For example. Lightning sorc uses stuns. Rogues have a lot of vulnerable. A lot of barb builds play around bleeds to do extra damage to CC targets. Blood necro relies heavily on overpower as a build scheme. Etc etc.
Then there’s barbarian weapon swapping. There’s stuff like “gain X rage when you swap weapons”, “After swapping weapons 6 times, gain Fortify”, and then the worst: “After swapping weapons 10 times, do an overpower”
Is this… the worst build theme in the entire game?
I’ve been watching all the class channels on Sanctuary, and I’ve seen builds for practically every ability in the game, but one style that is absolute crickets is barbarian weapon swap builds.
Definitely going to be a more niche build. I can see some possibilities, but it highly depends on how resource is going to be at high levels. It definitely goes well with the walking arsenal passive for up to a 45% damage bonus. There’s also an aspect for 12-20% lucky hit chance and one for 20-36% fury gen while all walking arsenal passive are active. Maybe using both lunging strike and frenzy along with a core spender to keep up all the bonuses at once. Then there’s the paragon nodes for getting up to 5% crit from using one handers and chance to make enemies vulnerable with 2-handed slashing weapons. I’m sure there is someone who put more thought into it, but it feels like more of an endgame kind of build.
The free rage on weapon swap one doesn’t sound bad, if it’s not a tiny number. Would help get your stuff going again for another attack in some builds.
The overpower one seems a bit steep though. If these were halved then I’d see more potential uses for them, but they have to design them around folks trying to abuse’em entirely instead of their general usage when mixed into something else.
C’est la vie.
That said, I’m not planning on touching bleed stuff either. Which instantly wipes out some of the paragon board choices as a result. I was struggling to find actually useful legendary nodes when I last looked. Think I only found about three of’em, so glyphs it is.
Since you can choose what weapon to use on each skill, weapon swapping isn’t nearly as difficult as you think. Especially if you weave builder and spenders together instead of spamming builder until full, then spamming spender until empty.
I’ve got my weapon swap build planned out and will be starting off with that since every aspect I need for it can be learned in the codex. I’m quite looking forward to it, but I’m also not a “if it isn’t meta then it’s trash” speedrager.
I don’t see why you would think these are “themes”. It’s not as if you’re specializing in them, for the most part. Ideally you would have as many different conditionals trigger as possible.
Some of these items that proc on these type of conditions will just be transient. It’s fairly generic and you can use it until you get something more specialized to your build.
Could go either way. For some people it will just be transient pieces they use while its better than other options. Others may specialize into it.
I plan to specialize into weapon swapping. Not because I think it will be some great meta build, but because it looks like something I’ll enjoy. Alternating between two basic builder attacks to buff up auto-overpowered upheavals, very low cooldown iron maelstroms, and maintaining high fortify, damage reduction, and nearly full uptime on walking arsenal buffs. Will it suck compared to whatever busted builds people come up with? No doubt. Will I enjoy it anyway? Absolutely.
I think the idea of “themes” is also relevant in the paragon boards. I’ll be starting off with the two boards that are themed around weapon swapping and overpower/fortify.
Weapon swap triggers don’t seem too terrible. Unless your build is mostly shouts or your specifically theming around single weapon, it just happens automatically as you use skills and should actually be quite predictable
Berserking is what seems kind of sketchy to me
Basically have to use very specific skills to do it at all and some are just small lucky hit chances.
You also only ever seem to get it in 1.5-2s chunks so you need multiple sources for any sort of reliability.
But it looks like once you get the stuff that boosts it. It becomes a very very big buff.
Hoping it doesn’t end up pigeonholing barbarian into always using the ~4ish skills that can do it
Finally, something we agree on! On paper when it was announced like back in 2019, it seemed great. I really thought it was an amazing idea.
However, I thought they were going to add a weapon swap button of some sorts. Not make your arsenal weapon swaps and passive states depend on the skill you use. it feels like if you try to chase paragon passives for weapons, if you spec into multiple skills for the weapon swaps etc, to sort of be a jack of all trades per se you will be gimping yourself.
We’ll have to wait and see endgame builds to see how well it works.
I was thinking of using a two hand does it all build, so these weapon swap skills don’t do much for that build. Frankly I though it was kind of clunky when I first saw them. There are just too many other things that seemingly work better for the aspect cost.