical hit, then note the healing number that pops out of your character (or look at the exact number of your life bubble before and after).
Step 7: Divide that healing number by 21457 (this is the maximum amount that StP will heal, shown in the skill tooltip, if your attacking skill has 100% proc coefficient). So, this division gives you your proc coefficient.
For example, when I hit with Boulder Toss, I healed for 10106 life. 10106/21457 = 0.471
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That makes it sound so easy, but I find figuring that stuff out pretty ingenious. Thanks for the explanation!
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I saw you were not quite done… congrats on your 5:31! For “adjusted clear,” that puts Barb (159.3) once again ahead of Necro (159.0).
I saw you swapped out Boon for Ruthless. I assume you were leveraging the Empowered Shrine ability from the potion? Did you just fish until you got an immediate combo of good map / good mobs / Empowered from first potion use?
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Haha. Actually, it wasn’t a push. I didn’t spend keys for a better record, but just got a good map while upgrading my gems for MotE push.
Regarding passive, I haven’t used Boon all along. I’ve always loved Ruthless, and it’s the same for my S26 clear and current non-season clear. Instead of reducing the cooldown between WotB, I try to make a bigger pool for the next bombing.
So for Raekor, I don’t do potion fishing. Even if I don’t do that, Empowerd usually comes out within five times (~2 mins), and that’s fair enough for pushing. But, for MotE, I’m preparing the Empowered shirne fishing setup.
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If you stand in the blue circle it also refreshes your potion timer. It’s easy to get all the buffs very, very quickly.
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Good grief, I can’t believe I never noticed that!
Pretty awesome (and kind of hilarious) that you took rank 1 by a mile while you were just trying to upgrade your gems.
Really! I’m surprised I have not heard about that before, that’s a pretty powerful ability then. Does blue circle also “dynamically” lower your skill cooldowns when you stand in it? Usually CDR works on a “snapshot” mechanic.
OMG really. The boys will be happy if that if true. Gonna test it!!!