I don’t now why none of the Barb’s Basic Skills can hit multiple targets even e.g. Sorc’s Arc Lash can do so.
3 Likes
Yep. All Basics should be Cleaves. Basic, Core, Ultimate, Brawling, and Weapon Mastery Skill Damage should all be rolled into a single stat called +Skill Damage. Every Rank of Basic Skills should raise its Fury Generation and Lucky Hit% to be worth investing in. They would be pretty decent then.
Devil’s advocate, running frenzy at 1/5 with perks let me get an extra 3/3 passive which is likely more valuable.
I guess basic skills not hitting multiple enemies is designed to avoid getting “too much” fury generation…
1 Like
Tbf, they didn’t cleave in previous games either. They had more interesting utility runes and legendary items tho.
they can make it “fury per swing if at least one target is damaged”
I think that is the problem in that there are too many Passives that are mandatory for Barb. Like, if you want to take Shouts (like many many players do), that is 9 points in Shouts and 9 in Passives alone.
Not quite sure who would ever put 5 points into Ground Stomp, Leap, Iron Skin, Steel Grasp, Basic Skills. The Ranks do not do a whole lot and seem like complete after-thoughts. Either make the Ranks attractive enough to not take Passives in its place, get rid of Ranks, or reduce point investment needed into a lot of the Passives.
The ranks provide CDR which offsets nerfs to CDR items…and reminds me how much I hate the MMO style cool downs in this game.
Ranks provide cdr for Ground Stomp and Steel Grasp(?), but not for Iron Skin.
Who decides this nonsense? Why? So weak.
1 Like
It reduces the CD by like .25 seconds per Rank or something silly. It needs to do a lot more than what it does currently. Let’s take Steel Grasp as an Example of how it currently works, and how it should work:
++Current++
Steel Grasp (Base)
- 11 Second Cooldown
- 23% Damage
- 25% Lucky Hit
- 2 Charges
- 3 Chains
- 0 Fury for Each Enemy Hit
Steel Grasp (5 Ranks)
- 8.8 Second Cooldown
- 32% Damage
- 25% Lucky Hit
- 2 Charges
- 3 Chains
- 0 Fury for Each Enemy Hit
++Proposed++
Steel Grasp (Base)
- 11 Second Cooldown
- 23% Damage
- 25% Lucky Hit
- 2 Charges
- 3 Chains
- 2 Fury for Each Enemy Hit (Bosses 10 Fury)
Steel Grasp (5 Ranks)
- 6 Second Cooldown (1 second per rank)
- 63% Damage (10% per rank)
- 45% Lucky Hit (5% per rank)
- 3 Charges (Additional Charge with 5 Ranks)
- 5 Chains (Additional Chain at 3 and 5 Ranks)
- 10 Fury for Each Enemy Hit (2 Fury per Rank) (Bosses 40 Fury)
Additionally: An Arsenal Weapon can now be Assigned to Steel Grasp
- What this does is move a lot of the Fury Generation into the Skill investment themselves instead of having to solely rely on Basic Attacks or Shouts.
- It puts the CDR where it needs to be to make point investment an alternate to CDR on gear.
- It scales damage appropriately making it a viable Secondary Damage Skill rather than Deathblow really being the only Skill being used with the Encroaching Wrath Aspect.
- It provides you benchmark increases to make 3 points still attractive, gives benefit from dumping 1 extra point into, and gives you a reason to Max the Skill outside of just damage and CC. The concept of Techniques providing an added bonus at Level Cap should be worked into Skills as well which makes it feel like you are actually Specializing.
- Lucky Hit builds actually start to become very attractive to take this and apply Conditionals and use it as a form of CC. The Unique Weapon actually becomes a lot more attractive when fully buffed.
- The Skill also gives you an added bonus for Bosses so it does not feel largely wasted.
I am not quite sure what Blizzard was thinking when designing the Skill Trees, but it is really sad the low-effort that went into it. The above examples might not be perfect but gives you an idea of how they can actually fix the tree and make it less about simply putting 5 points into a Core Skill (and maybe Challenging Shout) then dumping the rest in the same Passives that literally every build takes.
I think all the skill designs up to this moment are still brainstorming. They are not well planned, developed and tested.
I’m currently playing an interesting build right now trying to take advantage of dual basic, high attack speed, bleed damage and thorns. It’s only level 60 at the moment but is cruising through WT3. For sure some things are odd about the build and it feels a bit wrong when I look at the sheet, but here are some of the highlights. Again it’s only level 60 just getting into paragons so I’m interested in how it will scale later:
Basic attacks, 5 points each in battle lunging strike and battle flay. Base dmg for lunging (top end) 4913 dmg, 1933 bleed (6846 total.) Base dmg for flay 777dmg, 5656 bleed(6433 total.)
Core skill upheaval, currently 8/5 rank tooltip top end damage of 7878.
I’m also using iron maelstrom with its tooltips of (top end) 2784, 928+5963 bleed, and 1508 (total 10283.)
I’m using the walking arsenal key passive, and taking advantage of supreme iron maelstrom with plus ground stop along with 100,000 steps to get the extra reduction every 30 seconds. With CDR I have my iron maelstrom down to 41 seconds and ground stomp during en to 12 timing and placing the ground stomp is they key to this setup.
I’ve also got the 2H sword expertise maxed for big bleed damage on all my direct attacks. I’ve also got a relatively small base value of 2806 on thorns that nearly doubles with my death wish aspect. I’m also run beserk ripping, limitless rage and numbing wrath for massive fortify generation.
Other key stats on the build
Crit chance 24.5% (needs work)
Crit dmg 192.9%
Vuln dmg 43.7 (needs work)
Dmg vs elite 48%
Dmg vs close 78.4% (needs work)
Dmg with physical 100.5%
Dmg with basic 221% (build specific)
Dmg with core 85.5% (needs work)
Fury cost reduction 12.4%
CDR 8.5%
For sure most people would never consider stacking points into basic attacks or becoming a Jack of all trades in terms of damage as it runs a bit counterintuitive to most ARPG logic. Still this weird allocation of points and choice of talents seems to work for where I am currently in game. At level 56 I cleared a NM20 (lv 73 enemies) in just over 10 minutes. I will probably head up to WT4 around level 65 or whenever I get my second glyph socket unlocked on my paragon boards.
It’s an interesting ride for sure, but back to the OP points. If basic skills had an AOE effect there would be almost no need to spec into core skills at all. Running around with max fury and over generating could turn barbarian into an OP killing machine utilizing basic attacks plus weapon mastery skills alone. That might sound great to us, but it’s probably bad for the overall balance of the game.
The AOEs just need to be fair.
Lunging and Bash should have a small forward traveling AOE
Frenzy should have sidearm, so randomly third touch to extra enemy
Flay should arc, make rend back to 360 and give flay 90 - 180.