Ive been playing around with upheaval and just baffled at how bad it felt. It has an abysmal lucky hit chance, odd cone aoe, and huge fury cost. It’s extra passives aren’t great either, 1 being a berserk enabler and the other a 30x% multiplier for hitting things 10 times with other direct damage sources.
I eventually made my way to a leapquake build after hitting 100 and its a riot. The aoe is great however the ST sucks. Although hota is a beast i dont like relying on it because its obviously bugged and will see a nerf bat soon. So then i figured wth use upheaval.
The good: leapquakes and ground slam quakes stack the 10 upheaval charges, meaning in big groups you can get max stacks almost instantly.
Unbridled rage is the best way to play with leapquake as leap gives massive fury gain and with the ring and a lvl 9 leap hitting 2 enemies makes leap’s cooldown instant.
I stack bleeds as i use upheaval with a 2h sword. Bleeds with the disembowel glyph help reset your cds fast if leap happens to only hit one enemy and also keep ground slam on a low CD to fuel stuns and more quakes.
The bad: its single target sucks badly. The build is just bleh on bosses. Funnily enough my older arsenal maelstrom weapon swap build that utilized deathblow is probably the best bosser barbs have.
You can arsenal this build as well but upheaval’s damage wont be great. You get better sustain though.
With unbridled ive gotten upheaval to crit around 4-5mil but thats about it (350% vuln and 470% crit damage on sheet but about 600% with wrath and 2h sword implicit.
The bonus of upheaval over hota is that you dont need the berserker bleed aspect as 2h sword bleeds already. So you get an extra aspect slot for more damage or utility.
arent the 10 charges only 30% extra dmg
are you using a generator or did you drop a shout
You don’t need generator for leap quake. Leap is the generator and kick and groundstomp resets the leap cooldown with Perpetual Stomping Aspect.
Not even using the reset from ground stomp or kick. With 9 leap and the ring that reduces leap’s cd you get an instant cooldown if you hit 2 or more enemies or a 4 second cooldown say on bosses.
I could get the ground stomp reset but it wouldnt matter for bosses which is the build’s weakest link.
Also: after further testing ive come to the conclusion that everything on the barb is broken and hota is the only thing working or hota is absolutely busted.
It should be an embarassment to have the barb in this state, hota is so fn far above everything else that ive tested its stupidity. This class is completely broken with only 1.5 specs (whirlwind was over nerfed).
Using leapquake helps unbridled hota sustain more easily without shouts and it even works well on bosses by cycling ground stomp and leap (with a 4 sec cd its giving you 15% dr with 99% up time). I still think Hota arsenal is better for bossing if you can get the rotation down but unbridled leapquake has insane clearing and 1 leap pretty much fills your fury to full. Not to mention the style points.
Second update:
The ground slam and kick resetting leap aspect is amazing for 2 reasons:
- It resets leap’s cd
- Kick
After testing this build my biggest problem was the lack of vulnerability uptime. However this aspect not only gives kick huge utility, running ground slam and kick allows you to use kick to make bosses vulnerable and also keeping leap refreshed for fury. I actually dropped my basic skill for kick and if i run out of fury i just kick to reset leap and the vulnerability allows me to do massive damage (vulnerability is OP).
Juggling all these skills is kind of a headache but it makes for a very fun and intensive gameplay.
Ps: kick is insane for boss fights. Such an underrated skill.
I’m a huge fan of kick, have been since the start. Another use for it is to dump fury quickly to set up encroaching wrath for your next deathblow. Having supreme wrath of the berserker get procs from it too is just icing on the cake.
BTW, I’ve had kicks crit for over a million damage this way.
Then you can do fun things like chain something in, then kick it away, chain it back, then kick it away again.
It is fun. It’s just that you’re so damn squishy.
I did a 64 pretty easily. Ive set up my barb to be extremely tanky and i should be able to get to 70s at least.
I’d argue that its tankier than shouts hota because the quakes stack disobedience.
Brother… stop wasting your time with kick… just three shouts, upheavel, and ground stomp w/quake aspect is all you need. You capped at 5mil dmg? Your build is wrong somehow on the paragon. I’m 86 doing anywhere from 4-6.5mil. I can upheaval like 5 times in a row with the 10 stacks
I don’t know your play style but if u stand in your quake u get extra %dmg. If you use a sword there’s an aspect that can deal a %of the bleed dmg as physical dmg.
I tried leap quake and ground quake but it’s unreliable. Lunging strike with the exploit applies the vuln which gives you the opportunity to deal massive damage. For bossing. Both the ground quake stun and upheaval stun builds the stun bar pretty quickly. Not to mention your shouts.
What? You need kick to keep vulnerability up on bosses and elites lol.
Upheaval is just a worse hota in everyway. It needs to do 2x the damage to be useful for how slow it is.
I’d like to see upheaval go from being a cone to a rectangle that starts from behind you. That way when you grip enemies, they all get blasted by it.
That’ll give a small payoff for the backswing
What skills are you using now? I am missing some Aspects and Paragon so I am running:
- Bash (Overpower)
- Ground Stomp
- Iron Skin (Unstoppable)
- HoTA
- Leap
- Steel Grasp
Steel Grasp is 3 points, Kick you can get by with 2 it seems? Grants Vulnerablity to Multiple Enemies and Pulls them (sometimes lawl). It grants Berserking and Stuns Enemies which, with Umbral is giving me Fury by itself. I can use it from a range and right now, I have the Aspect to give me extra Charge and allow it to Stun, but with more CDR and Disembowel, I won’t need that.
I like that with Kick, I can take the (3) Berserking Passives which gives me (2) sources of Berserking, and I pick up a point. I would love to be able to drop Bash, but Aspect of Might is a lot of DR and it allows me to use the Aspect making my Core Damage increase by 30% after 3 hits.
How many enemies does Kick actually hit? In Beta, I played around with it and if I get a Selig’s Heart Unique Amulet, playing around with a Deathblow, Upheaval, Kick Nuke build sounds really fun.
The wording on the kick nuke modifier, a la “spend all fury, more damage for spent fury” was also available on seismic slam in D3. SS is the predecessor to Upheaval. I’d love for a modifier like that on Upheaval. Combined with a meaningful “life per fury spent” affix and you can get a nice flow going.
Lack of true nukes is a bummer.