Best Hardcore Trav Hoark build?

I play exclusively Hardcore, and I've been leveling a

Berserk Barbarian to mainly run trav and hoark high runes. Of course I also hope it will be usable for some

Terror zones and pit farming. I'm now at lvl 79 and I haven't yet twinked him with good gear. I'm starting to wonder if this is going to work out.

Is a

Berserk Barbarian both safe and powerful enough to be the most efficient hardcore trav runner? I want to run trav thousands of times before he dies from some freak occurence. Is there any other build that is a better at Trav running in Hardcore?

Here's my current draft: https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/z10106qi

I'm thinking that damage reduced by % and high hit recovery (

Guillaume's Face) is mandatory since I won't have any defense while I'm hacking away at the monsters. I've also equipped the trifecta of Thundergod's,

Dwarf Star and

Raven Frost, to provide absorbtion for all three elements that occur in Death explosions. Roughly 4k life with BO.

I forgot to put anything in the off hand but I'm thinking I'll use dual wizardspikes or

Wizardspike+ Spirit

Monarch. No hoto for now.

not playing hc, but this one (

Concentrate) i use on sc for council and this build should be fine for hc also. not fastest, but got good gold and mf.

https://maxroll.gg/d2/d2planner/ak0106m4

Miroslav wrote: 2 years ago

Is a

Berserk Barbarian both safe and powerful enough to be the most efficient hardcore trav runner?

I would say yes. Well, "very efficient" at least. No guarantees for "most efficient".

Basing that off of my own trav zerker who is using a Grief as really the only actual "damage gear". Literally every other piece is focusing on MF and/or GF and he is still a complete tank in there, all while basically just 1-shotting them all.

Mind you, that's based on P1. Never actually farmed Trav on higher counts with him so no idea if/when you'd need to shift to more real dmg gear.

No other input? "Yes"? I guess I'm going with it then...

Just to add my 2 cents, I've never tried a full

Berserk build with my barb (only use

Berserk for the occasional Phys Immunes), but have done thousands of runs with

Frenzy and WW, and haven't had any deaths with him @ Trav. All my deaths have been in CS or WSK from those damn corpse explosions, as well as a few from

Lister the Tormentor and

Lord De Seis . Barb is a pretty safe bet for Trav, IMO.

Only thing I'd point out is,

Berserk brings defense down to 0, which makes it potentially less safe than

Frenzy or WW. But as Schnorki said, it should be fine for P1, since they'll probably be dropping faster than they can damage you too much..

Yeah the defense=0 is worrisome. I'm going to go for max block, max res and I absolutely need lots of Faster Hit Recovery. Some kind of freezing crowd control would be nice as well, I'll probably outsource that to the merc.

How come pitzerkers are 'zerkers and not

Frenzy barbs? What's wrong with

Frenzy? It even gives you movement speed.

Zerk = magic = far better dmg on average, simply due to being magic.

Most hell mobs come with some sort of physical resist but little to no magic resist base. Take the council members for example, they all start at 50 phys res but 0 magic res which in itself basically doubles zerk's dmg by comparison.

In Pits specifically, all of them start with 15-33 phys res base but only one mob type has any (20) magic res.

The defense=0 isn't too bad because a) it makes no difference for magic attacks anyways and b) stuff doesn't hit you much if you 1-shot it as soon as you get in range

As for the FHR, that certainly never hurts but keep in mind that as a barb, you tend to have a fairly high amount of life anyways. With great life pool comes great

Stun threshold (=1/12th of your max life in dmg) meaning the number of mobs that can even put you into recovery to begin with goes down significantly. My trav zerker has a measly 30 FHR (never went for it, his gear just happens to give that on the side) and I've never once missed having any more on him.