The TLDR 2H Barb

New patch new changes, ill try to do little summary how it affects our barb:

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Now, lot of these buffs to thrower, makes building a melee barb questionable.
What happens here is, throw speed goes from 9 to 8 frames (super easy to max as balanced axes have great wsm).
Throw skills got all buffed, snake stance buffed, remember that patch ago there are also 3% poison pierce per rune, makes it great source of such valuable stat.
Another thing that comes to mind is using poison as single target, loaded with spell damage on gear, delivered via skill such as windform.

Interesting thing from oskill list:
TIME WAVE: projectile - every nearby enemy is hit with a timed strike, causing delayed damage
Now also spawns on 2 Handed Barbarian Axes and Barbarian Helms
Fuse delay reduced from 3 seconds to 1.6 seconds
Weapon damage increased from 40% to 150%

huge aoe, 150% wdm, only 1.6s delay, looks quite decent, especially for melee poison

TLDR: Overall not many changes for physical melee (wolf stance based), thrower, especially snake thrower gets major buffs.
Big elephant in the room is fact that bear stance will work with all builds (ranged and caster), also ghal rune got 200% buff (15% EF on weapons => 45 per rune, and barb can use 12 in those slots). That paired with bunch of spell oskills, makes me think caster barb is gonna be strong.

Are you indirectly announcing TLDR Throw Barb?

I guess it would be the way to go, changes seem to be making new competition for current barb meta. Especially in matter of gameplay, 2h barb wasn't a dream build for farming.

Ywinel wrote:Are you indirectly announcing TLDR Throw Barb?
I guess it would be the way to go, changes seem to be making new competition for current barb meta. Especially in matter of gameplay, 2h barb wasn't a dream build for farming.

I mean if you can get it to state where you 1-shot screens with poison stampede, just facerolling areas, then yea, melee skills stand no chance in terms of clear.
As for foolproof slower paced character that pushes through content and goes from charm to charm, not sure if poison would be route to chose.
There are some negative synergies with approach to bosses. A runemaster version, will lack spelldamage for poison single target for instance. Alternatively if you focus on that, all spelldmg you collect will go to waste vs crowd, because AOE attacks don't carry spell damage bonus to snake stance.
Block route is never ideal untwinked because you need farm your signets first.
And finally melee scales with poison for that single target.
Take windform, which hits for 150% wdm, adds its own poison that is about half of what maxed snake stance does, AND on top of all of it, if you equip caster gear, because windform counts as direct melee hit, its gonna multiply poison damage. 500% poison spell damage, means its gonna hit that target 6x as hard ans if you used 150% wdm throw skill (which btw doesn't exist, they have lower wdm).

Do you mean that +%psn spell damage works for direct hit attack? Does energy factor determine the damage of that as well?

If yes, then character mada by smaxing poison skills + caster gear would indeed be incredibly strong for bossing.

Ene factor won't work, only spell damage for melee hit and mostly direct ones.
https://docs.median-xl.com/doc/wiki/poison I don't know what is outdated in this topic but most of info should be overall correct.

Yeah thats the way to boost single target on weapon poison builds. If you melee hit (or via whirlwind clone), spell damage works.

Same way if you take assassin with maxed ways, load her with spell power, its all boosted via direct attack.
Since lot of bosses now is vulnerable to poison, it can be quite interesting, poison should be viable single target option.
There is just this problem that all that will not apply to your aoe, so if you use same build for area farming, your poison spell damage gear is partially wasted. For any ranged ability, or AOE from crystal swords, whatever thats not single target hit, that is only affected by level of snake stance and amount of poison pierce you have.

Reading all this I'm wondering if whirlwind + spell damage gear will work for bosses (ubers) - if it has enough damage - and snake + stampede for farming (in different gear).

Or... if the gear has -%EPR instead of spell damage, won't that work for both melee and ranged skills?

In the first option, there was no place for overkill, but in the second there would be.

Captcha wrote:In the first option, there was no place for overkill, but in the second there would be.

its correct, but point is you wont be able to kill tough bosses, by just throwing stampede at them with capped -enemy resist, thats not enough damage. Thats trash clearing values. You need really juice up the poison for single target it feels.

Anyway, after looking deeper into patch notes, I have some ideas.

SCREAMING EAGLE: enemies now take an additional 25 elemental and magic damage per Skill Level
BANISH: curse - renders target vulnerable to magic and elemental damage
Area scaling is now 0.33 yards per level down from 0.67 yards per level, and now caps at 1 screen
Duration scaling is now 1 second per level, down from 4 seconds per level
Now increases elemental and magic damage by 25/lvl, down from 30
Spawning on Sorceress Body Armor: oSkill level increased to (8-12), up from (1-3)

also:
ELEMENTAL WEAPONS
NEW ITEM STAT: Innate Elemental Damage
Increases the innate elemental damage found on sacred elemental bases
Multiplicative effect, e.g. 50% Innate Elemental Damage would increase Battle Axe damage to 135% of strength as fire
Many charms which previously gave tri-elemental flat damage will now give Innate Elemental Damage instead
Throwing axes are now an elemental base (innate elemental damage does not apply while dual wielding)

What happens here is: we get 25 fire/cold/lightning/magic damage per soft level from screaming eagle buff (and same from banish oskill that stacks).
Untwinked level 115ish build can easily get s.eagle to slvl 50 = 1250 damage per element/magic so x4 = 5000 added damage.
And this unlike wolf companion curse WILL WORK with stormblast/iceburst, as long as you have any amount of respective damage values added to your final damage hit.
Reason why wolf companion curse doesn't work with for example stormblast is, it only works if you deal some form of phys damage. Stormblast converts 100% physical to lightning, which means wolf curse (or doom, same thing) will not be added. But other elements or magic damage are still added on top of lightning. And that means damage from screaming eagle will be added.

Now as you can see flat ele damage is removed from charms, so we no longer get triple ele damage from for example six angel bag, which would unlock that bonus damage for free.
But you still can get it from runewords or TU items. Flat magic damage is little harder to obtain, magic elemental rune comes to mind first (or gladiator's dominance if we play throw spec).

This is quite interesting, and could potentially solve single target problems.
While these changes are targeted towards throw specs, I think melee with skills such as iceburst/stormblast will benefit the most out of flat damage (very high multihit, and low wdm value which doesn't matter).

Now question is how to seamlessly implement this into our spec. Screaming eagle does require throwing axe.
Easiest would be just go with balanced axe, and use deathgaze+iceburst, with shield.
Offhanding throwing axe to unlock screaming eagle as main hand with sword doesn't work, you can throw it, but it has no effect, that was fixed long time ago.

aerial wrote:While these changes are targeted towards throw specs, I think melee with skills such as iceburst/stormblast will benefit the most out of flat damage (very high multihit, and low wdm value which doesn't matter).

Very interesting piece of theorycrafting. Perhaps the downside for some is that it's become a melee barb not a throw barb - and some like the ranged/throwing style.

Just to clarify re my previous post, I wasn't really suggesting stampede with -epr gear for bosses, more that overkill (or another single target skill) could be used in the same gear. If it still doesn't have enough boss damage it might come down to how much +psn dmg we can get without having to swap out of the farming gear - or at least some of it. Lots of gear with -epr also has poison damage though?

If it works how i think it works, seems quite op tbh.
Lets take few examples.
A level 125 barb, spec from guide, so maxe spirit guide (200 ewd), maxed wolf stance (600), perfect 1h weapon craft (200-480 damage).
You get d2stats 1:1 damage physical 2.5-6k (average 4k).
Now that damage will be affected by weapon damage mod on skill. So if you use it via stormblast that is 30% wdm, 0.3 x that average value. 0.3x4000=1200
Screaming eagle with all damage types active would increase this by 5k (if it was slvl50). You could additionally curse by lets say level 20 banish, for another 2k.. and thats ONLY via this added damage.
Lets take another example, what if we max strength and nephalem spirit? on test char with this level of gear, im getting averag 1100 tri ele damage per element added to weapon (total 3300). And that again is affected by skill modifier, unlike screaming eagle curse. So via stormblast we only get 1/3 of it, whole uberskill adds 1000 total average damage to stormblast. While screaming eagle is 5k..

it almost feels like this build should ignore every other source of damage, because it is so inefficient in comparison. You get pierce, utility, and only get damage from screaming eagle + banish. Pierce to all elements, incresing skill level, defenses.

Question is: what weapon? elemental or physical? Let's say 1h elemental throwing axe will have same bonus as crystal sword (as being 1h). 60% stat converted to single element. Even if that is doubled via that innate damage modifier thats new, lets say 120%. Let's say it scales off strength, since axes are str based, we get 3000 strenth that would be +3600 elemental damage. Nice but again, affected by skill mod, if you use it with storm blast, or even worse, iceburst since its axe, that value is reduced by 75%.
Similarly physical damage, we would need go to big lengths to increase physical damage, since then we need skills, like ewd from stance, spirit guide, and that also ends up being low number after skill reduciton.
Feels like whatever has better utility wins here. Phys can leech, but if phys part of damage is low, that leech will be weak. Crushing blow is decent tho, because we need to deal any small amount of phys and it already gonna trigger cb at its full power.
Ele weapons have some interesting procs. Life spark on striking for heals? (3% max life healed per proc).
Getting automated banish also seems nice:
1% Chance to cast level 25 Banish on Striking
12% Chance to cast level 40 Banish on Melee Attack

that is 2500 or 4000 ele/magic to each tick of attack, regardless of what wdm on it is. And that is before factoring in pierce.

trash monsters have 35 resists. If you get -65 enemy resists (putting them at -30%) that doubles entire elemental damage. If it is boss with higher base resist, pierce is even more effective. A 70 resistance boss, if you apply same 65 pierce on it goes to 5% resist, and damage taken increased over 3x.