Things to fix the Walking Arsenal Key Passive and associated style of play

If you are a Barbarian enjoyer who loves to play off-meta builds or homebrew as some like to call them, like myself then you may have tried building around the Walking Arsenal Key Passive and the cool in concept unique 100,000 Steps. A build around such can work great in the early game, even up to maybe Torment 3 but it falls off hard after that. It’s really a fun and engaging style of play that is a shame to have being so weak in comparison to “Insert Earthquake and Call of the Ancients build”. For starters, aside from the key passive itself there is little to no incentive to keeping up the 3 part buff, along with being a lack of damage multipliers to push further in endgame play, and the generally weak unique being 100,000 Steps. I have a list of things that could be done to help nudge the build in the right direction.

1: Buff the 100,000 Steps Unique. I believe the implicit “Evade grants+10% Attack Speed for 3 Seconds” is while flavorful, extremely underwhelming. I suggest giving it the treatment of having 2 implicit effects, like Penitent Greaves and Flickersteps have, the 2nd it should have would be “Attacks Reduce Evade Cooldown by 1.5 Seconds”. That would help tremendously in keeping the attack speed buff it grants active, along with actually giving the ability to have your Evade available defensively.

  1. Adjust the bonus of the Mortal Draw Paragon Glyph. The additive “Skills that swap to a different weapon deal X% increased damage” is fine, however the additional bonus of “Swapping Weapons has an 18% chance to cause the Skills damage to critically strike” is very underwhelming and honestly useless with the ease of achieving 100% critical strike chance. I would suggest changing it to “Swapping Weapons X times causes the next skill to be a guaranteed Overpower Critical Strike” along with changing the legendary bonus from a flat damage multiplier to a larger damage multiplier for skills that swap weapons.

3.Add a Resource Temper for the Passive “Furious Impulse.” It would go a long way helping in the leveling process especially before we get access to the Weapons Master legendary Paragon node.

  1. Iron Maelstrom isn’t explicitly a part of this build but it certainly is meant to be part of it IMO, and I feel it needs a bit more of a nudge to be good. For starters while it does have the scaling off damage to healthy and injured, outside of the Slaying Strike Passive, the Weapons Master Legendary Node, and the temper for damage to injured, it doesn’t have much else. It’s damage is split between 3 casts of it, the starting damage isn’t great and the biggest problem IMO, the fact it’s completely overshadowed by the Barbarian’s other 2 ultimate skills due to the Uniques for them being actually good. Arreat’s Bearings are a staple in barbarian builds that aren’t even using Call of the Ancients because it’s by far the best source of All Res the class has, and the Ugly Bastrd helmet is the most used helmet for the class since it has the huge damage multiplier stapled on it. Not to say those qualities are a bad thing but when a build defining unique is being used outside of it’s build just because it’s best in X category, even overshadowing actual Uniques designed for the build you are playing, then that’s really not good. For an Iron Maelstrom/Walking Arsenal player to meet resistance cap on Torment 4 they have 3 choices. Run Arreat’s Bearing effectively as a pair of pants with All Res, Ultimate Dmg and Max Life, no unique effect applied, run Yens Blessings or Rakanoth’s Wakes for the All Res and somewhat benefit from their unique effect but forgo the builds designed boots 100,000 Steps, or get All Res rolls on every non-unique item they are wearing. Sorry to rant everyone but I just want to see this build I love the design of the actually be viable and successful for once. Been trying this build since Season 0 and sure I have fun with it sometimes but it just can’t really even handle Torment 4, especially after Season 5 ended.
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Theres actually a really amazing walkimg arsenal build that no one talks about and its based around Iron malestorm spam hitting for billions the only downside to the build is its not super fast for speed clearing

Nice post, I have an IM build that can handle T4.

I like you ideas, I agree with the Mortal Draw Glyph being useless and love your ideas to fix it. I hope the devs look at your idea on this glyph.

Capping IM at 200% is too low, at least double it!

100,000 Steps needs a rework, move speed per walking arsenal bonus sucks same with damage to stunned enemies. Make it synergize with IM.
Stats should be move speed, all resist, ult damage, strength. With those stats it helps most builds and could be used as hold over until you get Yen’s or Rak boots.

Lets hope for some changes in season 9!

IM’s problem is that for one, it should not be an Ultimate as it is a bastardization of Rend, Double Swing, and HoTA wrapped into one Skill, the major problem being that it requires 3 key presses. You could essentially do that with 3 separate Skills but each of those has no modifier to them. The damage for each category is also very low and unlike Core Skills, you cannot gain as many Ranks or have as many synergies with it.

Can you make it hit hard? Sure, but it is really janky. You could get +24 to Heavy Hitter which gives it absurd multiplicative damage. Combined with Ground Stomp and Flickerstep, you can spam it. Shattering Steel is interesting to put on a 2H, but unlike Steel Grasp, it does not have something like Delayed Extinction giving it x500% Damage.

Honestly, my Third Blade Steel Grasp build is way better than most Metas, people just have not figured it out as they are distracted with MT.

If you want an Ultimate Build though, I have a WoTB build that uses WoTB as your Primary Damage and hits into the high TRILLIONS consisently. You can spam it and every hit has every single modifier and bucket imaginable.

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