Could someone rank Barbarian offensive Passives (Berserker Rage, Rampage, Ruthless, Weapons Master, Brawler) from best to worst for Rend Barbarian? Because I know some are better than others. Some are multiplicative, some additive (that’s what I read at least). And please leave a little explanation. For the purpose of this ranking let’s assume that we are talking about a high GR pushing situation and we are constantly at max fury and we use swords.
It depends.
Go read the Zodiac Rend guide. That should answer any questions you’ve got.
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“It depends” is not the answer I am looking for and it does not satisfy me. I have given specific circumstances and I want specific answer.
Here: It’s all in the guide.
Essential Passive Skills
Passives are key to a winning build. Discussed below are the essential passives needed to fully optimize your build.
- Rampage: This passive provides a huge boost to DPS and toughness through the rift, but won’t offer much against the RG unless the boss spawns lots of adds (hello, Saxtris!).
- Ruthless: When you’re pushing your personal best, you’ll want every second you can get to kill the RG and elites. This passive makes your job a heck of a lot easier.
- Brawler: Since this build performs best in density, you should be able to maintain the bonus from this passive 100% of the time.
- Berserker Rage: Though this passive offers slightly more damage than Brawler, it requires you to have 95% or more Fury. Use of this passive over Brawler depends on how often this drops off during game play. Use whichever seems to give you the most consistent damage.
- Boon of Bul-Kathos: This, along with careful management of cooldowns, will insure you have perma-Wrath.
- If you use the Crimson’s variant, you won’t need this passive to maintain perma-Wrath. If, however, you opt to not use this passive and happen to die with Wrath on a long cooldown, you will need to wait a long time before reviving.
Alternative Passive Skills
Whether through bad RNG, deficiencies in gear, or Hardcore play, you may be forced to take a different, optional passive.
- For Hardcore, swap Brawler for Nerves of Steel .
- If you have trouble maintaining Fury, swap Brawler to Weapons Master (with BK set) or Animosity (with IB set).
- If you are having trouble mitigating incoming damage, swap Brawler to Superstition .
chill…
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Here’s the answer you’re looking for:
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It is not the answer I want.
But all is in the guide and the guide is so good it’s been stickied.
Oh and you forgot NoS. For me that’s my first skill picked for all my builds.
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Oh, so you don’t want the right answer?
In that case, I recommend you take three Crusader passives, one Witch Doctor passive and use an INT-based Hellfire amulet with a Wizard passive on it.
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If you don’t have something smart to write better do not write anything. My question still stands.
Alright, here’s your answer:
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Achievement unlocked!
Maximum Irony
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Rage directed you to the guide that discusses all of the options, and notes that it’s situational, so reading the guide is your best bet to understand the best choices.
Blackarrows goes a step further and quotes the relevant guide sections that tells you everything you would want to know about passives for this build.
It sounds like you’re still unsatisfied, so:
Here’s my attempt at taking the information in the guide and formatting it to try to most directly answer your question the way you asked it.
Hopefully my other more experienced Barbbros will correct anything not correct.
Assuming you use swords and are constantly at max fury without needing a passive to get you there:
- Rampage - huge str boost throughout the rift.
- Ruthless - nice boost against RG and elites
- Berserker Rage - you indicated always at max fury so this provides slightly more damage than Brawler. I think this is additive DibS.
- Brawler - damage boost smaller than Berserker Rage (assuming you’re at sufficient fury to get BR) and density dependent (which you should anyways get during rift but may not at RG). I think this is additive DibS.
- Weapons master - lower damage bonus for Swords than the other skills. Usually used for fury regen with mighty weapons (BK) more than the damage bump for swords. I think this is also additive DibS.
So if you could take any one passive from another class and use it on a barb, what would you take?
Ambush is an extremely strong farming passive if you can overshoot the 75% and realize something closer to 40% damage in actual value, but it wouldn’t work well with anything that ticks or hits frequently in short intervals. So I don’t think it would be very useful for most barb builds.
Audacity for melee builds and Power Hungry for ranged builds are quite strong, would probably be the best damage multiplier choices, should be better than Ambush for anything where you aren’t close to one-shotting stuff. Audacity would probably be a really solid choice for WW/Rend.
Gruesome Feast is also quite strong for speedfarming (or when you can make globes I suppose), assuming it would work for dex/str and not just int.
Grave Injustice is a very strong passive, but can be largely be replaced by Messerschmidt’s now if you can spare a weapon slot.
Swampland Attunement is a pretty strong defensive passive in density. Rend barb w/ Swampland Attunement would just laugh at everything (well, except arcane and lightning). Monk has some solid defensive passives too, e.g. Harmony. Stand Alone would be decently strong on a lot of non-pet builds too (well, at least ones that don’t have too many other % armor bonuses, would be pretty bad for Leapquake or anything with Stone Gauntlets).
There’s a couple cooldown passives that could be useful, Evocation and Beacon of Ytar.
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Don’t bring us into this 
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What are you twinkly-fingered spellcasters doing in here anyway? 
You didnt know? the other classes have to take turns keeping an eye on the barbarians; they require supervision.
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It’s true, I looked away from Free for one minute and he put paste in his mouth! 
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I believe he was using the ground up bones of a cheeky Witch Doctor interloper mixed with ice-cold lager as a means of in-the-field dental hygiene. It was…
Helltoothpaste!
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Just keep him away from the electrical outlets; we’re not gonna make that mistake again.
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What? Tasted like licorice.
Kidding aside, I don’t get threads like this one. All the OP has to do is read the guide that is stickied in this forum and it will answer all of his questions. I mean, I know it’s a dense and lengthy guide, but there’s a ToC built in and the whole thing is incredibly easy to navigate. Just lazy, I guess.
Also, why would you push with anything other than swords?
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