[Guide] Raekor Ancient Spear

Barbarian
21

Funny thought: Revenge would actually be a pretty good skill to stick on the bar for this build. Because it provides a source of healing that is largely controllable by you, unlike LpS, LpH, LpFS, BR:StP, all of which just do their thing, and you can’t turn them off.

Heck, if you take the Best Served Cold rune, you can even pick up 8% CHC!

But, there’s really nowhere to put it on the bar. What would you drop? The only reasonable thing would be IP, but I can really only see that happening with a Sword + Board setup.

22

Heyo Rage,

Sooo how do you feel about a pure ranged version of this? This is ultimately my end goal, since I’ve been trying to make a viable WT/BT build every season I’ve ever played. I need this man

My first thought was swapping the WT rune to Throwing Hammer to supplement Zei’s, but the build is in dire need of a heavy slow/chill so I don’t think those two are enough. Maybe Iceblink with a cold damage rolled weapon? I’m not sure.

They should have changed one of the WT runes to cold damage and throw three weapons in a cone. That would have been pretty damn useful.

23

Hey U,

I was actually just thinking of maybe adding a “ranger” variant to the guide, for those who want to try their hand at staying ranged all the time.

Question: does Iceblink actually work with just cold damage range on weapons? It specifically mentions “cold skills”, but this would not be the first time a tooltip was wrong.

Anyway, let’s assume for now that Iceblink won’t work. I think that actually means it might be worthwhile to replace Trapped, since the main way you CC mobs is by freezing them with Charge, and if you are keeping your distance, that may not happen very much. That leaves you with Zei and Stricken.

The main candidates to replace Trapped are Esoteric (for toughness), Gizzard (to try to get some more value out of Squirt’s, if you are using it), and Gogok.

Personally, I’d go Gogok since it can help with your Fury generation via WT, defense via dodge, and CDR too.

In the cube weapon slot I’d take Oathkeeper, since you want to fill up that Fury bubble ASAP.

Especially if running a Crimson setup, you could, instead of taking IP, take CotA: Together as One. And you could stick Leoric’s Crown in the armor cube slot. Combined with Gogok, you can actually get up to 76% sheet CDR that way, which gives you 93% uptime on both WOTB and COTA (only 1.57 seconds of downtime).

This setup lets the Ancients block some mobs for you as well, which is really helpful for maintaining distance so that you can get the most bang for your buck out of Zei / No Escape / Arreat’s Law.

You could stick with Endless Walk, though if you find yourself needing to reposition too much and drop too much damage, you could switch to CoE + Squirt or Hellfire.

Here’s a D3planner. I’m on phone now so I only think it’s all correct: https://d3.maxroll.gg/d3planner-ptr/698472903

One other thought:

If not going with EW, you could also wear Flavor of Time and put Ess of Johan on your follower. This would actually let you reach nearly 78% CDR, giving you 100% uptime on both WOTB and COTA, while the Ess helped you group and slow enemies to keep them away from you.

Oh and one more:

If no enemies are near you, Battle Rage: Bloodshed won’t really be helping. You could take all sorts of stuff in this slot: War Cry, for toughness, Threatening Shout, for grouping or damage, Revenge: Best Served Cold, for a controllable heal and some extra damage like I mentioned in the post above, or even Avalanche: Glacier or Snow Capped Mountain, to freeze/chill mobs at a distance.

1 Like
24

What am I, chopped liver?

I didn’t exactly ask you to respond to my WT/BT range focused “Elite killer”, but I think it was pretty implied. :wink:

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25

I’ve actually gotta run shortly DH… my quick gut reaction is that you may run into significant trouble actually targeting the elites because WT just hits whatever is in front and doesn’t pierce, while BT deals an aoe. You’re also right that Zei is generally better than Powerful…

I’ll take another look tomorrow, but initial reaction is that it’s better to just murder everything with hammers/boulders/bloodshed than trying to specifically target elites.

26

Yeah, I kind of figured to clear mob action (like H90) and then go ranged on elites, but loring in an enemy or two from the next frame in order to proc Oculus and so forth until elite is dead. Now how that actually plays out is up in air. But yeah, do your thing and…

27

Well, all cold damage can inflict Chill iirc, and Iceblink is a 2 parter. The second part just says that it increases the slow from chill effects by x%. So theoretically it should work.

If not, Gogok is an excellent choice I agree. Attack speed is pretty key for this setup.

When I was experimenting with this build last season I rolled all my gear to attack speed, cubed 300th Spear, and held main hand Oath Keeper with off hand Pig sticker and had Gogok and WotB. Was good, but still not fast enough. Going to need machine gun arms.

What if you dropped Leoric’s Crown in the cube for Fury of the Ancients and wore Flavor of Time? Would you still have enough CDR for a still reasonable uptime? The fury gen of the ancients is pretty wild, and would supplement WT nicely for faster boulders.

Endless walk is going to be mostly useless damage wise if we can’t get a solid form of CC out immediately, since you’re just going to be charging/leaping away constantly.

Focus/Restraint might work better. Oooorrrr for a real wildcard pick that’ll help with CC would be the Pandemonium Loop it comes with 10% fear on hit and fears enemies near a feared enemy that is slain. Can pair that with CotE, SoJ, Rechel’s Ring of Larceny for speed, or RoRG.

You can roll % fear on hit on helm and weapons to supplement the ring as well.

Avalanche would work well as a keep away and Threatening Shout too. Could be set to the Intimidation rune for the 60% slow and have its duration doubled via Inspiring Presence passive. I’m sure terrify would be good too if you used the Pandemonium Loop.

28

Checked: doesn’t work, at least not for Barb.

Cold damage on weapon: doesn’t chill.
Cold skill: doesn’t chill.
Cold damage on weapon + Cold skill: doesn’t chill.
Cold damage on weapon + Iceblink: doesn’t chill.

Cold skill + Iceblink: chill.

I think I remember from something Tinne wrote once that all Wizard Cold skills auto-chill, but that it’s not the same for other classes.

Well, we got an extra 200% AS for Weapon Throw! It’s now basically the same speed as Frenzy, a 7 or 8 frame attack. Pretty freakin fast!

You’d end up with 74.27% CDR and 86% uptime on WOTB / COTA. I think the big issue is that you may be really squishy when those skills are down. It’s worth a try, though- could substantially increase your Fury generation even further, which means more dps. And it would give you a source of generation that doesn’t get nerfed if a bunch of mobs get up in your grill.

I wouldn’t recommend that… too much damage loss, whether we’re talking about EW, F+R, or CoE. I think your idea of taking TS: Terrify sounds much more fruitful.

Well, sounds like there are a lot of different options to try. Should be fun!

Thought about this a bit more. I think you probably just want to stick with Trapped instead of powerful… and, you know, you don’t necessarily need to skip Juggs. In density, just focus on hitting anything other than the Jug. AD + Bloodshed damage to him won’t be diminished by his CC immunity. Then, once you’ve killed everything else, you stack Stricken so fast now (roughly every 7 frames, or at least 8 stacks / second), that you’ll chip him down quite fast, even with the loss of damage from no Trapped.

I’ll often kill Juggs this way with Frenzy, and WT is now a lot like Frenzy.

2 Likes
29

You know what? It just ocurred to me that the Mighty Throw rune will almost certainly be the best for any pure Weapon Throw build, and probably by a large margin.

Let me explain.

The key is that Mighty Throw has 3 advantages:

  • It does more damage.
  • It has 100% proc coefficient.
  • It hits only one target.

What this means is that you can stack Stricken entirely on a single target (ideally an elite), and your Bloodshed damage, which hits everything around you, will then follow from your damage to that one target.

Frenzy would be similar, except that the Bastion’s chain smears your Stricken stacks across a whole bunch of mobs, significantly diluting the effect. If instead of the stuff with the chain, Bastion’s just read “Frenzy deals 100% additional damage for each stack”, Frenzy would instantly become an S-tier build.

Weapon Throw lacks some other advantages that Frenzy posesses, but with this mechanic in mind I’d expect it to overshoot my earlier estimates of its potential by at least a few tiers.

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30

Yep, that sounds right!

31

I checked on Aquilla. There is a hold-over, but it’s really short (maybe 1/3 of a second / 20 frames).

That means the buff would basically never be up except for cases where you are repositioning, or just hitting with Weapon Throw despite it not doing any damage (i.e. stacking Stricken).

I added a “Ranger” setup to the guide, it’s the second one in the “Variants” section.

32

Do you think that BT in IK WT holds it back?

33

Probably, yeah. Unless the Stricken stacking doesn’t work as it should, you really just want to be hitting one guy in the face, whereas Boulder Toss deals an aoe.

I think a LoD setup might end up being optimal, since you don’t have to even put AS:BT, or COTA, on the bar. It’ll also be tankier, which will let you just stand there hitting that one guy.

This might be a close to optimal setup:

This setup keeps you at a 6 frame WT, even when WOTB is down. It also has 100% IP uptime, for general defense and to keep Stone Gauntlets from slowing/stunning you.

You could also drop the AS rolls on rings for AD or Dmg Range. You’d be a hair slower but hit a bit harder.

Another option, since IP gives you CC immunity anyway, is to ditch the Ice Climbers for Illusory Boots, and swap Charge for Ground Stomp. That’ll prevent you from needing to reposition at all when you’re targeting that elite. And if Wrenching Smash causes any issues with moving that elite out of place, you could always take one of the other runes, like Jarring Slam, which generates health globes.

34

You make valid points. The 200% IAS makes a huge change to how WT is played for sure. I think that BT has a place, but should be used strictly for elites. Trash/mobs will always hinder the WT damage that we want directed towards elites and this is where BT comes in. I lob boulders over trash for direct hits on elites, once trash is cleared, then WT takes over (with the occasional BT for resetting WotB). In any case, I don’t think you can go wrong either way.

LoD has a lot of perks, but unless I’m missing something, IK does 4x the damage that LoD does.

https://d3.maxroll.gg/d3planner-ptr/166780807

35

You’re missing something. The build I linked didn’t have any paragon in mainstat. If you give each setup equal paragon (3290), and rank 100 augs on every piece, then the sheet damage for LoD is 8.27 mil and for IK, 4.36 mil. That doesn’t really mean much, though, since it doesn’t reckon with stuff like different WOTB uptime, or using EW vs using CoE + Squirt, etc.

There’s no doubt that an IK setup would also perform pretty well. But I think it will not have quite the same ability to just stand there and tank everything, while standing right next to the elite and hitting him with Mighty Throw.

Which brings me to this:

Ideally, you’re going to be standing right next to the elite. Basically the ideal range = 0, which is why I don’t include No Escape in the setup I recommend.

And, you’ll just keep hitting him, and only him, with Weapon Throw, and only Weapon Throw. That’s what keeps all the Stricken stacking in the same place, which not only kills him fast, it causes BR: Bloodshed to kill everything around you fast, too.

36

That’s true, but with WotB only up half the time, your losing 50% of your max damage which averages out to 6 mil. Secondly, SoJ wasn’t factored in by either of us which is 30% increased damage versus elite (you can pretty much say it’s CoE vs elites), this increases IK to 7.8 mil. And we can’t count out the impact that Zei’s (I had BotP) will have. It’s good to also keep in mind the Zei’s isn’t completely useless at close range since it does 12% damage at 0 yards. So I’m sure that LoD is the optimal setup here.:slightly_smiling_face:

37

Whoops, wrong thread :wink:

38

Since sticking to close range is so valuable, you’d be better off just sticking to Trapped. For IK setup, Trapped-Stricken-Simplicity will be optimal I think.

Both IK and LoD will be competitive with each other, I’m sure. And, I still think taking Aughild + IK (and skipping Skular’s) will be optimal for IK setups, though with all the Bloodshed damage we’ll be doing, IK + H90 might be a good bet too.

1 Like
39

You might be right, but that aoe damage from BT even at close range can be pretty devastating on a group of trash. I know BT can feel clunky and can a put off. As far as ranged goes, I gotta get this bug out of my system. IK + H90: I haven’t put much thought to it, sounds good as heck.

40

I know why I’m so adamant about range gameplay, it’s because the skill is Weapon Throw. I must see projectiles fly across the screen or it’s a no go.