3 Piece Trang-Oul's and Singer Barb -- Have You Tried It?

[logoutzero]

So, I recently Guardian'd my Singer Barb (thanks to the HC MP crew!) so, it's pretty safe to say his solo career is over. I built him with the sole purpose of MP in mind, so now I'm trying to figure out his next stage of development.

We all know about the oskill partial set bonuses that Trang-Ou'ls Avatar provides. We've seen Fireball Paladins, and well, I'm thinking adding Firewall to the Warcry Barb is a pretty natural fit. The only problem is, is the puny damage even going to be worth it?

Level 14 (13 from the set, 1 from Battle Command) Firewall provides 759-782 per second of fire damage. My current setup gives me level 35 Warcry, which boasts a measly 1003-1038 damage. I figure, the highest I can get the Firewall to is level 26, or 1875-1898 per second. Assuming (haha!) we can do that without dropping the Warcry much, we should see roughly 1k from Warcry, and just shy of 2k from Firewall.

Now, on to resistances! I know there's probably about a 50% Physical Resistance globally in Hell, so figure half the Warcry damage, for argument's sake. And, at least in the Chaos Sanctuary, normal mobs have either 0%, 60%, or 130% Fire Resistance. So, best case, we add at least 40% fire damage to at least half the mobs in CS. That brings the ~500 per Warcry up with a nice ~900 fire damage per second. Considering there could be what, 3 Firewalls stacked at most, so probably 2 in practice, it could add a nice ~2k fire damage to mobs that just have to stand there and take it.

Firewall is hard to aim, I know that. And I know, it's not going to kill anything. But, it does throw more damage out on the board, by a character just standing there in the middle of a stunned group of mobs.

Really, I'm trying to think of a way to contribute more in an MP game. I feel especially useless when there's a Trapper stunning 90% of the mobs anyway. Now I'm just there for BO, and that's just a rich kid's Beta CtA away from nothing...

All in all, the Warcry damage is insignificant. And, the Firewall damage will be, too, I think. But, it's a chance to flog a little more damage at a crowd, which may speed things up.

Thoughts? Opinions? Thanks for reading!

 

[NagisaFurukawa]

It's definitely both very interesting and doable. The only one I can remember off the top of my head is by poops a while back. (Where'd he go, anyway?)

 

[logoutzero]

It must help to know what you are looking for. I searched for a little while for Magebarb and firewall barb and fire barb, all kinds of stuff. Thanks for the link, I just knew someone had to have done a writeup!

After glancing through his thread (if he could Pat it, there's no reason to think it does nothing at all) I think I may start trying to gather some gear. If nothing else, it'll be fun once!

Thanks again for the link!

 

[pharphis]

At the very least it'll mix things up and be fun to watch

 

[zaphodbrx]

Firewall will do some damage. But really not a lot.
Warcry's purpose is to stun the mobs. The damage is not significant in high mp settings.

If you want to 'contribute more', your best bet is probably the conventional one. Get a big weapon and hit the monsters with it.

Or: Load up on massive amounts of MF and max find item. Hork everything in sight.

 

[pharphis]

I'm also a big fan of the hork everything in sight with dual gulls (or better!) on switch.

You can also do this in baal runs if you're careful enough to hit the boss before the entire pack goes down and baal removes the corpses. Takes practice, especially with an mp group.

 

[logoutzero]

Firewall will do some damage. But really not a lot.
Warcry's purpose is to stun the mobs. The damage is not significant in high mp settings.

If you want to 'contribute more', your best bet is probably the conventional one. Get a big weapon and hit the monsters with it.

Or: Load up on massive amounts of MF and max find item. Hork everything in sight.

Well, thanks to a generous donation from Pharphis, I am the new proud owner of a 3 piece Trang's! Next MP game, we'll test it out, see if it makes a difference. Thanks dude!

I like the idea of horking everything. With the FCR setup, you pretty much just run in a small circle if you drive with it on RMB. I am considering this idea.

I'm also a big fan of the hork everything in sight with dual gulls (or better!) on switch.

You can also do this in baal runs if you're careful enough to hit the boss before the entire pack goes down and baal removes the corpses. Takes practice, especially with an mp group.

Yeah, the MF hork sounds like another contender. I really like the idea we discussed on Hamachi about static. I think it will be the next move after Firewall.

And thanks again for the massive hookup!

 

[FredOfErik]

What is this static you are talking about? Dual crescent moons on switch for double swing? Sounds like a very cool idea.

My singer is the MF/Hork variant. Since most of our MP chars are pure dmg builds that lack any sort of decent MF (personally my wolf sports a wooping 0% MF), it would be a great way to add more drops to the sessions. I have even considered making a hork switch for my wolf, but I can't be bothered to lose my dual HotOs.

 

[pharphis]

We were talking about dual crescent moons as a cheap option, but dual stormlashes as an even better option! 15% chance each. Yeah, double swing.

 

[zaphodbrx]

IIRC stormlash has 20% ctc? Need to check..

One of my barbs is frenzy with stormlash+shaefer's hammer, fun build, even if not too strong.

 

[WoRG1]

Stormlash is 15%/lvl10, Crescent Moon is 7%/lvl13...and Beta Crescent Moon is 20%/lvl13.

There's a clear winner here, if you're OK with timetravelled itamz...

Of course, the 'Lash comes with other good mods and lots of CB, but is harder to find and might cost your singer some stats to weild...

WoRG

 

[NoisemakerArrow]

So the solution to "How do I make my War Cry barb stronger?" is simple: make a melee barb.

Try a Reaper's Toll on the merc (or is Insight absolutely necessary?). The Decrepify will help a lot.

 

[FredOfErik]

So the solution to "How do I make my War Cry barb stronger?" is simple: make a melee barb.

Try a Reaper's Toll on the merc (or is Insight absolutely necessary?). The Decrepify will help a lot.

Insight is in every way absolutely necessary.

If making a singer for soloing with optimal gear (enigma), your main goal won't be to have high dmg but to stun everything (example: kestegs) and let the merc do the main killing.

In this specific case logoutzero is trying to make his singer barb work optimal for our MP sessions. Since there will always be someone around with greater, more diverse killing power than a singer, the singer's main purpose is to provide a high BO, stun stuff and be a tank. Logoutzero is looking for a way to optimize his function as support to being more than just these three things - one of the ways could be casting static or fire wall when the monsters around him are already stunned or some other tank is taking care of a specific pack.

 

[logoutzero]

Insight is in every way absolutely necessary.

If making a singer for soloing with optimal gear (enigma), your main goal won't be to have high dmg but to stun everything (example: kestegs) and let the merc do the main killing.

In this specific case logoutzero is trying to make his singer barb work optimal for our MP sessions. Since there will always be someone around with greater, more diverse killing power than a singer, the singer's main purpose is to provide a high BO, stun stuff and be a tank. Logoutzero is looking for a way to optimize his function as support to being more than just these three things - one of the ways could be casting static or fire wall when the monsters around him are already stunned or some other tank is taking care of a specific pack.

QFT. Maybe I'm not so good at saying this, but FoE nailed it. That's probably because he's been involved in some of the conversations, and also, I MP with him, so he knows I like to play support chars.

The Firewall is novelty. I knew that the damage would be irrelevant, especially with Solar's op/hax Trapper. Even without the trapper, there's the Wolfbarb, who just tears through everything, and sometimes a Chargeadin, who is pretty beastly. And even outside of the regulars, most people prefer to play characters that hit hard, but not many like to be in the support role. So I'm not necessarily trying to tune this Singer to specifically cater to this MP group, but to CS/Baal running in general.

The 'Insight' is not 100% gospel needed, probably more like 98.4% or so. Current gear spread gives me over 2000 mana, and the Regen is quite nice. I can always grab pots, and hork more of the purple stuff as needed. Insight is VERY useful for this build, because I park on Warcry, so that as many mobs as possible just stand there. I also like to Taunt anything out of my reach, I like to feel like I'm saving/tanking for my comrades, even if it isn't needed. We are HC afterall...

With that being said, Reaper's I don't think is a great fit, because the damage dealers all have their preferred curse, and I don't want to ruin/slow down a killing character's setup to make my ~1k cry do 750 damage instead of 500. I think the next iteration of the MP Runner's Singer is going to be some sort of Double Swing CtC Static variant. This ~should~ help a lot I think, assuming I can land any hits. And a few of the weapons of interest come with a pretty decent amount of Crushing Blow, so it will help knock down Diablo/Baal in record time.

Also, another point of interest: if I can keep the FR/W up, and maintain my 105 FCR, horking everything is pretty useful. If the Static build doesn't do it for me, I think I am going to settle on kitting him out in MF. But! Feel free to keep the discussion going, if you have anything else to say. I love how we, as a community, are able to tweak, and evolve builds, to bring them upon the brink of perfection...