frenzy barb questions

My

Frenzy barb is currently at 63 so far wearing a light

Sabre and an oat.
I just put on Fortitude and went into

The Den of Evil and I must say I am not impressed so far.
I am squishy and the damage output is good but not comparable to my jav when doing melee - but my jav is of course 93 and probably has better gear.

I was thinking about Grief / LW in pb , Fortitutde, Gore Riders, High Lords, (Areats or Guilames?) - for Merc I was thinking about Pride. Main considerations was CB and survivability on LW combined with damage on Grief.

What I am wondering I guess is if with better gear the

Frenzy barb becomes more viable also in higher player counts - and what

Belt would I wear? Trang Ouls for cannot be frozen?

A well geared

Frenzy barb can clear through P1 quite quickly and can still handle P8 well enough.

Though "well enough" is nowhere even close to what you're used to from actual top-end builds like sorcs, hdins, javazons, Mosaic sins and such. If that's your expectation, you will be thoroughly disappointed even in the high 90s with perfect gear. The clear speed just isn't comparable as is the case for basically every single-target build.
The 'squishy' bit is simply a matter of gear/build though, that goes away entirely and you can just blindly plow through everything simply by mindlessly holding down your

Frenzy button.

LW imo is and remains the single biggest waste of runes and most overrated rw in the entire game. It is lackluster on an A5 merc. It is even worse when used yourself. I know some folks may disagree but I stand by that.

Yes, LW kinda sux. But it’s a right of passage. I wish the game had a few more super expensive end game runewords, with high roll variability just to keep everyone in the grind for longer but I digress..

For survivability,

Cham a

Helm and throw on

String of Ears. Once you equip Grief your life will be way better. If you haven’t, put a point into ww for maneuvering in combat. Just be careful with ww bc when using it you may decide to scrap

Frenzy and become another run of the mill ww barb :p

Also

Howl can help a lot. One point should suffice. If you’re going item find (probably not bc

Frenzy is high synergy cost) you can also use

Grim Ward. It’s really annoying but it makes normal monsters like butter, if you can catch them. Frenzied ww helps

so you say i would be better of with 2 griefs instead of a LW? IAS is also driving me crazy - I traded a super cool Grief in a BA but that guy is slow... so I guess I need another phaseblade or a 40 IAS roll on the second weapon - uff

since Pride doesn't add damage to the weapon, should I build it on a

Thresher or something cheaper?

My level 92

Frenzy barbarian is a go to character for torch hunting for me. I had a chance the other day to clear the Worldstone TZ at P8 with it. Yes, it's been quite a workout dealing with hordes of physical immune super Hell Temptress and alike monsters accompanied with their champion variants at once, but manageable.
For the gear I put on him an almost perfect superior AP base Fortitude, a socketed with 40% ED jewel Aarreat's Face, a

Thundergod's Vigor

Belt for a boost in lightning defense,

Gore Rider

Boots and

Dracul's Grasp gloves.
For weapons I'm a sucka for an ethereal

Berserker Axe based BotD and a PB Lawbringer. Yes, I'm aware of the fact they are of two different types of weapons, which many consider as less than ideal. Sometimes I replace the Lawbringer with a

Berserker Axe based Beast against the non-

Travincal ubers.

Highlord's Wrath amulet, a high roll

Raven Frost ring and either a rare ring (mostly for high strength when I want to switch to a less than ideal armor base Enigma) or a high dexterity life leach crafted ring round up the equipment used. Oh, for the switch weapon I use a pair of

Heart Carver daggers for extra looting of items with barbarian's Item find skill, that helped me to squeeze out a

Vex rune the other day, some unique items as well.

Yeah in almost any situation I’d go Grief phase. LW does have some really cool features. Ridiculous crushing blow, 2 amazing procs and an aura, but it’s roughly just over a 1/3 of the base damage of Grief when both are in phase blades and that’s not counting griefs deadly strike. In D2R the best defense is a good offense.

Prides damage is almost negligible, your merc isn’t going to be killing much, only shattering corpses, to which I speak for myself and all fellow horkers, damn you to hell

Cham! But the damage will impact his survivability with leech and the runeword is super expensive, I’d find an ethereal, elite base and be good with that unless you’re interested in resale. You could always roll it perfect, sell that and then make another Pride with change. If you roll perfect in a poor base, it’ll fraction what you’d otherwise get for it. Ethereal

Mancatcher or

Thresher are always solid options.

bigbikefan wrote: 10 months ago

My level 92

Frenzy barbarian is a go to character for torch hunting for me. I had a chance the other day to clear the Worldstone TZ at P8 with it. Yes, it's been quite a workout dealing with hordes of physical immune super Hell Temptress and alike monsters accompanied with their champion variants at once, but manageable.
For the gear I put on him an almost perfect superior AP base Fortitude, a socketed with 40% ED jewel Aarreat's Face, a

Thundergod's Vigor

Belt for a boost in lightning defense,

Gore Rider

Boots and

Dracul's Grasp gloves.
For weapons I'm a sucka for an ethereal

Berserker Axe based BotD and a PB Lawbringer. Yes, I'm aware of the fact they are of two different types of weapons, which many consider as less than ideal. Sometimes I replace the Lawbringer with a

Berserker Axe based Beast against the non-

Travincal ubers.

Highlord's Wrath amulet, a high roll

Raven Frost ring and either a rare ring (mostly for high strength when I want to switch to a less than ideal armor base Enigma) or a high dexterity life leach crafted ring round up the equipment used. Oh, for the switch weapon I use a pair of

Heart Carver daggers for extra looting of items with barbarian's Item find skill, that helped me to squeeze out a

Vex rune the other day, some unique items as well.

Botd and Lawbringer?

Those poor undead

I’d love to experiment more with both azure Wrath and Lawbringer but I’m just too addicted to horking

Rik wrote: 10 months ago

Yeah in almost any situation I’d go Grief phase. LW does have some really cool features. Ridiculous crushing blow, 2 amazing procs and an aura, but it’s roughly just over a 1/3 of the base damage of Grief when both are in phase blades and that’s not counting griefs deadly strike. In D2R the best defense is a good offense.

Prides damage is almost negligible, your merc isn’t going to be killing much, only shattering corpses, to which I speak for myself and all fellow horkers, damn you to hell

Cham! But the damage will impact his survivability with leech and the runeword is super expensive, I’d find an ethereal, elite base and be good with that unless you’re interested in resale. You could always roll it perfect, sell that and then make another Pride with change. If you roll perfect in a poor base, it’ll fraction what you’d otherwise get for it. Ethereal

Mancatcher or

Thresher are always solid options.

You mentioned using an ethereal, elite base for the Pride runeword for your mercenary. How does the damage of Pride affect your mercenary's survivability through leech, and what factors would you consider when choosing the base for the Pride runeword?

IMHO the best guide for a

Frenzy barb so far.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comment ... y_barb_d2/

Yea Grief is hard to beat, sometimes I’ll go with Botd and Death just to switch it up (have sets in both berserker axes and

Colossus Sword/

Blade)

The

Frenzy barb is fun, but like every other barb build (for me at least) it’s just to cleanse my pallet after better builds like

Nova/

Fireball sorcs, hammerdins - because they can make your mind numb

feeney2 wrote: 7 months ago

Rik wrote: 10 months ago

Yeah in almost any situation I’d go Grief phase. LW does have some really cool features. Ridiculous crushing blow, 2 amazing procs and an aura, but it’s roughly just over a 1/3 of the base damage of Grief when both are in phase blades and that’s not counting griefs deadly strike. In D2R the best defense is a good offense.

Prides damage is almost negligible, your merc isn’t going to be killing much, only shattering corpses, to which I speak for myself and all fellow horkers, damn you to hell

Cham! But the damage will impact his survivability with leech and the runeword is super expensive, I’d find an ethereal, elite base and be good with that unless you’re interested in resale. You could always roll it perfect, sell that and then make another Pride with change. If you roll perfect in a poor base, it’ll fraction what you’d otherwise get for it. Ethereal

Mancatcher or

Thresher are always solid options.

You mentioned using an ethereal, elite base for the Pride runeword for your mercenary. How does the damage of Pride affect your mercenary's survivability through leech, and what factors would you consider when choosing the base for the Pride runeword?

With Pride alone, the damage has little to do with survivability unless used in conjunction with a

Helm or armor that provides leech in which case, his damage provides his source of healing as a percentage and thus survivability. Without considering leech, it impacts how quickly he kills things, with faster kills generally meaning more survivability. With this in mind, the factors I’d consider regarding the base are price and dps.

The thing with Pride is that it has no on weapon Ed, meaning the massive damage bonus

Concentration applies for the merc is neutered by the low base damage of a weapon with no Ed. One way you can slightly mitigate is by finding an ethereal base which would give an additional 50 percent more damage, thus 50 percent more leech. Unfortunately, his damage will remain paltry even with the 300% conc + 200% might boost. Even if you went ham and purchased an uber expensive 15ed base, it’s still gonna suck damagewise compared to any other common option. But besides not wanting to buy a more expensive ethereal base, there is no other reason I can think of to make Pride in a corporeal weapon when solely intending to use it in a merc. In fact, I can think of no reason to use Pride on anything but a merc. Tho I’m sure there’s some summoner out there who’s tried it.

If trying to maximize dps with the merc, run an ias calculator and test different bases accounting for what you intend to equip in the armor and

Helm slot. The damage metric is essentially a weapons average damage x rate of attack x to hit chance.

Increased attack speed in d2 is tricky bc it’s dependent upon reaching certain breakpoints, it’s further complicated by the act 2 merc dynamics with using

Jab vs regular attacks and those calculations are way beyond my scope of knowledge. I’m a “that’s good enough” kind of d2r player

I think if you’re using an ethereal elite base that the variation between them will not result in noticeable shifts in performance, but if you’re intent on min/maxing you’ll need to run multiple calculations or find a trustworthy guide. There is at least one in depth guide regarding the ultimate base for Infinity which to my recollection is the mancatchrr on the whole, but I think that the crushing blow chance of Infinity is a prime factor in that calculation. Being that

Mancatcher is the fastest act 2 merc elite base in which Infinity can be placed (I think ), it makes intuitive sense to me. You could probably find that discussion using the search function on this site on forums.

Hope that helps