Good evening I figured I’d start by saying that this build is not meta, it is probably not the best though it has some good things going for it. I didn’t want to play the standard meta shout and was looking for something to change up my play from my twisting blades rogue, I wanted a tactile feel that was more meaningful and heavy hitting.
I really found Iron Maelstrom appealing and the living arsenal passive had a huge bonus. So here are a few things I focused on:
1: I needed my basic skill and my core skill to consistently take care of two of the weapons. Hota fits perfectly into bludgeon and two weapon can be used for lunge, which is versatile and provides good movement.
2: We need to think about 1-2 other skills to fulfill the third weapon type while also looking at making our core skill useful. Killing Blow quickly became my favorite for both activating berserk and and vulnerability on demand. IT also happens to hit really hard when you need it.
3: Survival - this is the part I hate… Right now unstoppable is rough, being a barb we all know this, rallying cry and charge is what we got. I also considered iron skin, it’s an option but it sucks up an aspect slot but does have a shorter cooldown.
While playing the build I focused heavily on increasing my overall and scaling hammer of the ancients and killing blow. Iron Maelstrom became a room clearer removing chaff and allowing my main skills to decimate larger targets. Killing blow can effectively be used to do heavy damage to bosses and elites while activating key states for increased damage. My damage scaling was focused largely on:
- Damage close
- Vulnerable Damage
- Critical Damage
- Critical Strike
- Overpower
- Damage while stunned
- Damage with weapon swap skill
The last two may be confusing but I found with a majority of my damage coming from HOTA (Hammer of the ancients) that running concussion allowed me to consistently put down stuns both with HOTA and lunge. You could also run the vulnerability on core skill lucky hit if you wanted. In addition to stating for lucky hit weapon swap has an aspect that gives a huge amount of lucky hit while all three passives are going, which is easy to maintain with our core and basic skill and a secondary skill (killing blow) that refreshes itself if used properly. Weapon swap can also consistently force overpower every 10 weapon swaps.
Things I liked:
I hit hard… I’m sitting at 75 ish now and I often crit for 800k - 1.3 mil when things align. Combat has a nice tempo and each of the abilities feel impactful. The build is punchy and I supported by survival with heavily with fortify and paragon support for armor. Fortify also doubles as an increase in damage for overpower.
The hard stuff:
While I felt very tanky, it was very easy to get overwhelmed with CC. Unstoppable is absolutely neccesary and right now I suspect investing into lowered CC impaired duration may be absolutely neccesary. I also run unstoppable while injured in addition charge and rallying cry. One area that really felt bad was getting caught in an Iron Maelstrom. The skill really needs to have unstoppable as it changes your entire skillset while its active removing access to your normal methods of unstoppable.
Other options:
I’ve been testing scaling brawling and weapon master skills with some of the core charging aspects. These seem to be extremely powerful providing 200-300x increase in damage to skills in those categories with very low investment into them. As you always rotate your core and basic with this build you should always have high fury meaning you can also look at aspects and paragon traits that interact with that high fury to increase damage.
I encourage others to explore the options out there, Barbarian is rough around the edges, it really needs more options for unstoppable on a more consistent basis (like giving charge extra charges, leap unstoppable, Iron Maelstrom unstoppable). The class really needs this given its nature of being up close 24/7. In playing nightmare dungeons I felt comfortable up to a point with most encounters but certain combos are just brutal. Long duration unstoppable (like rallying cry or ironskin) are a must.
I’ll probably update the thread sometime tomorrow with a build… for now have a good night and I hope this post inspires others to try something outside of the norm.
Edit:
Had a 1.3 mil crit last night, just wanted to bump the thread and let folks know I will be posting the guide over at Wowhead under the title: Brahtos - Bro of War: Living Arsenal Iron Maelstrom. I’m not sure if there is a better standard for posting builds here because links can’t be posted.