The TLDR 2H Barb

We can calculate the difference.
Do you remember what was the number on Tectonic when it was maxed? what % chance per how much ewd?

Quick math for your setup, Colonel has always the same amount of damage, + snownstorm combo it results in avg damage of 276. And it is 1 frame faster than 2h axe (so 16% multiplier to spammable damge (irrelevant for manual cast SOR), and chance to proc). Also 10% deadly strike.
Colonel base type ed bonus is (0.11 per Strength)%

Two endgame 2h choices:
both 2h axes (0.16 per Strength)%

non eth Gotterdammerung
average damage with 6 jahs = 662
Area Effect Attack (100% chance to cast 50%wdm aoe 5 yards)
Mega Impact 25% chance to cast -7% enemy phys res debuff

Grief
runeword (berlemgulbur) in sacred labrys superior 60% ed base non-eth
average damage = 611
slows target 20%, max all res 1%, 5% dodge
for SOR if we count 20% more damage (to reduced cooldown), then total damage goes up by 20% (for weapon alone that would be 730)
thunderfury proc is lightning which will be nulified by passive

So basically, question is, how much more proc chance from tectonic will you get in comparison to 2h setup and does it outweigh the difference in base damage, which is over doubled, among other stats on weapons, such as AOE proc every swing, mega impact, or that reduced sor cd.

It is 1% chance to proc per 70% EWD.

So if your combined chance was 17%, and if you only count weapon slots (not set bonus), 500ewd from colonel = 7% chance on attack.

Btw if we value proc chance so much, using something like Metalhead unique great helm would be worth considering (3% chance for sor on attack). That is almost half of the bonus and it works with all attacks not just EQ.

Anyhow, 7% of 17% is 41% of your total proc chance, and then losing 1 attack speed frame that results in roughly half of the proc chance compared to 2H setup. But 2h deals over double base damage, and doesn't rely on rng procs, and with procs below 20%, this gets random, some targets may die very fast and some not proc at all for couple of seconds if you get unlucky.

I will start throw barb this season and might give EQ a shot again if i get bored of it, especially if i end up using phys variant since a lot of gear will crossover.Then i will try to play around tectonic and find balance between EWD and flat damage, maybe ditch jah/ko runes in favor for elq/stone runes etc etc.

Yea I don't see point of trying to fit those new passives into melee spec, just play phys throwbarb. Judging by the wording in patch notes and how good overkill used to already be, I can bet this is gonna be very good single target skill. All you need to complete the build would be good performance of physical version of stampede for aoe clear. You essentially end up with similar build as this, except more defense (shield), and ranged, and probably way more single target, due to sor limitation we discussed in this thread multiple times.

Now that i think about it, you might be able to reach close to 100% between deadly strike from items and crit strike from passives. You will have to ditch runemaster for glad dominance and pay the 41 skill point tax (probably comes from either wolven guide/mountain king and ancient blood). On a scuffed setup that fat daddy had, i have 32% DS and 78% leech, assuming we dont pay too much tax points via sacing mountain king, the build should still have around 5k str (40% leech from new passive, might not have that much if we use crafted jewels instead of ko/ka runes though). Add opportunity of using crafted jewels with leech 2% str and flat str it will be pretty close to 100%. Still not sure if it will be worth sacing points for tax though.

aerial wrote:Yea I don't see point of trying to fit those new passives into melee spec, just play phys throwbarb. Judging by the wording in patch notes and how good overkill used to already be, I can bet this is gonna be very good single target skill. All you need to complete the build would be good performance of physical version of stampede for aoe clear. You essentially end up with similar build as this, except more defense (shield), and ranged, and probably way more single target, due to sor limitation we discussed in this thread multiple times.

Is overkill that good? Im worried that it will be awkward against moving target or target not nearby, even in 2.6.

Overkill was very good, and it should get better. Remember that being ranged is superior to melee. If you could just shift lock on a quick boss that runs around, you would immediately chose that option over chasing it with whatever melee ability.

On the other note, I was still wondering about Tectonics passive and its synergy with attack speed.
Last summary was not correct, I forgot that 1h swing was changed at some point to be capped at 7fpa same as 2h axe. So thers no difference there, which helps 2h in this scenario.
As for other setups, dual wield will give 6 fpa, same as unarmed and 2h sword.
Treewarden morph from unique axe is 5 frames which is also something to consider.

Assuming that Colonel ewd works if put in offhand.
Dual wield setup seems to be interesting here, as you can get benefits of colonel and at same time get 1 frame faster attack, and good avg damage from crafted 2h sword used as 1h. That old meme where +350 max dmg roll from a 2h sword then works even if you use this as 1h on barb.

Technically with 6 fpa if we could push tectonic chance to ~24%, that is 1 sor per second on average, which compared to normal sor every 2s, triples our sor damage. And it is safe to assume, that earthquake damage vs single target was pretty negligible.

All orange text does not work when dual wielding, unless stated otherwise. Pretty sure colonel was part of the reason for that.

That 500% ewd is worth 7% proc chance. Opportunity cost is shit base damage.
King of ents seems interesting in that comparison. 5fpa speed is worth a lot, and weapon has good damage at same time. The more base % proc you get, better it becomes. 5fpa is 40% faster than 7fpa. So 10% proc chance would proc same amount per second as 14% chance without morph.

One more calculation that would apply to classic untwinked run. No crazy sacred uniques, high runewords and such.
If we have let's say 7% chance to proc SOR, and we have our 7 fpa attack with either 2h axe or 1h+shield.
That will proc 1 extra SOR on average every 4s, in addition to our regular self cast sor every 2s. So that is on average 0.25 SOR per second and self cast is 0.5 sor per second, so proc increases sor output dps by 50%.
That isn't bad. 14% proc chance would double it, and we would be getting 1 additional sor every 2 seconds, which is same as cooldown.

12% ewd weapon MO x5 is 60%, that is almost 1% chance to proc extra sor.