For the basic setup, I see the following pieces being used:

• Full Wrath of the Wastes set (6 pieces)
• Lamentation (belt)
• Mortick’s Brace (bracers)
• Band of Might (ring/cubed)
• Convention of Elements (ring/cubed)
• Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac (ring/cubed)
• Hellfire Amulet or Squirt’s Necklace (amulet)
• Ambo’s Pride (cubed)
• Mantle of Channeling (cubed)

Now, for the Ethereal, there are two weapons I see being used. Either The Grandfather 2-handed weapon or a Doombringer. From my understanding, The Grandfather might end up becoming the best-in-slot choice here because of the huge amount of damage and other affixes it can roll including both cooldown reduction and critical hit chance.

On the other hand, the Doombringer is a one handed weapon, which means you can use another solid weapon in your offhand. However, it won’t have as much damage, nor have the cooldown affixes which can be critical for a Barbarian. It can provide some damage reduction, which is great while one can search for cooldown reduction elsewhere.

What matters, of course, is the legendary power on the Ethereal. Of the possible ones, the best in my estimation in order are:

1. Ambo’s Pride (Attacking with Whirlwind also applies Rend, and the total damage of Rend is dealt over 1 second)
2. The Furnace (Increases damage against elites by 40-50%)
3. Messerschmidt’s Reaver (Reduce the remaining cooldown of one of your skills by 1 second when you slay an enemy)
4. In-geom (Your skill cooldowns are reduced by 8-10 seconds for 15 seconds after killing an elite pack)
5. Echoing Fury (Slaying enemies engulfs the wielder into a Frenzy)
6. The Executioner (Attacks will slay enemies with less than 5-10% health)

If you manage to find a good one hander, you should find a complimentary one hander from the list above then use a cubed power from the list. For myself, I ended up dual wielding a one handed Ethereal with the Ambo’s Pride power and an Echoing Fury while using the Messerschmidt’s Reaver power in the cube. I know most people on PTR were using The Furnace but I think The Furnace works best when you’re pushing. At lower levels, you will value your cooldowns since it will be harder to generate Fury with everything dying quickly.

Active Skills

Skill-wise, I found the following setup to be useful without the Bul-Kathos mighty weapons:

• Ground Stomp: Wrench Smash (to pull in enemies)
• Whirlwind: Wind Sheer (to generate Fury on hit)
• Rend: Bloodbath (your main damaging ability activated by the set)
• Wrath of the Berserker (rune does not matter once you are using Mortik’s Brace)
• Warcry: Charge! (for instant generation of Fury)
• Sprint: Marathon (speed boost since you will NOT be using whirlwind the entire duration)

Passive Skills

Passive skills are going to depend on the passive you manage to score on your Ethereal. That said, you might be looking at between 5-6 passives for a Barbarian, depending on whether you feel okay with using a Squirt’s Necklace over a Hellfire Amulet. With that in mind, I will list out six passives I think will be worth using here.

• Rampage: Good for increasing strength, which in turn will also improve your armor
• Animosity: Increased fury generation as well as increased fury.
• Ruthless: Increased damage
• Nerves of Steel: Cheat death
• Brawler: Since you will always be in melee range and probably be against more than 3 foes at time, this provides increased damage
• Weapons Master: Only take this if you use an Ambo’s Pride for the Fury generation
• Unforgiving: Not a must have but only if you are having problems sustaining Fury generation. Useful in emptier areas.

Followers

With regards to choosing a Follower, my recommendation here would be to go with a Templar for resource generation. Without the Bul-Kathos mighty set weapons to provide constant Fury generation, you will be searching for additional batteries for resource generation. Also, a Templar is good for providing extra healing but in taking the Inspire over Guardian as a skill, you will lose out on a cheat death. So in that situation, you might go with Nerves of Steel.

Alternatively, you can choose an Enchantress for a little more cooldown reduction, bonus armor and a cheat death. However, if your Barbarian is also your starting character, you will end up not maximizing the gear for intelligence for your Enchantress which will improve things like her cooldown reduction for you.

Remaing Thoughts

In my experience with this version of the build, the biggest hiccup I immediately encountered was being out of Fury constantly. Because of that issue, I could not maintain Whirlwind at 100%, which is why Sprint with Marathon became critical. Empty areas in particular pose the greatest issue, especially if you need to backtrack. Generally, my strategy was to attempt to maintain Wrath of the Berserker and give myself a burst of Fury through War Cry whenever I encounter foes. I could also use Ground Stomp to gather up my goes and quickly mow them over with a slight generation of Fury.

I will admit that my endeavors were on lower levels of content. So I never felt threatened nor damaged too seriously. Instead, my biggest obstacle was keeping up Whirlwind or Sprint just because my Fury would be eaten up quickly especially in emptier areas. I might’ve switched from a badly rolled Hellfire Amulet to a Squirt’s Necklace too to improve my damage.

In addition, I saw a few alternative builds such as replacing Ground Stomp with Furious Charge. In that situation, Sprint also was used and I see the two abilities as a way to speed across areas while Furious Charge could be used to help generate your initial Fury, depending on the rune taken here.

Another thing you can do is alter the ring setup slightly. For instance, using a Focus/Restraint combination rather than depending on a Convention of Elements to cycle through to physical damage. In that scenario, you can use either Furious Charge or Ground Stomp to keep up the bonus generator damage. However, you will lose out on either a Band of Might for damage reduction (which can be made up through the Doombringer’s damage reduction affix) or an Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac (which likewise can be made up through an In-geom and/or Messerschmidt’s Reaver combination). So there is quite a bit of room to experiment there.

At any rate, there’s no doubt that finding a solid Ethereal will be the way to go for a Whirlwind barbarian in Season 24, especially in pushing higher GRs. The various affixes will allow more flexibility  and damage that should give you a few more GRs when you find a good one.

The post Diablo 3: Season 24 Whirlwind Barbarian Guide for Patch 2.7.1 appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.

Aptly named the “GoD” set (aka Gears of Dreadlands), there is no question that this set is what to play this season. Nothing really comes close to the performance once you get the basic gear assembled. Even with crappy, unoptimized gear, you can easily hit GR 70 and unlock primal ancients in record time.

Thus far, I haven’t really pushed this character very far. My highest GR was 75 and I found it relatively easy. In fact, I farmed GR 75 to upgrade my gems to 70 to get the seasonal achievement and am sure that with better gear, I could push much higher.

The way this set functions is like a super powered version of the old Natalya’s strafe build, except that the star of the show is Hungering Arrow via The Ninth Cirri Satchel and various gear that boosts your generator damage. Combined with the set, where strafing fires your generators, you pretty much are piercing large groups of monsters and doing massive damage all the while taking very little damage.

What makes this set ridiculous though is the raw speed. Using Drifting Shadow as your Strafe rune, you gain a good deal of raw speed through that, Momentum via the set (as long as you keep up 20 stacks from firing your generators now and then) and can burst through areas via Smoke Screen Displacement, which also helps trigger your damage reduction from a cubed Elusive Ring. With all that movement, you can run through areas very quickly and take down hordes of monsters who cannot keep up.

Finally, you have damage reduction via Fortress Ballista and Wraps of Clarity, which gets triggered from firing Hungering Arrow. A lot of sketchy, high damage mobs that make me fearful on other builds practically run through all the ground effects, missiles, etc. with no effort.

Obviously, this build will eventually get nerfed (although I hope it doesn’t). But it might be the set that sees adjustment. I find that the Momentum portion is a little awkward because you have to rev the set up before blasting off in starting any area. Once you have a few stacks of Momentum, you only need to fire Hungering Arrow periodically to keep up your buffs.

The thing is that this is a good time to give this build a try because it’s really slick once you get the basics of the mechanics. I did make myself a 2nd set with Unhallowed Essence and it felt like night and day. While Unhallowed Essence feels less chaotic and more reliable, it also felt horribly slow and I gave up quickly on it.

Once I felt that my GoD DH was reasonably geared, I built up a barbarian and afterwards a monk. I mostly wanted to give the Frenzy/Savage set a try. When I had the fundamental pieces assembled, I felt the set kinda sucked. It just felt super slow and the Frenzy stacks would drop off. I couldn’t tell if the Frenzy stack drop off was a bug or not, but it made moving around sluggish. In the end, I simply returned to the old Rend/Whirlwind build, which still felt sluggish compared to my GoD DH.

For my monk, I ended up doing a Patterns of Justice Tempest Rush/Sweeping Wind build. Now, this build was fun. Tempest Rush for the longest time wasn’t good. It was like a super crappy, frail version of Whirlwind. Patterns of Justice makes it so that your Sweeping Wind works with Tempest Rush in increasing your damage.

The way I have this build working is using Vengeful Wind and Won Khim Lau as my weapons with Balance, Mantle of Channeling and an Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac in my cube. Also, I have Cesar’s Momento for my bracers, Kyoshiro’s Soul, a Unity and the Endless Walk for my other jewelry slots.

Much of the damage comes from Sweeping Wind as it gains all the runes from the 2-set bonus and Vengeful Wind + Kyoshiro’s Soul boost the damage and stacks. Kyoshiro’s Soul is particularly useful as it helps maintain your stacks while out of combat. This is important since movement is increased by your 2-set bonus per sweeping wind stack.

The Won Khim Lau boosts your Tempest Rush and Cyclone Strike damage when you hit someone with Tempest Rush as well as auto cast Cyclone Strike. With the Wall of Wind rune, your Cyclone Strike Freezes enemies along with the Master of Wind rune. In turn, that further triggers your Cesar’s Momento bracers to have enemies take more damage from Tempest Rush.

I use an Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac along with a Gogok of Swiftness to help lower my cooldowns, especially for Serenity and Epiphany. Both just help keep me from taking more damage and the running is smooth.

I really like this build so far. Not as much as my DH but once I had the basic gear, it felt smooth and powerful. I did run out of spirit often though so that part can get a little sketchy. While I use Tempest Rush actively to move through my enemies, I employ Dashing Strike to dart through hairy situations and go across longer distances.

Overall, I feel I’ve satisfied my basic D3 seasonal fix. I might try to push the gear on my monk and DH a little more since I haven’t done any augments yet. I think I can easily get up to GR 85 on my DH once I get a few more ancients (especially another ancient Dawn) and some augments.

The post Diablo 3 Season 21 Review appeared first on Kontroversial Keith.