I recently compared LS, HotA, MT and DB here.
If we assume that Lunging Strike is kind of OK as an endgame build, then HotA needs around 10-20x more damage.
Here I’d like to brainstorm some ideas, how HotA could get to that point.
First thing: I’d rework Mantle of Mountains Fury to become a quake/GS/Leap unique instead of some quake/HotA hybrid. You can either play quake or HotA, both just doesn’t work, which makes half of the Mantle’s affixes useless for any of the builds.
Then I’d introduce a new unique HotA hammer with the following stats (base version):
- Implicit: +40 maximum resource and 30% fury generation
- 242 strength
- 50% chance for HotA to deal double damage
- +6 ranks to HotA
- 300% critical strike damage
- Unique affix:
- Lucky hit: When at max. fury, attacks with HotA have a 50% chance to spend all your resources to create an aftershock that deals [175-350%] damage and grants you Berserking for 3s.
I call it ‘Ancients Judgement’ 
Why this?
- We go all in on the fury synergies of HotA
- We utilize the high lucky hit chance of HotA
- The fury spender will allow synergies with Banished Lords and Red Furor and keep Starless as an option
- The fury generation and lucky hit requirements will make an interesting build objective and progression
- The Berserking will relief some stress on skill requirements
- We leave any fire synergies to a rework of Hellhammer
- We can keep the amazing quake explosion splash from Mantle for the aftershock animation ^^
The next step would be to fix the ‘Ancestral Force’ aspect, by doubling its damage.
From here its probably quite some way to go, but the rest of the missing damage should come from general buffs to the Barb that all synergize with core skills. The best place to put them is probably by reworking glyphs and legendary nodes.
What do you think? 