The TLDR 2H Barb

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OverSky
Pit Knight
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Kerchaak wrote:
OverSky wrote:With Bloodthirst and Mighty Vigor nerf in a couple of consecutive patches, is it worth dumping 36+ points into throw tree for like 50% ish critical strike now?

Critical Strike and Deadly Strike roll independently but do not stack on the same roll right?



It will be difficult to reach that amount of critical chance total unless you invest in Gladiator's dominance & plan on replacing all sockets with 2% LL, 2% STR and flat STR.

Its exactly 41 skill points for a total of around 17% crit with endgame gear, 25% LL and an additional 200% WPD on wolf stance, at the cost of total life and AR, defense and WPD you would get from investing those points in Wolven Guide and Ancient Blood.


I see ye that seems on the wrong side of tradeoff, should not be worth it at all. Like 20% more damage for maybe 30% less tankiness.
Kerchaak
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OverSky wrote:
Kerchaak wrote:
OverSky wrote:With Bloodthirst and Mighty Vigor nerf in a couple of consecutive patches, is it worth dumping 36+ points into throw tree for like 50% ish critical strike now?

Critical Strike and Deadly Strike roll independently but do not stack on the same roll right?



It will be difficult to reach that amount of critical chance total unless you invest in Gladiator's dominance & plan on replacing all sockets with 2% LL, 2% STR and flat STR.

Its exactly 41 skill points for a total of around 17% crit with endgame gear, 25% LL and an additional 200% WPD on wolf stance, at the cost of total life and AR, defense and WPD you would get from investing those points in Wolven Guide and Ancient Blood.


I see ye that seems on the wrong side of tradeoff, should not be worth it at all. Like 20% more damage for maybe 30% less tankiness.


Something like that.
I think its worth the investment if you don't need the life.

35 points between Ancient Blood and Endurance, leaving you 6 points into Wolven Guide for additional defense and WPD%.
OverSky
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With dumping all points into strength I feel squishier than other strength melee specs tbh (Werebear, Holydin), especially against ele damage, so more life is welcome.

Btw will there be a point where it's worth dumping rest of the points into earthquake (when not going for the warmonger tree)? The skill hardpoint synergy number does look lame.
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aerial
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Imo no, because that damage doesn't add to SOR, and that is main damage dealer vs tankier targets. It is good for clear early, when you have weak weapon though.

I was messing around with different specs, to compare, and regular snake stance throwbarb is pretty crazy for bossing. You get capped poison pierce, from that new life leech leech = 2x poison pierce, so few jewels, MO on weapon, easily can reach 170-200. Spell damage doesn't help the damage, poison duration makes snake bite more comfortable to use (less reapply), so shael weapon, get some duration on for example shield rw, get 7-8s duration. And then, random defensive gear with +skills, angelic items are good for this as they roll with high skills. You turn ultra annoying fight of teleporting boss, into 3-4 shotting them with snake bite, while running away. if they triggered stuff on hit, which is often the mechanic, with this they won't trigger anything because how few times you need to hit them. And all the time max dps is ticking. They don't need to stand in poison (like for instance scorp blade sin), all you need is tag them, and wait, dodge mechanics, heal. Shows how stupid op dot damage vs bosses in this game is, turns many fights absolutely trivial.
Stuff that stands out about snake bite is, for example compared to ww poison, which uses poison pierce gear and poison spelldmg to scale damage. It takes bunch of sacred uniques to get going. Snake bite doesn't require anything. You can literally put tiered uniques/low runewords and its gonna deal probably within 10% the dps of fully endgame minmaxed gear, because gear doesn't really change much when it comes to dps, only +skills scale it, and duration for comfort (but not needed if you are fine throwing every 2-3s).
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PitStains
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aerial wrote:L
I'd still do conquest helm + immortal combo to run over 50% avoid while standing still.
Angelic items could change things, depending how realistic it is to get good one, high new affix rolls, could be competitive to runewords.


What is the "conquest" helm?
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aerial wrote:
I was messing around with different specs, to compare, and regular snake stance throwbarb is pretty crazy for bossing.

He was always kinda a meme build - cheese bosses with Snake Bite but absolutely ass to play normally. Just Stampede having 3 different poison states on enemies: no damage (it is a weapon attack, so 1 in 20 chance to miss on average with capped AR, which is basically every pack), base damage and boosted damage, makes it ass to farm areas even compared to WW poison barb, let alone Scorpsin.
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aerial
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PitStains wrote:
aerial wrote:L
I'd still do conquest helm + immortal combo to run over 50% avoid while standing still.
Angelic items could change things, depending how realistic it is to get good one, high new affix rolls, could be competitive to runewords.


What is the "conquest" helm?


Oskill on barbhelms that gives you extra dodge chance. I think it got nerfed though, because last time i tried it has 10s duration and 10s cooldown, so you could just keep recasting it for extra dodge (+20% iirc), so cost was basically just inconvenience of recasting it. Now I think duration is less than cooldown, by quite a bit, making it less appealing.


BearBearderBarb wrote:
aerial wrote:
I was messing around with different specs, to compare, and regular snake stance throwbarb is pretty crazy for bossing.

He was always kinda a meme build - cheese bosses with Snake Bite but absolutely ass to play normally. Just Stampede having 3 different poison states on enemies: no damage (it is a weapon attack, so 1 in 20 chance to miss on average with capped AR, which is basically every pack), base damage and boosted damage, makes it ass to farm areas even compared to WW poison barb, let alone Scorpsin.


True, new stampede is just small/akward aoe, compared to old stampede (basically half of thunderslam nova with 1s cd).
You can still make it so 1 thunderslam, or time wave kills everything in fauzt/teganze/duncraig. But it will be too weak for scosglen, and for that even stampede feels weak with poison, needs quite a while to finish poison resistant mobs. Trees are extra tough, so you need multiple snake bites for them, also valuable targets for snake bite in general are hard to hit, with non-piercing projectile, too often it gets body blocked.
Its just if you exclusively spec this for bossing, kill some Uldyssians fast or teganze boss, this is basically free to respec to, compared to scorp sin that needs poison gear.
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aerial wrote:True, new stampede is just small/akward aoe, compared to old stampede (basically half of thunderslam nova with 1s cd).

The Snake Stance Stampede is the old Stampede. I've tried playing right at the patch when throwbarb got reworked, in a semi-ssf fashion, and dropped it at Duncraig. It's just so annoying to play mechanically when you miss 1 or 2 enemies in a pack constantly and the way Stampede bonus poison damage works you will never know if you have applied base poison damage or boosted one on a poison absorbing enemy and therefore have to constantly watch out for that. Made me realize why Scorpsin has a custom-made scaling mechanics, it's pretty hard to make a good poison projectile build otherwise.

Also the general damage scaling is out of whack, you basically cap your damage at lvl 35 and up until level 120 the only way to boost damage is +skills and -% enemy res. A good Normal leveling build though, I still respec at 50 for EQ just because capped Wolf Stance is way better for Terror speedrun.
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aerial
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by old stampede I mean the pre rework thrower tree stampede, it was gigantic aoe that went ~2 screens, and it was roughly 180 degrees cone
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