Frenzy vs. WW

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fistofyah

New member
Frenzy vs. WW

So after a couple of years off from D2 i've decided to come back and play some more. With the current patch I was wondering the whether I hsould go for a Fury barb or WW. I know that WW is a solid build that has withstood the tests of time, but what are the advantages and disadvantages of each? Thanks
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

I've been wondering this myself. So far I have my barb at level 47 with maxed out Frenzy and am currently working on double swing for synergy.

I've found that I deal a lot of damage very quickly and was able to easily stand toe to toe with most bosses so far.

I think the main advantages are the fact that you get a large damage bonus and attack speed bonus which seems to really mesh well with the life/mana leech gear I have currently.

Another thing is that Frenzy does get bonuses from Double Swing and Taunt for damage while, I believe, Whirl Wind doesn't get any sort of synergy bonuses.

Also the increase run speed really lets you cover a map quickly....I really like being able to travel through an area really fast....just hit one guy and take off running....hit another as need....and of course with 1 point in leap attack you can jump over large groups of enemies and such.

I think whirlwind gives you a little more control though. I notice with frenzy I sort of just fail around at whatever is closest to me until everything is dead. With whirlwind I think you can direct yourself more toward the creature you want to kill.

But...I'm pretty much just learning myself....those just seem to be things I've noticed so far.
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

they are both sweet whichever you choose you will be happy.
frenzy super quick attack and frw
but in crowds it can get messy for you if ur not very carful.
ww as long as you have leech you will be ok in nearly every crowd
but it kills slower in my experience especialy against bosses

thats my 2 cents but i am no expert. (so if i have made mistakes people please dont too brutal)
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

They both rock and are very entretaining. If you forget about frenzy synergies, you can even use both on the SAME barbarian :)
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

I'm not much of a barbarian player, and I find them relatively easy to play with on normal and NM (i never got to hell with one)

I do like them, and I think they're fun to play and have around, so I decide to make one. Not sure exactly what gear I was gonna use (I restarted, so no wealth), I decided to make a rather "rounded" build.

Frenzy is nice, and you can run fast, and buff other attacks (berserk, concentration), has very nice attack and damage bonuses.

WW is also nice with huge slow weapons, cause it doesn't take forever to swing a hit or such. (imagine using berserk/conc with a slow weapon while decrepyfied/holy freeze/ and cold attack). with WW you just cut through!

Anyhow I have about the equal point distribution in both of them, and most of my skills are in BO and Shout. I also put 1 in each mastery (except throw and spear) moslty because I wanted to experiment with various weapons.

My build is definitely not a "cookie-cutter" and might do very bad in HELL, but I can assure you its a lot of fun!

Mauls, Polearms, axes, you name it, i can use it!:smiley: I got plenty of life(20%+) and mana(+5%) leach so I can WW forever, or quickly frenzy to recharge mana for next WW. It's really fun! BTW, i'm level 48 in NM act 2, so I don't know how much fun its gonna be in later acts...

and since I'm here... is there a real advantage to WW with a Shield? I know Talic, one of the ancients, does it, so I thought there might be a reason. Except for possible extra resist, do you get the benefit of CTB when WW?
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

Alecz said:
I'm not much of a barbarian player, and I find them relatively easy to play with on normal and NM (i never got to hell with one)

I do like them, and I think they're fun to play and have around, so I decide to make one. Not sure exactly what gear I was gonna use (I restarted, so no wealth), I decided to make a rather "rounded" build.

Frenzy is nice, and you can run fast, and buff other attacks (berserk, concentration), has very nice attack and damage bonuses.

WW is also nice with huge slow weapons, cause it doesn't take forever to swing a hit or such. (imagine using berserk/conc with a slow weapon while decrepyfied/holy freeze/ and cold attack). with WW you just cut through!

Anyhow I have about the equal point distribution in both of them, and most of my skills are in BO and Shout. I also put 1 in each mastery (except throw and spear) moslty because I wanted to experiment with various weapons.

My build is definitely not a "cookie-cutter" and might do very bad in HELL, but I can assure you its a lot of fun!

Mauls, Polearms, axes, you name it, i can use it!:smiley: I got plenty of life(20%+) and mana(+5%) leach so I can WW forever, or quickly frenzy to recharge mana for next WW. It's really fun! BTW, i'm level 48 in NM act 2, so I don't know how much fun its gonna be in later acts...

and since I'm here... is there a real advantage to WW with a Shield? I know Talic, one of the ancients, does it, so I thought there might be a reason. Except for possible extra resist, do you get the benefit of CTB when WW?
Click to expand...

you SHOULD get a fast weapon that hit the breakpoint of ww's attack speed, it matters ALOT in terms of damage wise. The difference of damage output between 12fpa (2 attack per second) and 4fpa (6.2 attack per second) is HUGE.

secondly, block work in full effects during ww.



 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

Frenzy=pvm
WW=PvP....kinda pvm

Frenzy is terrible in pvp so i wouldn't bother trying. The only difference in pvm is how you like to chop the monsters in half. Also if you want a 2 hander (i dont but....) Ww is the way to go.

Just my 3 cents cause im rich.
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

WW
advantages:
faster attack speed. maximal is 4 fps per hit per weapon. if equiped with two weopen, that would be 2 fps per hit.
more free stat point. ww has no synergy. so u have plenty of stat points to invest on other skills. ww barb usually has godly defense.
name lock bug. using ww when the enemy was name locked, u can hit the enemy far away from u. the effect just like teleport to enemy first then ww. it is very useful in pvp.
disadvantages:
low damage. no synergy, u can get only 100%ed at lv 20 ww.
no ctc. all ctc will not work with ww. such as On Attack, On Striking. that is terrible in most of the cases.


Frenzy
advantages:
excellent damage. the synergy and Frenzy itself gives a reasonable bonus on ED. with pride on might merc, he can kill most of the monsters in 2-3 hit.
CTC. the ctc of amplified damage on Lacerator will give a incredible power to frenzy barb.
fast walk/run speed. very good at boss hunting.

disadvantages:
lacking of stat point. Frenzy barb usually has only 10k def.
low attack speed. maximal speed is 5fps.
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

Frenzy with a [0] speed weapon will attack at 5 fpa with 117% attack speed on gear, and provides a total of 570 ED from gear. Assuming ~200 str and ~230 from might merc that's 1000%

WW with a proper weapon (which is the same as the frenzy weapon if they both have good IAS on them when it comes to the availability of ED) would attack at 4 frames (with both weapons except for first hit if dual wielding (which is equivalent to 2 frame attack frenzy), as far as I know) and provide 243% less ED.

DW WW attacks 2.5X faster than frenzy while dealing ~78% of the damage (8.57/11), which is much greater damage/sec.

2h WW attacks 1.25X faster than frenzy while dealing slightly less than double of the DW WW damage (so ~1.5X of frenzy's damage).

Overall WW (with a WW-viable weapon) should almost double frenzy's damage/sec, while costing 20 less skill points and only requiring enoug IAS to bring your weapon to the last breakpoint (if 2H swords are much easier to do this with since they use 1h breakpoints even when held 2H), rather than requiring total 117% gear IAS, allowing you to skill+gear+socket for more damage/survivability on top of it. WW has a side bonus of being able to equip a shield although if you thought you needed a shield you probably wouldn't have been looking at frenzy anyway.

Only advantage of frenzy is fast running, which is only good if you have such amazing weapons that the majority of your time is actually spent running to the next mob rather than killing the current. Well and CtC effects if you have that kind of gear which can *maybe* bring you on par with WW (using amplify damage or life tap and stuff).
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

sirwhere said:
guys, leave defense out of this. it's utterly useless for pvm.
Click to expand...

I'm not so sure about that...

I do agree that defense is either a lot, or don't bother and use shield and max block.
But for a barbarian... if you put 1 pt in Iron skin, with say.... +8 all skills, you get 9 points (110% more defense), than you put... say 10 in Shout , this gives 18 Shout (270% more defense) for a total of 380% more defense.

if you use a body armor of 1k, helm of 250, belt, shield, gloves, boots of 150 (average) each, you end up with 1000 + 250 + 600 = 1850 base defense.
After iron skin and shout this becomes 1850 x 4.8 = 8880 defense, and if you BC before you get 1850 x 5 = 9250 defense. No you also have a shield... so what physical attack can touch you?

Also if you use a defiance mercenary (say lvl 75 - slvl 17 defiance +1 form BC)
your defense becomes: 1850 x (5 + 2.3) = 1850 x 7.3 = 13505 defense.

I believe this is a decent amount of defense for NM or hell start.

If you invested at least 1 pt in shout and 1 pt in Iron skin and you get some godly gear (+12 skills) you'd make much better use of defense than most other characters.

And if you go frenzy (so no shield) than what is gonna protect you from hits, when facing a lot of enemies, if not high defense?


 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

alec, i have something like 1500 defense on my D2 classic babo and I never come close to dying.

what keeps you alive isn't defense, it's life steal.
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

Of course life steal helps a lot (usually). However there are monsters yo u cannot leech from (except with life tap), and then there's the ranged guys.

If you don't use a shield and you have a mob of 15 skeleton archers shooting at you (happened to me in Act 5 just outside the town), your life is going to go down pretty fast, even if you have a lot. Not to mention if you are cursed or something.

Also mercs can make good use of defense. I noticed a big difference when I replaced prayer merc using some random 400 def armor with a defiance merc using a 2.8 k defense armor. The latter merc had about 13-14k defense final and survived much better.

As I've learned from this thread when you go with WW the shield block works, so you probably don't have to worry about defense.

Idk, try removing your armor so you get your defense really low and see how your barb performs. Where were you playing with that defense though?
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

The less you get hit the less leech is needed, and the less possible it is to burst you down before you can leech. Getting hit less is a very good thing. The hell dif mobs I was looking at on the AS beastairy they seem to be scoring in the ~2700 AP range, meaning (before taking level difference into account) a 10k def barb will get hit ~21% of the time while a 2.7k def barb will get hit 50% of the time and a 5.4k def barb will get hit 33% of the time.

Of course this is only for attacks where defense actually helps, you'd still need lots of resists, but elemental damage isn't the only thing that kills. Mobs in 1.1 also do decent physical damage.
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

I'm glad I'm not the only one that believes that high defense can really help a frenzy barb.

What is that AP range you are talking about? It shows that AP is something like "anti-defense" or Attack Rating. It would really be helpful to determine how much % they hit me with various defense numbers.

As far as resists are concerned... that's another topic.
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

I guess your defense is... ok.

My lvl 76 defiance merc with Eth Stone (2.8k) reaches about 14k defense, but he's never going to see past Hell Mephisto. And your resists shouldn't be under 75 at your level in NM, even without fade!

I know my lvl 49 poor barb has maxed resist in NM and didn't even do Anya quest! (at lvl 49 -> no torch or anny) Also only about 5 pts in NR (with bonuses).
 
Re: Frenzy vs. WW

Just a thing: defense isn't going to help you against skeleton archers because one usually RUNS towards them and while running, every monster swing/arrow is an auto-hit. Defense would be useful if players were to WALK towards archers, but no one does that (not anyone I know of, at least.. lol).
 
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