Dear Blizzard, since Might Of the Earth set has been lacking last few seasons here is a nice solution to boost it by also giving an awesome looking 2h sword a chance to shine.
Blackguard is an awesome looking 2h sword that barbarians should be proud to use.
We can make this sword unique like this:
Adds 20-50% increased damage against Elites and 100% damage increase against Rift guardians. Damage is doubled when full Might of the Earth set is equipped.
I’ve been waiting since forever for barbarians to be able to dual wield 2h swords. But since that option is pretty much gone this is one of the solutions. Another one would be combining Mighty weapons and swords as an option for Transmog.
Blackguard is a two-handed sword, i.e. it’s not a Mighty Weapon, so it’s not restricted to Barbarians. This means any class that currently makes use of the The Furnace in the Cube’s weapon slot would just take Blackguard instead for the additional bonus versus Guardians.
Yep that is an issue. Madawc’s sorrow is the only item that could be targeted for this kind of buff without a complete redesign of an item. For the most part anything they do for barbs needs to be done to the entire class. All of our builds except for Frenzy are dependent on area damage for clears. Even Fenzy has area damage built into the weapon and the battle rage rune.
For the most part balance for barbs as a class is the best it has ever been and likely better then all other classes. On top of that balance across all classes top build is better then ever
except for monk. I expect that to change at the end of this season. How blizzard proceeds after that nerf is anyone’s guess.
So, our general slate of at least semi-serious builds is:
Rend
HOTA 3x
Leapquake
Frenzy
Slam
Charge
Let’s assume that a new Barb passive letting us dual-wield 2H weapons would work like the Crusader Heavenly Strength passive, and cut our damage by 20%.
So, for Rend, you could do something like wield Furnace in one hand… but the other hand doesn’t really get you anything major, in terms of affixes. Probably carry Messerschmidt, for extra cooldown, or Executioner, for slightly faster kills.
The extra CHD from an extra socket basically makes up for the -20% from the passive. You would suffer some dps loss from low aps when hard-casting Rend. After all, even when dual-wielding 1H weapons, you only break the 2.0 aps mark due to the IB bonus, which you wouldn’t have. You’d also have lower survivability, due to slower attacks leading to less healing and slower Zodiac cooldown procs. But, 2H maces have about 93% higher weapon damage than 1H swords, so you’re gaining a lot of damage there.
Then again, you can always play Rend now using a 2H weapon (not dual wielding) without suffering that -20% damage penalty. The reason this isn’t done is basically just the low attack speed causing problems with cooldowns, healing, and hard-cast Rend, and all dual-wielding would do is add 15% additive attack speed, which probably won’t solve the difficulties completely. If anybody want to see what that feels like in practice, they can just play Rend with a 2-hander and take Gogok rather than Stricken.
I’ll post some more about this regarding our other builds later…
It would be great for goofy seasons like this one. Imagine leapqking with a furnace & mess reaver with each hand keeping up zerker 100%. Then you could ditch APDs, etc, etc, etc.
Well, right now it wouldn’t do much in terms of damage- maybe a 5% buff to our dps. The main thing it would do is easier fury generation via Earthen Might.
Of course, if they buffed Avalanche damage somehow, then the net damage increase would go up. If they buffed it enough, then it would eventually outweigh Earthquake, and you’d be better off ditching EQ damage entirely, wearing Dread Iron instead of GoG… basically the mirror image version of the situation we have now.
Well, Seismic Slam is obviously an “Earth” skill… but there’s no reason you can’t use it with Raekor.
If they made this a power of the set, then I suggest that Lut’s socks cause rumbles when you walk, visually similar to the Seismic Slam power. Every 6-10 seconds, you release shockwaves that have a chance to known enemies down.
Good grief, I feel like I’ve had to explain why this is a bad idea a dozen times now. Well, here I go again…
If they made that change, two things would happen. Most importantly, you’d actually do less damage, since you could never really wring much benefit out of Zei + Oculus circle in big fights. And your damage is capped by your Leap + Shout speed, not how long EQ takes to do its damage. So, you wouldn’t do more damage, you’d do less damage. If your intention is to nerf the build, this is a great idea. But if you want to buff the build, it’s a terrible idea.
Second, it would just ruin the aesthetics of the build. I for one love leaving a lake of fire everywhere I go!
Well, a) there’s no knockdown mechanic in this game, only “knock into the air”, and b) if they did that, everybody who uses Leap:CoA + Strongarms for damage would do less damage since they would have a harder time grouping mobs to maximize AD. And everybody who uses Leap DfA plus Parthans for defense would be dead, since it would make it near impossible to keep many mobs stunned. (This is already the reason you cannot use Parthans with Phys Leapquake).
That is not a bad idea. Cram the Lut power into the 2-piece. Then give Lut a power that helps with elites+bosses. Either “more EQ damage for 3 seconds when Leap hits less than 5 targets” or maybe something like “Leap deals 100,000% weapon damage when it hits less than 5 targets”. Or, various other things of that sort have been proposed…
And, the other point – good. Force changes to make something new.
In any way, the point was to add something more interesting, thematically. Whether it “works” for the game is distant last place as that’s on the developers to figure out and has no bearing on considering an idea.
I get the benefits of damage over time. Killing trash and AE rocks. Flipside is how it plays after a certain gr point. Id like at least the option of DD IF they figured out a way to sexy it up like they did rend.
Its dumb when it takes longer to fight the boss than to takes to clear the grift.
Yeah, I totally agree that the boss fight takes too long. It’s just that compressing the duration of EQ wouldn’t help that problem at all.
I think the solution you’re looking for is just the one I think Bastich proposed a while back, where Lut Socks power moves to the MOTE set, and the new LS power makes EQ do extra damage (3x, 4x, 5x, whatever) for some amount of time (3 seconds, like GoG?) when it hits less than 5 enemies (so, similar to Bracers of Destruction for Seismic Slam).
That would give you lots of extra damage vs elites and bosses, and shorten those fights considerably.
There might be a bit of a mechanical issue with that since you can have EQs all over the place, so the “enemies hit” counter could be kind of complicated. Or, if the extra EQ damage were pegged to enemies hit by Leap, you could end up with a weird situation where it’s best to stack EQs on the mobs, then Leap away into empty space to trigger the LS bonus. That might be a pretty strange playstyle, but it could also be pretty cool.
Or, you could just have LS load a ton of damage into Leap itself when you hit 5 or less targets. That way you get your “direct damage” without having to completely change the mechanics of EQs. You could have the damage added be a big flat weapon damage increase, like S6 does for Impale. That would be mechanically simpler, and it would let Slam builds get the benefit too, rather than just Leapquake setups.
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