Diablo 3: First Impressions of Might of the Earth Barbarian Set


This blog will go over some testing I’ve been doing since acquiring the main pieces to the Might of the Earth Barbarian set. I’m just off by two non-set pieces in the belt and ring that compliment the primary popular build. Instead, I want to go over an alternative build that combines this build with 3 pieces of the Immortal Kings set.

The main thing about this set is that it’s a cooldown heavy set and requires you to have a reasonable amount of CDR on your gear in conjunction with using a few cooldown abilities. The set is a bit awkward at first because unlike other sets, this one involves timing things rather than spam casting your abilities. When you combine this set with the Immortal King’s 3 piece set bonus (using a Ring of Royal Grandeur to allow for all the bonuses to apply), you lose some focus from sacrificing abilities like Ground Stomp and Earthquake for Call of the Ancients and Wrath of the Berserker. At first, the combination seems very appealing but a lot of the damage is passive from your ancients.

The net result from the combined set play style is awkward waiting as your main abilities come off of cooldown. You can still do a lot of burst damage through War Cry and Threatening Shout which trigger Avalanche and Earthquake as a result from a cubed Blade of the Tribes. But nothing really reduces the cooldown of those two abilities. So in between you just hope to have leap ready as well as Ancient Spear while your ancients take care of business.

A different set up exist where you remove the Immortal King’s Boulder Breaker and go with The Fury of the Vanished peak and Bracers of Destruction. This build reminds me of a Furious Charge Raekor’s build I’m doing, except that you use Leap to get around instead. It’s something I might try soon to see how it compares. Both are similar in some way except Leap has a slight advantage in being able to jump over areas.

Either way, I’m not a huge fan of the involvement of Ancient Spear. I get the idea of the mechanics but it feels as though the premise works better alongside Raekors rather than Leapquake. Seismic Slam feels better just because I dislike not having some form of way to react while waiting for something else to come off of cooldown. I’ll have to play around with the build a lot more to see which ability feels most comfortable for my playstyle.

Overall, I’m still trying to find a decent, fun build for the barbarian since Wrath of the Waste builds aren’t as fun anymore. Everything is leaning towards a mixture of Immortal Kings and Raekors but I’m still a few pieces away before I can turn up the difficulty and move away from experimentation into progression.

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