As a Barb main that created a Pulverize Druid for the season I’m quite shocked by the huge distant in common sense from Blizzard in terms of build design when you compare a HotA Barb with a Pulverize Druid.
Just in terms of the core skill itself when you are between lvl 1-20, it’s unbeliavable how little damage you get from ranks in HotA compared to even a rank 1 Pulverize. More importantly, you literally need a legendary aspect just to make HotA relatively similar to a raw Pulverize in terms of impact.
It gets worse: that unimpressionable HotA legendary aspect is all it has in the entire game. Pulverize in the other hand has now 2 legendary aspects and a whole powerful unique. More than that, the only clunky way HotA was able of working when you get to 60+ was by procing overpower, usually with Bash + cleave. Well, nowadays not even that is an option and the skill is pretty much unusable in the endgame. Compare that to Pulverize which has many sinergies with poison + guaranteed overpowers now.
Just venting a bit as it’s crazy to me how a game has two skills which are actually quite similar in terms of raw form and gameplay, but the devs are completely clueless about one of them. Even worse, HotA is a pretty consolidated skill for the “smash” playstyle of Barbs (and it was always relatively strong in Diablo 3), which has become a class known for minions, caster or ranged playstyle in the past few seasons god knows why.