Presenting: The Reaver- a late game summoner barb for 2.5

Hey y’all. A couple updates in patch 2.5 have made some subtle changes to the game, if you know how to exploit them the game is really different... maybe forever.

I present for your consideration: THE REAVER!

The Reaver is late game and very expensive build, but if you can put it together you’ll be rewarded with (I believe) the strongest merc possible! Your merc will be stronger than 95% of player characters out there! Crazy gear with might,

Concentration,

Fanaticism auras with a

Heart of Wolverine, and a barbarian’s maxed

Battle Orders, your looking at crazy health and over +1200%ed (someone do the math and correct my estimate). That’s not all, you’ll still have amazing secondary summons:

Valkyrie,

Iron Golem and a bear. We won’t get any additional summons - although we could - but less is more. The build is primarily focused on gear that only a barb can fully wield. Finally, other than maxing out

Battle Orders, there is a lot of flexibility to focus on either

Frenzy,

Berserk, horking, shape shifting, warcries, or even

Whirlwind.

Full disclosure: this build is theoretical at this point, I don’t have the Wealth required to put it together, so if anyone can, or can hero edit to test please let us know how it works out!

The gear you’ll need:

For the act 5 merc:
Last Wish in

Phase Blade - needs to be in a 1 handed weapon to be equipped by an act 5 merc
Lawbringer in

Eth

Conquest Sword - can be

Phase Blade or

Cryptic Sword if you don’t like

Conquest Sword, there’s are higher damage options, but Lawbringer procs decrep to break physical immunes

Eth arreat’s face with either 40/15 or

Cham - depending on how much you value cbf or attack speed

Eth Fortitude or Treachery - Idk if the 45 ias is more important than 300 off weapon Ed or not, but with the rest of the build I’d recommend fort, the goal for your merc is to 1 shot everything up to p7

For your

Iron Golem:
Pride - The build requires a

Concentration aura which is given by a Pride

Iron Golem (hereafter called IG). I told you this build is expensive and it’s going to get worse...

Player character:

Pre-buff:
Peace armour - gives you a chance to proc a level 15

Valkyrie, which isn’t insanely strong, but is still a tank and hits with decent damage, the kicker is that once Valk is proc’d you can swap out the armour for Enigma, or another armour. So each game you’d put this armour on, go somewhere you’d get hit until Valk procs then switch it out - it’s actually not that big a deal.

Playing gear:

Helm - either socketed arreats face or wolf

Howl, depending on how you customize your build, you could also run a +skills barb

Circlet with tele charges if you don’t have/want Enigma.
Armour - definitely Enigma is your best option, you need to tele if your IG (weakest and also most high value summon) gets at risk of lethal damage.
Weapons:
Berzerker

Axe Beast - for the

Fanaticism, bear charges and +to shape shifting skills
Berzerker

Axe Oath - as a min you just need one to maintain your IG, and it also allows you to cast

Heart of Wolverine (HOW), which is the 4th damage buff to you and your army. Ideally you’ll have a non

Eth one on switch so you can recast HOW if the Spirit dies and keep an

Eth Oath for normal use (if going

Frenzy version).
Amulets:

Metalgrid - you need one, the thing about the persistent IG is that every game the IG is cast at the currently equipped skill level, so if you have a

Metalgrid equipped when you load your game it’s at level 21, if you have an Oath equipped, it’s at level 17. In the play style you’ll want to pre-equip your

Metalgrid so it’ll be as strong as possible. Then once you load - and have an Oath equipped - you can swap

Metalgrid out for something else like maras, or highlords, or a crazy rare/crafted Ammy.

Rings, gloves,

Belt,

Boots and charms - whichever is best for your custom build, lots of options for customization here.

Level requirement: I wouldn’t try this build less than level 90, but you wouldn’t be able to put this together with a char less than that anyway. All that to say the higher the better.

Skill distribution: you need to max out bo to buff everyone, everything else is the barb 1 point wonders. Other than that you could let your summons kill everything and hork, you could

Battle Cry stuff, you could

Frenzy (not with all synergies maxed, but you know, still a good amount of damage), you could also berzerk the physical immunes if you want your merc to forego Lawbringer.

Stat distribution - this also depend on how you want to play it, you could max life, you could max strength & damage, your smart enough to figure this out!

Play style:

Character start-up - this’ll be a respec char, you can’t play it from the start, so once you have the min gear to fully equip your char and respec make sure you have enough strength and dex to wear everything.

Now that your semi-committed you’ll want to equip your

Metalgrid (putting any oaths in your stash), then comes the most stressful part of this build. Toss your Pride in the floor and cast

Iron Golem. Now equip your Oath(s). You can now safely unequip

Metalgrid and the IG will remain as long as you keep an Oath equipped. As noted above, when you load into d2r each game the highest level of

Charge/skill designates the level of IG - so you can get away with a level 17 IG just from Oath, but if you want to maximize its life you’d have to pre-load, equip

Metalgrid and reload. (Hope that makes sense)

Ok next summon is the

Valkyrie, equip your Peace armour, go out and get hit until a

Valkyrie is proc’d, sure you won’t really be able to maximize it, but crapy level 15 Valk is still enough to solo he’ll on p1, plus she’ll get like 1200% Ed before it’s all over. So once there’s a Valk switch out Peace to Enigma.

Now you can cast a bear from Beast ...

Um ... that’s about it. A level 13 bear is still worth it. What a tank!

Now cast your

Heart of Wolverine from Oath, this adds a whole bunch of damage for everyone.

Ok, you’ve summoned everyone needed, now everyone needs to be buff’d with

Shout, bo and

Battle Command. With bo max’d Everyone’s going to have double health and increased armour. Obviously you’ll need to reapply the warcries as necessary. I honestly don’t know what everyone’s damage is, but your merc is at least going to be like >10k, likely much more, which is crazy!

Now you and your raiding team is up and running, to maximize this build you’ll want to do the most farming each game, so I recommend each time you do a run with this char you complete the following (this reduces the amount of re login in and pre-buffing needed):
-countess
-the pit
-summoner in

Arcane Sanctuary
-LK
-meph
-

Chaos Sanctuary
-

Nihlathak
-Eldridge and shank
-Worldstone keep

Can do other lvl 85 areas as you’d prefer.

With everyone’s Crazy damage and extra life from maxed bo, you should be able to clear higher level difficulties than just p1! I’m hoping up to p7 if you go the

Frenzy route and clear next to all your summons.

I hope this has been at least an interesting read, and maybe even inspiration to try the build!

I’d be very interested in your feedback and recommendations - right now this is still just a theory build!

You all rock

Interesting. I love theoretical builds like this. Yes, hella expensive, but it's something to strive for in the endgame. Good work.

Me, I love going in the opposite direction, loving budget builds that work in endgame, but this is great to conceptualize and possibly test.

The one big advantage of this is the massive BO bumping his life more than other classes could do.
That having been said, in terms of damage, this would be far from the best merc you can get I believe. It'd be more of a defensive version.

If you follow the same basic concept on a necro for example, you get two main differences:
1) You can actually get a solid, high-survivability

Iron Golem, making that far less of a hassle
2) You bring amplify by default and can drop Lawbringer for a high dmg option instead

The tradeoff is of course a lower HoW (wisp instead of Oath) and lower BO (CTA instead of barb skill).

In terms of dmg however, the barb setup with decrep would end up around 45k dps (~57 with Grief instead of LW). The necro setup with a 2nd Last Wish instead of the Lawbringer and necro amp over the decrep proc would end up at a massive 81k dps so nearly double.
Adding to that, as nice as auras are, if you replace the double Last Wish with double Grief (making it far cheaper at the same time), the theoretical dps goes up to well beyond 100k. And since you cast yourself, you don't have to wait for decrep procs and you don't have a sanc aura pushing mobs away. If you do want decrep over amp for the def bonus it adds, he still ends up around 61k and 73k with LW/Griefs respectively.

Similarly, a pally version also offers more top-end dmg by comparison. High lvl conc from the pally, Last Wish equipped for might, Beast

Iron Golem, Grief and Lawbringer on the merc along with a wisp for at least the low HoW. Ends up around 72k dps. Nowhere near a necro but far beyond the barb version as well.
(Last Wish on IG would be nice to give him

Fade but the downside would be that he'd also get a lifetap proc that can override the merc's decrep)

Lastly, going the druid route, he'd end up around 64k with Grief, 50 with Last Wish. LW in that case may still be worth it because to focus on his HoW, you're basically a full summoner druid anyways, meaning you get all of the other summons on top which would then be buffed by LW.

I'm actively ignoring the valk in all of that btw since a low lvl valk is really just kind of a non-factor next to a merc like that imo.

Basically, in terms of merc dmg possibilities (looking just at

Frenzy mercs for now), nec >>>>> pally > druid > barb.
In terms of life pools, barb obviously wins hands down, due to the massive BO. Though defense in general is kind of a matter of preference imo since the other options add other advantages:
- A solid zoo of tanks for the druid plus the most ridonculous area

Stun in the game
- Pally ability to switch to

Cleansing as needed and...well, ok, pally is kinda limited by comparison
- Necro ability to switch to for example

Life Tap on the fly if he does get low [uber merc, go!], switch between amp and decrep for dmg/def balancing, tanky IG by default, fearing adds if you somehow do get overrun, bonewall/prison, ..... endless possibilities
- Barb aoe

Stun, the eternal insane stupidity that is

Leap spam, ...

Side notes:
- Barb actually gets better dmg performance if you go dbl Grief and then use

Grim Ward instead. Though that is highly situational as I believe it doesn't work on bosses and you do need a corpse to start out with. Plus it nets more running..though that shouldn't be an issue, considering how stupid fast a

Frenzy merc is.
- You don't need the Treachery. A

Frenzy merc with fana added on top is IAS capped with only a couple stacks so the IAS on Treachery is entirely wasted, meaning fort far outperforms it. The only reason for it would be if you wanted

Fade without using Last Wish.
- Basing numbers off of d2planner atm which is obviously always a tad risky since they're known to be off on occasion.
- The one big variable here is the hit chance which is really a

Frenzy merc's main issue. You could help that with things like Infinity/

Conviction, which may well outweigh one of the other auras or specifically on a pally by focusing on fana from him rather than conc, to get more AR out of it. Equally, it may also shift things in favor of the druid version as the higher HoW also yields more AR than other builds. That one's tough to really figure out though, seeing how it is highly dependent on your target area and mobs and all that.
- Regardless of the underlying class...interesting concept. I may just have to play around with that a bit later on and get a real gameplay comparison. After all, theorycrafting only takes you so far.
- Even ignorning the higher base dmg, I would leave Last Wish out of the builds using Lawbringer no matter what and go with Grief instead (ok..out of any builds actually..LW kinda sucks). Specifically because LW

Life Tap and Lawbringer decrep will keep overwriting each other, meaning you reliably lose decrep uptime. Plus the LW blind guarantees you won't ever have either on normal mobs as that crap always hits (the single worst thing about LW imo).

Great ideas! Another option I thought about is dropping the Lawbringer, swapping it out for Grief then the barb could have a

Wand with decrep charges on switch with the non

Eth Oath. Idk if you can get decrep charges, if not then amp damage charges. That way your merc can duel wield either griefs or deaths, or

Eth headstrikers, etc

Alright, couldn't resist and did some proper testing of it all.
First things first, them Mercs are just annoyingly stupid. Lawbringer is honestly a bit of a waste of time and decrep/amp charges are even more pointless. The reason being that the stupid merc keeps taunting his target (wayyyy too often as it turns out) and in doing so immediately overwrites any amp or decrep you have up. The only build that was able to counter that is the Necro version, due to the ability to just keep spamming amp without running out of charges.

So as a first bottom line: Double Grief all the way on any build. Though I kept the Lawbringer in for the initial/stat comparison.

Barb (

Leap + Warcries): Pally (Aura support +

Smite): Druid (Summoner): Necro (Curses, Tank IG, Bone support): Did a number of test runs with each version to get a feel for them all.

In normal farming (CS + WSK), none of them really have a problem keeping things alive, except for the non-druid HoW which keep dying for everyone over and over, thanks to pathetic Spirit life pools. As soon as a mob looks at it, it falls over dead and you get to blow another

Charge. Point Druid.

Also in normal farming, all of them can easily clear everything though the performance differs MASSIVELY. The Barb and Pally builds are roughly equal, plowing through P1 like butter but dropping off very quickly on higher player counts. The Druid build VASTLY exceeds their performance by what feels like a factor of 2-3 though that is kind of expected as he gets to bring a ton of other summons on top. The Necro build has about the same performance as the Druid version but with damn near all of it being the merc himself and since that's kind of the point of all of this.. point Necro.

Following up on that, I went ahead and did a DClone test, intentionally not touching him with the actual character but leaving merc + adds to it. The only exception was the Necro throwing up Amp to even out the curses. Because of that approach, his regen remained semi-active since neither Grief nor Lawbringer shut it down reliably (Venom doesn't last long enough to take care of that). Both, the Barb and Pally builds failed miserably. HoW and IG got annihilated in no time and the Merc can't get past his regen. Necro performed a bit better, largely also because the Necro IG is a Beast of a tank. He still took forever though because they just baaaarely outdps his regen. If/when the IG does die, the regen outperforms merc DPS, resulting in another fail. Only the Druid build could reliably take him down, due to Spirit wolves and grizzly being able to survive DClone and adding enough extra DPS to outdo his regen. Though even for that, the performance wasn't exactly stellar. Either way, clear point Druid.
Lastly, I went with an obligatory Uber run but all of them just failed miserably in

Tristram. Kind of a worse version of the DClone experience.

Mind you, A5 mercs can be built to wreck both, DClone and Ubers but that follows a fairly different loadout, specifically aimed at boss/uber killing and not so much overall performance. You essentially just drop raw dmg for massive crushing blow with last wishes which keeps the merc alive via

Fade + tap (since blind doesn't override it on bosses) and that handles that. Works in any build but is significantly worse for general farming/anything other than bosses.

All in all, the very clear winner in all of this is hands down the Druid. Not only because he's the only one that can actually keep HoW alive because his is high enough to actually have at least SOME life but because the entire idea of "buff the everliving crap out of your merc!" works extremely well in terms of synergizing with a full summoner build.

The Necro approach comes in a semi-close second I guess. This could likely pull closer to a Druid if/when going for a full summoner build as well but I refuse to do that as by the time you get your summons up, the Druid's already in the next game. Side note: The Necro build is the only one that doesn't end up capping your own resistances.

Barb and Pally share a very, very distant 3rd place. They basically combine all of the bad with very little of the good. Though I'd give a slight Edge to the Barb because depending on the situation, he is far superior to the Pally version in terms of defense (

Leap spam, go!) but at the same time, doing that knocks stuff around so much that the merc spends way too much time running - a problem that he already has with Lawbringer as is, when going to places like CS.

What stands out to me though is that even though the Druid build completely eclipses the others...it still falls short of my normal (Act 2 Merc) summoner Druid build. Though it may be an interesting idea to at least adapt the IG and to give my standard summoner build a conc golem, albeit at the cost of a couple skill points.

Moral of the story:
Druid wins (there's something I never expected to say, hah!). It still doesn't quite compete with a fully optimized summoner build and all of it obviously doesn't even remotely compete with top-end speed builds that don't rely on mercs (aka your usual farming builds from Sorc to Zon). Regardless, for normal farming runs, it works quite well with any of the 4 support classes and is certainly a valid fun side project to blow your spare high runes on. For a Barb specifically, you can actually just unleash your merc on P1 and pretty much spam

Find Item behind him without running out of corpses though you won't get quite as much GF/MF as traditional merc horkers. Personally, I'll continue to roll with A2 mercs for any build any day (much as I'd love some viable variety on that front).

Wow absolutely outstanding testing! Thanks for your hard work and feedback! Imma have to re-read your post a couple more times to really absorb everything!

Yea pretty crazy, that damage is way less than I expected with every possible buff aura active. My mf hammerdin runs an act 2 holy frost merc with an Insight, nothing fancy. With just the hammerdin’s

Concentration only he gets up to 9k damage, and can 1-4 shot most singular normal monsters, even at higher player levels.

This just raises more questions on how to max out mercs/summons (I don’t know why it’s my current Obsession, I guess I just wanna walk around and have stuff die in front of me, maybe i’ll Build a Tesladin next).