Monday, June 24, 2013

Seismic Slam is an incredibly powerful tool at keeping mobs


I'll agree that Seismic Slam is an incredibly powerful tool at keeping mobs with fire chains or other Barb crushing abilities at a distance. But once you drain your fury, you'll have to close the distance to gain it all back again. While Frenzy is the best choice hands down for your dps, it is also a weak Fury builder and if you intend on living through d3 gold Halls of Agony in Act 1, Revenge with Provocation is also a necessity which means the fury built from Revenge is also slightly gimped.

Here in lies the dilemma with your well thought out build. The point of it seems to be to keep mobs at a distance while slowly chipping them away running in and out counting on Relentless to keep you alive when they inevitably drop you to dangerous HP levels. Seismic Slam with a 1hander especially for someone fresh out of Hell mode with a weapon that most likely has between 600-750 dps will not be able to take down the more difficult champ packs. The shield will keep you alive, but your damage will be sitting between 8-10k depending on your other gear. This is a fine spot for you to be in Act 1 to buy d3 items, not so good towards the end of Act 1 and not very good at all for Act 2.

Frenzy - Sidearm: Sidearm is an absolute necessity in all cases. The axe does not stop when it hits a mob, it keeps going and it keeps hitting. Frenzy is a powerful single target damager and Sidearm gives it an aoe ability that still effects single target. It is slightly more random than the guaranteed higher damage of the Maniac rune, but if you want to keep your 5 delicious stacks of MF for those boss kills, you can't be switching your abilities from encounter to encounter (horrible design). Sidearm will allow you to still take on huge amounts of white mobs without relying too heavily on the GCD of Revenge. I'm sure we all know the feeling of smashing a proc'd revenge before Diablo 3 account sell the very short GCD is up.

Seismic Slam is CC with massive crits but as I said, the crits are not going to be awe inspiring on Champ packs. It will chew through any white mobs but either way you're going to have to close the gap to regain fury which sort of negates the power of this ability. Ground Stomp on the other hand offers a different option with much greater use. Wrenching Smash will not only stun your opponents for 4 seconds, it will pull them into you and close to your Sidearm runed Frenzy swings. Your greatest power in Inferno mode is not letting the champ packs run amok with their abilities narrowing the area you have to fight. Ground Stomp will give you 4 seconds of no damage whatsoever and the rune allows you to dictate where they stand for a short period of time. Pair that with WotB and Iron Hide runed Ignore Pain and you get nearly a full 10-12 seconds of pummeling a champion down. Drink a pot to negate the damage of those last 3-5 seconds of WotB and you can literally stand in one spot (preferably a corner) greatly improving your chances of success. A 700 dps one hander can easily take down a champ with extra health from 100-25% with WoTB.

The build is as follows:
Frenzy - Sidearm
WotB - Insanity
Ground Stomp - Wrenching Smash
Revenge - Provocation
War Cry - Impunity
Ignore Pain - Iron Hide


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