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Does this mean that spamming it might actually decrease your damage if you "overwrite" a crit application?

Hello!

I've been playing a throwing barb since 1.03. I could easily farm act 1, but was dying regularly in act 2. After 1.04 I changed up some skills and just a few pieces of gear, and now I finished the game and farm act 2 with ease (probably act 3 as well if I had any decent gear).

Skills

This is the build I use:
http://us.battle.net...ikRP!YfZ!aZbcYZ

Before, I was using ricochet and ancient spear (tried various runes on that one). This combination has several problems:

- It feels stupid attacking a single target with a multi target spell (ricochet)
- Often there are not enough targets to get decent fury generation out of ricochet. Even with a good crit chance, this caused occasional fury problems with bosses.
- Ancient spear is actually rather useless and in my opinion overrated. If you use the life leech rune, it requires a lot of dps for it to be worth something. The rune that pulls several targets is nice, but you end up pulling several enemies to you AND even with high crit chance, there's a chance you won't crit and won't be able to spam.

All in all, I found this build annoying. Another problem I had was that since I'm a barb, people seemed to expect me to tank at least a bit, which was hard with this build. So I changed things up a bit:

Mighty throw: Extra damage and perfect for single targets. Moreover, it will generate tons of fury on crit (with no escape). I found that with this rune, my fury was almost always full! Hence, I replaced ancient spear with:

Rend (Blood Lust): This skill is the perfect solution for all problems. It allows you to tank a bit if necessary (in fact, I prefer to be surrounded now). If you prefer kiting (or need to) that's also fine, you just run in, turn the mobs into a bunch of life regenerators, run out again and mow them down with axes. It also solves the one target problem of Mighty Throw. Trash monsters drop dead in a matter of seconds with this skill. If you keep battle rage up, you should gain more than enough fury using mighty throw to apply Rend whenever you need to. Don't spam it on the same monster! The timer will only refresh, it does not stack! The only time you should spam it is when there are 500 monsters all around you and you want to tag them all.

The rest is fairly standard:

Ignore Pain (Ignorance is Bliss): Panic button, turns you invincible. Don't hesitate to use, fairly low cooldown.

War Cry (Impunity): Would be stupid to go without it. Also, it's your only initial fury generator. Still it's no disaster if it's still on cooldown and you need fury. Since 1.04 you will auto-attack, which gains fury, and in the process you'll get hit a couple of times, for more fury.

Battle rage (Into the Fray): I've experimented with different runes, but I think you really need it to play comfortably with a throwing barb, especially in this build. Make sure it's always on. A trick I use is to cast it together with War Cry whenever War Cry comes off cooldown. Like that you'll always have fury to keep your Battle Rage up. Without it you're crippled. If you try this build and you run into resource problems, chances are you're not keeping battle rage up.

Wrath of the Berserker (Insanity): Not essential, but I love it against crowd control and with bosses. Solves all problems that Rend doesn't.

Passives are of course Weapons Master, Ruthless and No Escape.

Items

Equipment wise I recommend going as DPS-oriented as possible. Of course you'll need a decent amount of crit chance. I'm at 51% now (with my mediocre gear) and that's fine. The key pieces are:

- Off-hand I'd recommend the three-hundredth spear. Preferably one with a socket, so you can get 70% crit damage easily.
- Main hand a mace or axe with life leech. I prefer this over LoH since our attacks will be relatively slow. A mace is a little better than a same-dps-axe, since the attack speed is lower, which improves your rend and fury management.
- Belt: a decent belt can be hard to find, since you'll both need life leech and reduced weapon throw cost. I have one with 4 reduced cost now, which works fine.

For this build, it's not necessary to bother with skull grasp or whatever, since you'll gain enough fury to keep up both.

On a final note, this build works better in some areas than in others. It's a charm in act2 farming routes, where there are lots of little meelee chars surrounding you and you can get the most out of rend. In act 3 it seems to be less effective in certain areas with lots of ranged monsters, but still viable.


What do you think?

I'm gonna put the wings on my barb, strip off all his armor apart from his pink-dyed pants and pretend like I'm at the gay parade.

This exists in some games (Dungeon Siege i think). Usually I'd find this a bad idea. But there are a few reasons why this would be a welcome addition in D3. First of all, your drops are personal, so you can't just grab everything from other players. And secondly, there are actually reasons for picking up everything (sell/salvage).

The disadvantage would be that you can just go around pressing that button, and then salvage everything in your inventory. That kinda takes away from selecting which items would be worth selling/salvaging. Also, imaging after a boss drop, you'd just always press that button without even looking what dropped, so the items might as well have appeared right in your inventory. It kinda takes away from looking what dropped, pickung up the uniques first, then checking the other stuff to see if there's something valuable.

So well I could understand them not introducing such a function, but I'd use it if it existed. They won't introduce it though: there are scrolls of companion, which create a little creature picking up gold for you. Also, if I'm not mistaken, there's a stat that increases your gold pickup range. If you could jsut pick up everything in a certain radius around you, both would be rendered obsolete.

This question may be difficult to answer, but only someone who's actually played can..

How does the new skill system feel? I mean, part of the challenge in D2 was picking the right skills. The system was broken, no doubt about that, but now it's something completely different. Do you feel like there's still some challenge to picking skills? Or is it more like, "oh, I'll try this one for a while, cool, it does that, ok, now I'll take this one, ooh pretty".. So basically I'm asking, do you personally (or anyone who's played the beta) feel that the new skill system is a success?

This is what they were testing in the beta. They wouldn't need the test if everything was fine already. It might just be a minor issue.

isn't this thread a bit racist?

The only reason why they might mind is that those crappy videos don't exactly do the game justice. Other than that, I don't see why they'd care much. It's not like it's secret content, and those who are actually in the position to attend blizzcon will still much rather play the demo themselves instead of watching a shaky video online. So there's still an incentive and no actual content leaking.

I actually love the D3 artstyle. It's unique, the way it looks like a painting and yet real. Especially the desert footage is really nice.
They had to do something different than D2, for progress' sake, they couldn't use the graphics from a 10 year old game. So it's gonna look different. And the game takes place in different environments, so it's also gonna feel different. And that's good, because it's a different game.

Seriously, is your penis gonna shrink because at least one act has some cheerful looking parts in it? Or even because the overall color palette is brighter? Once I'm playing the game and actually running around with my charcter through a whole world ready to be explored, I won't care about how some old screenshots look.

Is there anything that hints to dragons in D3 lore? If yes, bring it on. If not, i'd say rather not. Don't get me wrong, I love dragons (even got a dragon tattoo), but it would just be too much of a cliché.

So, is anyone else worried that due to some totally random (or perhpaps, not random) chance, they will be inadvertently killed before Diablo III launches? Brain aneurism, sudden cardiac death, tripping down the stairs? You don't even need to leave your home for something like that to happen.

This is obviously me overthinking something to an extreme degree, but surely I'm not the only one hoping to live for at least a couple more weeks. Anyway, goodluck staying alive for another 6 days, everyone.

That's it, hit em the morning.

Quote from Antirepublican

That might work on beta, but not a chance in hell of working in the real game.

You act as if you have great info, yet the game isn't even out. You don't know shit,

What actually caught my attention of the OP was last month he had gotten into the beta test and as soon as Blizzard was aware of his actions he was banned from beta I think within 2-3 days. The funny part was the next advertisement on his site was, "My Beta Test is Complete and I have 8 ways to make you money". The guy made it sound like he had extensive knowledge of the game during the few days of an early "beta" test. Also, to expand on that, I recall a post from him stating he did not even play previous Diablo games, and is just going of his Warcraft experience to teach people how to make buckets of cash for a nominal fee.

I hate to single out this one individual, because I know there are going to be several ToS violating "entrepreneurs" attempting to capitalize on gulliable players. It is just that this is the guy I am finding most active on the Diablo forums that I read, so it is hard not to take notice and comment about same.

You are bragging about crafting a lvl 13 BLUE sword and selling it for profit. Do you know how easy the blue sword is compared to the crafting you are gonna have to do for the items people want endgame? Crafting is a gamble. It isnt now, because you are crafting low lvl blues which are probably far easier to roll decent then the rares and whatnot people are gonna actually want endgame.

You do have to get lucky when things actually start mattering. Blue swords at lvl 13 mean about zilch, especially in the ease in which you are able to create them.

So, in essence you are gonna have to make a decision. Do you gamble with your mats going for the homerun shot, or do you sell your mats going for the steady profit and income. That is gonna be the decision gamers have to make. Making the items will be a huge gamble. I doubt itll pay off to as many people nearly as much as making a low lvl blue sword. Maybe it does, and in that case lots of people will do it.

If I was just gonna play the game, I would craft. If I was gonna try and make some money, I would take the safe bet and sell most of the mats. Personally, depending on how it goes, I'm gonna sell every mat I can unless items are easier to roll which I seriously doubt. Will this cut me out of the big lottery ticket roll that could happen? Yes it could.

But as they say, if add up all those 1-2 dollar lottery tickets you blew trying to win 50,000 bucks, you would have 50,000 bucks.

Edit: after reading and commenting on some of these and joining in, it really seems you, Marcko, and this Stabsey character are really running a con here or something. I mean hes a mod on your forum, probably a friend, and he posts follow ups on all your stuff like some info commercial host thats suprised by what you came up with.

Wow, dyes are a lot cooler than I thought. Vanishing dye was a great idea for those who like the original look of the character/complain about large shoulder pads.

In my country, Patience is a common black woman's name... So when I read "where did Patience go?" I only imagine our cleaning lady who have ran away without doin her job!