Whelp, it finally dropped: a solid Tyrael’s Might. I believe the GA was on the damage reduction and I ended up critically hitting the damage reduction bonus twice and max to all resistance once. So my damage reduction on the Tyrael’s Might was around 50% while the all resistance hit close to 85%. With the incense, I can easily hit resistance cap and pretty much be invulnerable. On top of that, I was able to swap out my Rakanoth’s Wake boots to an ancestral legendary one and got good rolls on the movement speed and maximum life. That put my Spiritborn life a little over 7k. While I could continue to progress this character, I felt it was time to take a break and try a different project: Mighty Throw Barbarian.
At the moment, I do not have my new Barbarian at level 60 just yet. I’ll hit it tomorrow as I’m a few levels under and simply ran out of things to do and got tired for the night. But I started out leveling as a Bash/Hammer of the Ancients Barbarian, starting on normal mode up until level 15 to get my Expertise character ability then moved to Hard mode. With level 15, you can use Bartering to help fill out missing gear slots as needed. With that, it was fairly easy to get the character with all legendaries and most of the basic Aspects. Luckily, I had already done the Hammer of the Ancients dungeon to unlock that Aspect and had various other Aspects already unlocked.
The leveling version of the Hammer of the Ancients build uses Mighty Throw, Bash, Ground Stomp, Iron Maelstrom and Charge. Quite frankly, I think this build sucks because Hammer of the Ancients simply doesn’t do enough damage and there’s too many unfocused abilities here. If it weren’t for having previous characters already possess key Aspects etc, this would have been terribly painful to level. Most people are recommending Upheaval but I found that build only decent in S3. The real problems are Hammer of the Ancients having been nerfed so many times and Charge being trash these days.
I did end up modifying the build because the leveling guide did not provide good advice for aspects. So the big stuff I chose early on to help the build out were using the Blood Boiling Aspect (since you get Overpowers), Aspect of Earthquakes (to help boost my Earthquake ability) and using the Decrepify + standing still runeword along with the Earthquake one that gets triggered when a spell of another class is cast. Since early on you don’t generate a lot of Fury, you’re probably just going to be filling up your Rage via Bash. In doing so, you end up standing around quite a bit trying to fend off your opponents which causes the two runewords to trigger. I add Earthquake size to my Tempers and this helps create a nice QoL situation where you have a natural defense during downtime. Part of the idea was to get a similar effect to Path of Exile’s Sunder or Earthquake abilities to augment Hammer of the Ancients.
Now that I think about it, I probably can swap out Charge for Leap and use the Leap + Earthquake Aspect for more damage reduction. Also, I think Accelerate really works well for Hammer of the Ancients because it’s such a horribly slow ability. The end game version of this build uses Call of the Ancients and Rallying Cry to help generate more Fury along with a Tibault’s Will. Until I hit level 60, I’ll missing out on these things, although I have quite a few Ancestral versions of Tibault’s Will that eventually will become handy. But I am missing the Bold Chieftain aspect that helps with quickly making Barbarian war cries come off of cooldown faster.
Of course, the real goal is to eventually get Mighty Throw up and running. The biggest problem is that I lack the Unique weapon and Arreat’s Bearing pants to make the build work. So initially, I’m going to stick with Hammer of the Ancients as more of my gear is closer to that build. Probably, the biggest blocker is The Third Blade unique weapon, which is hidden behind Infernal Hordes. I have a sneaky suspicion that the Hammer of the Ancients build won’t be able to do Infernal Hordes all that well because of the small AoE. Maybe Leapquake might be good but I’ll need to farm up the right uniques for that build. I could go to Whirlwind/Dust Devils but I know it’s not top tier right now. As a start, WW/DD might be decent though if I need to get through Infernal Hordes.
The sad thing right now for Barbarians is that there’s not a lot of great options. I knew going in that after Spiritborn, it would be really hard to find something appealing again. My motivation to do a Druid is almost nil as well Sorcerer. Perhaps, a Necromancer could be interesting but the new Soulrift skill looked bad. There are two builds that have some promise so I might give those a shot once this Barbarian is done. I really don’t plan on taking this Barbarian beyond T3 if I can get in. But it’s mostly to see how far I can go and whether or not Mighty Throw turns out to be a fun skill.
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