Whirlwind Bul-Kathos Barbarian

[Damien 1,514]

This thread is for comments about our Whirlwind Bul-Kathos Barbarian Build Guide.

[Guest Saoth]

How do you gain fury with this build i'm so confused.

[Guest diablo fan]

Re: fury, the weapons themselves pretty much supply all the fury you need, especially if you continually hit things.  You have to go for a while without hitting anything to run out of fury, especially if you are solo and using the templar's ability to restore resources.

 

One mistake in the build:  Threatening Shout - Falter does not provide damage reduction, but "instead" provides the increased damage to enemies.  It's not a double-dip (unless the tool-tip is wrong).

One minor annoyance:  anyone know how to get your left-button whirlwind to never stop?  I find when I use that setup that occasionally my character would just start running around instead of whirlwinding, which was pretty bad.  You also can't start until you see an enemy or breakable object (which is fine).  I've tried moving it to right-button (which works), but that doesn't work for this build since you need to select an enemy to activate a left-button skill (and you don't want to have to take the time with most of these, although you could probably get away with Threatening Shout since you'll never use that except on enemies).

 

 

An alternative:  one key aspect of this build is the belt along with lots of cooldown reduction in gear and through the cubed ring choice.  But another way to do this is to cube the RoRG, and then replace one set piece from Wastes from the Immortal King set and replace the belt with the IK belt.  Then replace Ignore Pain with Call of the Ancients - Together as One.  This gets you the 100% uptime on 50% damage reduction without worrying about cooldowns or the belt, and is a little more friendly to newer players who might not have the belt or the entire Wastes set.  The downside is that it is much harder to maintain Wrath of the Berserker - you definitely won't be using it except for elites or better.

 

However, you could continue to modify the build by giving up the 6-piece bonus from Wastes in favor of the 4-piece bonus from IK by subbing out one more piece of the Wastes set with another IK piece.  This gives you a much more reasonable Wrath of the Berserker uptime, and you might even be able to drop Boon of Bul-Kathos in favor of your cheat death, or simply more damage (Weapons Master, for example).  You also don't have to try so hard to get perfect CDR gear, which can indirectly boost your damage/toughness.

I'm not sure these alternatives are better, since you're effectively giving up the Dust Devil AOE damage for +8% damage overall (or something else), and I'm not sure which version gives you more uptime on Wrath of the Berserker (in theory, it should be the IK variant, but theory doesn't always work in this game).  However it's a fair variant for someone who happens to have slightly different equipment or can't find or get a perfect roll on that crucial belt, and it seems a little more new-player friendly since the 50% DR is automatic and doesn't require precise timing of skills.

 

Another thought:  if you've gone this far, you could also give up yet another piece from the Wastes set in favor of a more damage-oriented or utility piece, although I'm not sure what a good choice would be (maybe Deathwatch Mantle or Paudrons of the Skeleton King?  Ice Climbers?  Or just Leoric's Crown for the massive +Life bonus?  Shi Mizu's Haori is an interesting one to mix with Blood Funnel - it will certainly increase your survivability).

[Guest Myspeld]

What ring do I use instead of unity if I am playing with 3 other people?

[Guest diablo fan]

What ring do I use instead of unity if I am playing with 3 other people?

The writeup suggests Focus and Restraint, although you will never use the first half of it.  Still, it's an always-on +50% damage boost instead of the 150-200% boost ~1/4th of the time, so it should even out.  Not sure how to replicate the massive damage reduction, though.

[Guest diablo fan]

After playing around with the alternate build above, I can confirm that you can keep near-100% uptime on Wrath of the Berserker even without Boon of Bul-Kathos just by using whirlwind alone (and zero Paragon points in CDR).  (It's actually harder to do if you are killing enemies too quickly, but if that is the case you hardly need Wrath.)  In fact, the only thing I ended up worrying about was occasionally not keeping near-maximum fury, especially against rift guardians - where you are fighting a single enemy for a long stretch of time.  In fact, unless I am missing something, I think it's impossible to maintain 100% fury against a single target with whirlwind alone (at least without a huge investment in resource cost reduction, or perhaps changing WW to fire and cubing the Cindercoat or something similar).  This was unfortunate because it caused Berserker Rage to drop off, which was noticeable - and single targets are when you need it most!

 

Continuing the thought from above, I wonder if perhaps the best 3rd piece to drop from the Wastes set would be the shoulder, and then add Fury of the Ancients.  It's a little redundant, but this would ensure that getting below 100% rage was effectively impossible, even in solo fights.

 

Another thing that benefits this alternate build is that your pets make excellent targets - it's almost like another source of damage reduction because any time something swings at them instead of you it's effectively 100% DR.  And in some ways they are better than the dust devils because they intentionally target enemies instead of just randomly rolling around.  They only do 270% weapon damage instead of 2500%, and there are only 3 instead of 6, but they also do skills from time to time that boost their damage slightly.  It's not equivalent, but it's not terrible, either.

 

I'm also still interested to see if replacing the torso with Shi Mizu's Haori (instead of the shoulder) makes you effectively immortal as long as you can keep attacking...  Haven't had a chance to test this yet!  (Or just wear the Hexing Pants and cube the Haori, whichever.)

 

 

TL;DR:  Here are the changes for an alternate whirlwind build combining Bul Kathos / Wastes / Immortal King:

Gear (all stat priorities are the same except ignore cooldown reduction)

- replace belt with IK belt

- replace shoulder with Fury of the Ancients

- replace your choice of 2 of the following:  helm, hands, torso, legs, feet with IK set piece of same (giving a total of 3 pieces of both Wastes and IK)

- replace cubed jewelry slot with Ring of Royal Grandeur

Paragon

- attack speed > cooldown reduction

Gem

- replace helm with +23% life gem (Flawless Royal Amethyst)

Skills

- replace Ignore Pain with Call of the Ancients - Together as One

- replace Boon of Bul Kathos with Weapons Master (or Nerves of Steel if you need it)
- suggestion:  put Threatening Shout on left mouse button and Whirlwind on right mouse button

 

During play:  hold down right mouse button the whole time and never stop moving.  Left click to Shout enemy groups / elites / bosses on cooldown; you get 6 seconds every 10 so keep it going (you can do this while RMB is held down).  Hit Ancients to start and recast immediately if any of them die.  Keep Wrath on cooldown and make sure War Cry and Battle Rage never drop; also don't forget to refresh Battle Rage only when War Cry is ready as well so you keep your fury topped off.

[Guest diablo fan]

Another thought:  instead of Weapons Master you could use Inspiring Presence; this would increase the 25% damage buff from Shout to full 100% uptime, as well as keep you regenerating 2% life 100% of the time as well.  Hard to say if that's better than the 8% damage buff on top of the 25% buff 60% of the time, but it would be easier.  (Ok, at least according to my math, it would be almost the exact same if you were hitting 100% of the time, with Inspiring Presence gaining 0.08% damage...  Feel free to check me on that, though.)

Wait - I just realized that the Bul-Kathos set are Mighty weapons, not swords - so they would simply generate fury instead of adding damage.  That makes Inspiring Presence better, unless using Weapons Master could free up your fury generation needed from the Call of the Ancients and allow you to try another armor substitution...

Along those lines, I'm also wondering if Relentless might be a neat thing to try with the Haori...  That would bring you up to 90% DR (including 4-piece Wastes, Call of the Ancients, and Relentless) when under 35% health, and under 25% health your attacks are all crits - generating 1% life each time.

[Guest diablo fan]

- replace shoulder with Fury of the Ancients

- replace Boon of Bul Kathos with Weapons Master (or Nerves of Steel if you need it)

Ok, I can confirm that Weapons Master allows you to maintain ~100% fury 100% of the time with this build, even against solo targets - or at least, it definitely does when you can do full paragon point resource cost reduction and you're playing with the templar buddy (no other RCR on gear).  So you don't actually need Fury of the Ancients - or rather, you can just use Weapons Master instead.  Or, you can use Fury of the Ancients, but then you should choose Inspiring Presence so you can keep the 25% buff up all the time - this should be a slight DPS gain (and a little more survivability as well).  Still not sure what set piece to switch out if you're just using Weapons Master, though.

 

So the above should be:

- replace Boon of Bul Kathos with Inspiring Presence (or Weapons Master if you do not have Fury of the Ancients)

 

Alternately, you could take Brawler just for some pure non-boss DPS gain - like if you're doing bounties, for example.  So far this build also does well with survivability thanks to ~80% DR, but I haven't tested it in T10 yet - so Relentless or Superstition might also work if you need it.

[adrianmak 0]

If I don't have the pride of cassius on hand, any alternative skill other than ignore pain ?

[Guest Chris]

Why is Skull Grasp not a ring option for this? Is the damage not multiplicative?

[Guest linch]

Why is CRD such a low priority on the gear? Don't you need around 50% CRD to have 100% uptime on WOTB and IP with the suggested legendary gems?

[Guest diablo fan]

If I don't have the pride of cassius on hand, any alternative skill other than ignore pain ?

 

Since no one else is posting, I'll just plug my alternative above:  i.e. switch to IK belt, grab another IK piece and switch your ring to RoRG to keep the set, and use CotA - Together As One.  But otherwise, no, some way to get that additional 50% DR is manditory (besides the 40% from the set), as otherwise you will be shredded (unless you are at a paragon level that you don't care anymore).

 

Why is Skull Grasp not a ring option for this? Is the damage not multiplicative?

I am not 100% sure but it looks additive from the tooltip.  On the other hand, that does seem better than Unity for groups, especially with a guaranteed +crit roll!  Seems like a good suggestion.  The ring slot in particular needs a group alternative.

 

 

Why is CRD such a low priority on the gear? Don't you need around 50% CRD to have 100% uptime on WOTB and IP with the suggested legendary gems?

The cubed Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac is your primary source of CDR.  That's why timing your shouts is important to this build:  that ring reduces one of any of your active cooldowns, and you want your shouts to be off cooldown as much as possible so that it reduces the time on your Ignore Pain and Wrath.

Although, if you use CotA instead, that would be one fewer cooldown to manage.  In fact, if you switched to CotA and then switched out Boon of Bul-Kathos for something else, it would effecively take the same number of attacks to get Wrath back as before, AND you'd have the benefit of another passive skill (probably Weapons Master, since otherwise as I said above, you will lose max fury against solo targets).

[Sampaio 1]

Could someone explain how does this build benefits from the Convention of Elements buff? Because most of the damage done is Physical, so is it really worth to keep it just to get the % for one damage source?

[Deadset 108]

Could someone explain how does this build benefits from the Convention of Elements buff? Because most of the damage done is Physical, so is it really worth to keep it just to get the % for one damage source?

 

Math-wise, it does come out as your best damage option - even with only a quarter of relevant uptime!

[Warden 8]

Sampaio - Convention of the Elements is confusing at first.  You get a 200% damage increase, but only 1/4 of the time (when it cycles through physical damage).  So you have to look at the average damage increase:

(0 + 0 + 0 + 200) / 4 = 50

or more simply:

200 * .25 = 50

This means you get an overall damage increase of 50%.  No other single ring gives that much damage increase.

If you could do both physical and fire, say, you would get a 100% average damage increase: (0 + 0 + 200 + 200) / 4 = 100.  The more types of damage you do, the closer you get to the ideal 200% increase.  But you can't keep multiple damage types up all the time, and the ring's cycles are short enough that you can't really time your attacks with the cycles.  So most poeple settle for the (still impressive) 50% you get while doing one type of damage.

Deadset - I also would like to know about two questions already asked: Does threatening shout - Falter still reduce damage?  It doesn't look like it does.  And how are you getting so much uptime on WotB?  I know I can learn to time my other buffs better (so that the CDR from the Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac is more effective) but still...  I typically have 1/2 of my cooldown left when WotB expires.

diablo_fan - Unless I'm misreading the tooltip, the benefits of Threatening Shout apply only to the mobs that you hit with it.  So increasing it's duration does not give you 100% uptime, unless you are talking about just the rift guardian where you could keep hitting it every time you shout.  In fact, for the rest of the rift, increasing its duration and casting it less often means you might deal less damage, since its effects are gone once the mobs you hit with it are dead.

General tip - I put Whirlwind on the right button and Ignore Pain on the left.

Edited September 10, 2015 by Warden

[Guest diablo fan]

 

diablo_fan - Unless I'm misreading the tooltip, the benefits of Threatening Shout apply only to the mobs that you hit with it.  So increasing it's duration does not give you 100% uptime, unless you are talking about just the rift guardian where you could keep hitting it every time you shout.  In fact, for the rest of the rift, increasing its duration and casting it less often means you might deal less damage, since its effects are gone once the mobs you hit with it are dead.

Wow - great point.  The life regen is still nice and keeping it up 100% on the boss is still useful but otherwise that power doesn't do too much, you're right - and if you're spamming Threatening Shout that means you're screwing up your CD management with ORotZ.  On the other hand, given that War Cry now lasts 2 minutes, you won't have to worry about that getting in your way with CD management as often.  Still, hardly worth it over Weapons Master.

 

 

I still feel like replacing the belt with the IK belt and one other set piece with IK, and doing the RoRG is a much easier way to get 50% DR at 100% uptime (with CotA) than Ignore Pain, and it's much easier to find those set pieces than that one belt.  It's probably not optimal - which this build strives for - but it's much easier, especially since you can't use Unity in groups anyway.  However, it also allows you to more easily switch Boon of Bul-Kathos for Weapons Master, which will make it a snap to keep 100% fury (and thus +25% damage) all the time, even on single targets - so that's another consideration.  (Or, keep Boon of Bul-Kathos and have an even easier time keeping Wrath up all the time - not sure which is better.)

 

As for my other suggestion above to break the Wastes set 6-piece to get the 4-piece IK bonus to easily keep your Wrath going 100% of the time - I haven't completely tested it yet but using another website to do the math, but I now think this is a horrible idea.    It turns out, the dust devils are a HUGE percentage of your damage - maybe even close to 90%?  The actual WW hitting is nearly nothing compared to those devils.  So the 6-piece bonus is really the entire point of this whole build, and must be preserved.

 

 

The site I was using is d3planner.com, btw.  Incredibly useful.  For example, I can tell that with my current build and attack speed, WW hits about 8.5 times per second and costs 3 fury per hit - we'll call it 25.5 fury spent per second.  Given that I can regen 12.5 fury / second with the Bul-Kathos swords (modified by the Hexing Pants), it's not surprising that you need to be hitting at least 2 enemies (3 is better) to maintain 100% fury.  And the more your attack speed increases, the worse this problem becomes.  However, when you add Weapons Master, that knocks the cost per hit down to 1 fury - which means you're only spending 8.5 fury / second - which is easily within the 12.5 fury / second you're regening.  That's why I can keep 100% fury on single targets with Weapons Master and I can't without it.  And since Weapons Master scales with hits, not fury/second, you can never outrun your fury expenditures (as long as you're hitting).

 

Also from what I can gather from this site, it also seems like the ORotZ can completely remove the cooldown on Wrath for me (with 8.5 hits / second against a single target) in only ~12 seconds, assuming nothing else is on cooldown.  Adding the Boon of Bul-Kathos decreases that by about 3 seconds (as you'd expect).  Theoretically, even if Wrath, Threatening Shout, and War Cry are all on cooldown, it still should only take about 16 seconds to get all of them down again - and that's against a single target.  If I added Ignore Pain, that jumps to 19 seconds - which is really close to the 20 second duration of Wrath - but Boon of Bul-Kathos takes it back to 16 again.  All this to say:  unless I don't completely understand how the ORotZ works, it should easily cover reducing your cooldowns and keeping 100% uptime on Wrath unless your attack speed is too slow.  8.5 attacks / second is barely enough to keep it going on a single target, and that's including all the bonuses from the set, wielding two weapons, etc.  It's probably not as hard to maintain this vs. a mob thanks to Pain Enhancer, but against a single target it seems like you need at least enough attack speed from gear to keep your cooldowns manageable.  Then again, I could be missing something fundamental here.

[Deadset 108]

Deadset - I also would like to know about two questions already asked: Does threatening shout - Falter still reduce damage?  It doesn't look like it does.  And how are you getting so much uptime on WotB?  I know I can learn to time my other buffs better (so that the CDR from the Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac is more effective) but still...  I typically have 1/2 of my cooldown left when WotB expires.

 

Falter doesn't DR anymore, I have corrected the guide to reflect the change. :) As for WotB uptime, it hovers around the 70-75% mark with careful management and proper item rolls, sadly no big secret to share. :/

[Guest diablo fan]

Ok, I fundamentally don't understand something about how the ORotZ works.

 

Having finally gotten all the pieces to try my alternate version of this build, I can say for sure that:

1) Dust devils are your damage.  The thing you do with your swords?  It's cute, but does basically nothing.

2) The ORotZ either has an internal cooldown, or doesn't work the way it advertises - or I am wildly overestimating how often my WW actually attacks.  Because - like Warden suggested - it is impossible to keep Wrath up 100% of the time.  I also tend to have about 1/2 my cooldown left sometimes (although sometimes I think it may be less).

 

Density affects the number of attacks you can make, and interestingly it works worse on easier difficulties since your dust devils tend to kill things so quickly you can't actually hit them with your swords, and the dust devils don't seem to have any effect on the cooldown (for some reason that doesn't count as a "hit" with a resource-spending attack?).  I feel like I got much better uptime on solo creatures that I could just wail on repeatedly, like rift guardians, or extremely dense packs.  Normal-ish or less dense packs were very poor.

 

And this is with Boon of Bul-Kathos AND a flawless diamond in my helm, so the total cooldown is 79 seconds.  Since the toolbars give such an unhelpful "clock" display of cooldown remaining (instead of an actual number), you can imagine that half the clock is basically 40 seconds, and 1/4 of the clock is basically 20.  After 2 actual seconds of ~9 attacks per second, I should have 1/4th a clock - and I don't.  Coming at this from the other direction, if I have half a clock left after 20 seconds, that means in 20 seconds all I managed to do was tick off 20 more seconds of cooldown!  Now, I may not actually have 9 attacks per second, but I'm sure I have more than 1!

 

It makes me wonder if the ORotZ actually has an internal cooldown.  Although looking online, people are saying that it does not.  Ultimately, I'm really not sure what this means.  If you have at least 3 attacks per second, you should be resetting the cooldown on Wrath every time, just in time.  With 2 attacks per second, you should have 6.3 seconds of downtime every 20 seconds.  I feel like I still wasn't getting this close.

 

And again, this was all assuming that was the only cooldown.  If you were procing Ignore Pain every few seconds, it would take even longer.  I found myself trying not to use Threatening Shout just because I didn't want to make Wrath take longer.  Although watching Threatening Shout come off cooldown was much more like what I would expect - it rapidly jumped down and seemed to go away very quickly.

 

 

Oooooook.  After looking around online, there's this thing called "proc coefficients."  So WW only has a proc coefficient of (probably) 0.2.  So my 9 attacks per second are only triggering as often as ~1.8 attacks per second... which lines up better with my math above.  (However, even dust devils are supposed to proc as well, although maybe they still don't count as a "resource spending attack?"  Honestly I have no idea.)  Suffice to say:  your WW isn't procing the ORotZ every time.

 

All of this makes me feel like getting attack speed up further would help even more, although I'm not sure.  It could be worth adjusting paragon points at the very least to hit some breakpoints if you can find good info out there.

 

I also wonder if it might be worth trying Gogok instead of Pain Enhancer with this build.  Gogok is much better vs. single targets with attack speed, and it helps reduce cooldowns.  With a full 15 stacks, your Wrath would be only 67 seconds (with Boon of Bul-Kathos and a flawless diamond in the helm).  Pain enhancer is strictly better if there are at least 5 enemies around, but that's not always the case.  The extra damage is definitely nice (that website estimates Pain Enhancer does about 15 million dps given my weapons), but the WW increased DPS from the attack speed bump should more than make up for it (at least vs. single targets).  I may test this when I get a chance.

 

Sidebar:  Looking at that website more, it seems like it's impossible to get more than 12 attacks / second (without Pain Enhancer and being surrounded by enemies anyway).  This is if you gave yourself the full +AS% on every item possible, Gogok, Wrath is up, etc.  Although the site may not be taking the +30% from Bul-Kathos into consideration...  In any case, my point is that you would still need oodles of CDR in order to make that possible.  Also, once you get to very high levels of attack speed, the breakpoints are harder to hit.

[Guest Fallsmyer]

What ring do I use instead of unity if I am playing with 3 other people?

 

Not sure if you are still looking for this answer, but the answer is to get a Stone of Jordan with %Physical Skills on it. A perfect Stone of Jordan has %elemental damage, Critical Hit Damage, Elite Damage, and a socket.

[Guest diablo fan]

After playing with this build more, I have these observations:

- Goguk vs. Pain Enhancer is a tough call, but I like Goguk more.  The DPS loss is a little noticable, but the consistency of the +15% ASI is much more even.  Pain Enhancer can get rediculous in tight packs, but Goguk is much more reliable, especially against single targets - and thanks to WW's speed, even at low gem levels you can max your stacks pretty quickly, so the 4 second limit isn't too bad.  When it comes to Wrath, it is possible to get Wrath cooled-down by the time it expires with Pain Enhancer, but you're going to do it more often with Goguk.  This is all according to my very unscientific "just run each of them on the same Grift level a couple times and see how it works."

- The tricky thing to Wrath is that you will reduce your cooldown so much faster when Wrath is up.  So you want to keep it up not just for damage, but also to reduce your cooldown!

- Once you get to Grift 45+, survivability is the main issue.  Damage is fine, but you become more and more squishy, especially against the usual worst elements (fire, arcane).  I understand now why Unity is the only 2nd ring slot listed:  you pretty much are required to use it for high-level Grifts, even on top of the 50% from CotA or Ignore Pain and 40% from the set.  Ultimately this build still feels glassy at those higher levels.

- Related, this build is extremely fragile when you die.  It takes a few moments to build yourself back up, and if you die with Ignore Pain/CotA on a high cooldown and Wrath on a high cooldown, you can easily die again instantly.  Taeguk is also important to your survivabilty so you may need to go WW by yourself for a few seconds just to get your stacks back before even engaging anything.  This becomes both an upside and a downside to the CotA variant:  keeping 50% DR up 100% of the time is guaranteed while you're alive, but if you die with it on cooldown, that's a LONG wait before you can use it again.

- Threatening Shout feels like a weird choice for this build.  You don't actually want to use it much due to cooldown restraits (although it's not much) but it never really feels like it does all that much.  The DPS boost is nice, but not nearly as important as keeping Wrath up - so I find myself just ignoring it until the boss or a particularly bad pack.  Still, it would be easy enough to swap it for something, or possibly switch it back to giving you survivability instead (maybe Grim Harvest?), since that's what you need more than damage at higher levels.  Not sure how good it is at that, though; I doubt the arcane purple lines and explosions count as "enemies" for the DR.

- For the person who asked, I looked at Skull Grasp - and yeah, it's terrible.  The problem is that, at least according to that same website, it increases only WW damage, not dust devil damage (unlike WW% increase from gear, which does both).  And the actual WW strikes are a pitiful ~5-10% of your overall damage, so increasing that doesn't really help much.

 

If you want 100% uptime on Wrath, it seems like you're going to have to chase attack speed, or cooldown reduction, or maybe both.  Attack speed is nice because it boosts your DPS, but cooldown reduction sort of helps everything.

According to that site, if you get perfect or near-perfect attack speed rolls on every piece of equipment it's possible (including weapons), combined with Goguk and Wrath and dumping a few paragon points in attack speed, you can get an APS of at least 2.57 on your sheet for both weapons - this gives you 12 APS with WW and is a great breakpoint for both WW damage and dust devil damage.  If you have a diamond in your helm, Goguk, and CDR on your shoulder, that makes Wrath's CD about 63 seconds.  12 APS * .2+1 = 3.4, 63/3.4 = 18.5 seconds to reset Wrath.  So it should be much easier to maintain 100% uptime in that case.

Similarly, you could dump most of those rolls into CDR, and get that up to about 50%.  That would make Wrath reset in 45 seconds.  You could still very easily hit 2.20 APS (sheet) on your weapons, which is 10 APS.  10*.2+1=3, and 45/3= 15 seconds to reset Wrath.  This is a full 3.5 seconds faster, so keeping Wrath up would be even easier (especially with other cooldowns), but you lose a chunk of WW damage this way - for example, with my equipment it would be about 17% of my damage.  On the other hand, since you can probably keep Threatening Shout up more often, that would raise you back up - in my case to just 7% less.  Not to mention how much it would help the other cooldowns.

So it's possible to get there, but you'll either cut it really close (and probably not really get there with all your other cooldowns) or cut it less close and suffer some DPS.

[Guest diablo fan]

Sorry to spend walls of text just getting back to the beginning (I should have just made an account so I could edit my posts) but I now have a much better understanding of this build and why every piece was chosen and why unfortunately each piece is required.  I thought I was switching Ignore Pain for Ancients but really I was just switching for Unity, which basically does the same thing.  And while I thought I was doing good to increase the DPS of the build a little with my variant (by 6% - 20%, see below), it came at the cost of 15% DR (going from 85% to 70%) which is extremely important if you want to do higher level grifts.

I do still think that Weapons Master is pretty much required to maintain near-max fury on single targets, so I would suggest that as a top priority for a Hellfire - or maybe even switching out Rampage if you have to, since that does nothing for bosses anyway.  And the IK variant (belt + another IK piece using RotRG instead of Unity) is a fine variant to help people get up to speed with the build, especially while they're still searching for that nearly impossible-to-find belt.  And you can always swap out Unity for CotE to maintain enough toughness - at the cost of a huge chunk of DPS (around 25% lower).  But if you want the damage AND the toughness you need those 3 rings - which means you need that stupid belt.

For those who find the IK belt variant useful, I think the Strongarm Bracers are BIS since one of the Ancients is constantly spamming some sort of knockback move, and that procs fairly regularly.  (It's also very group-friendly.)  I didn't include those in any of my damage calcs above but it would definitely make a huge increase as well (bringing it closer to +20% DPS when it procs).  Also, for anyone who doesn't have a Furnace yet, the much-less-rare Scourge is the next best thing:  it gives a very solid DPS boost.  While a lot of people like Maximus (and it does have some advantages, like an extra body in the way), from what I can tell Scourge actually does a little more.  It's really nitpicking to choose between them, though - but either one will probably drop a dozen times before you can find the far superior Furnace.

Other variant ideas:  if your DPS is fine but you need more DR you can always try Wrath with Striding Giant instead of Insanity - giving up massive, massive damage for +50% DR.  Another trick is to run Ignore Pain with Ignorance is Bliss instead of Iron Hide - you'll lose 2 seconds on Ignore Pain, but the regen on Ignorance is pretty insane.  Not only are you spending constantly with WW, but you can also spam Battle Rage repeatedly to heal even more.

Another idea that is more cooldown friendly but less rage friendly is to use Sprint - Gangway along with the Strongarm Bracers instead of Threatening Shout - Falter.  It is nearly the exact same effect - enemies take up to 30% more damage for 5 seconds instead of 25% for 6 seconds - but you'll be losing fury instead of gaining it.

[Guest diablo fan]

Ok, looking around a bit more, I found this study of how the ORotZ works:  http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/17261347119#10

The key takeaway being that:  "As long as you are continuously attacking and hitting your target with WW/DD, Zodiac procs at your sheet APS."  (However I'm not sure if this is right - see below.)

So, re: stacking attack speed vs. cooldown, here's the full math on War Cry + Ignore Pain + Wrath:

Attack Speed
- 30% CDR, 2.57 breakpoints on AS
- 2.57 zodiac procs/sec, or ~0.8567 procs to each CD per second
- WC = 14 sec CD, 60 sec duration; Wrath = 63 sec CD, 20 sec duration; Ignore Pain = 21 sec, 13 sec duration
After 8 seconds, WC goes off CD; ~1.285 procs to each CD per second
Wrath now at 48.15 sec CD, IP at 6.15
After 3 more seconds (11 total), IP goes off CD - 100% uptime on IP
Wrath now at 41.3 sec; 2.57 full procs to this CD
After 2 more seconds (13), you hit IP again
Wrath now at 34.2 sec; back to 1.285 procs to each CD
After 7 more seconds (20), Wrath is only down to a 18.2 sec CD - Wrath drops
8 seconds later, Wrath is off cooldown (71% uptime)

Cooldown
- 50% CDR, 2.2 breakpoints on AS
- 2.2 zodiac prcs/sec, or ~0.733 procs to each CD per second
- WC = 10 sec CD; Wrath = 45 sec CD; Ignore Pain = 15 sec CD
After 6 seconds, WC goes off CD; ~1.1 procs to each CD per second
Wrath now at 34.7 sec CD, IP at 4.7
After 2.5 more seconds (8.5 total), IP goes off CD - 100% uptime on IP
Wrath at 29.5 sec; 2.2 procs on this CD
After 4.5 more seconds (13), you hit IP again
Wrath now at 14.4 sec; back to 1.1 procs to each CD
After 7 more seconds (20), Wrath CD drops - 100% uptime on Wrath!

So while 100% uptime is possible, it seems to require near perfect timing, (not to mention you can't actually get .8567 procs, so there will be some wobbliness) AND perfect equipment (if your IP is only going 11 seconds, you'll hit it more often and drain your Wrath more).  Still, it's closer than going full attack speed, and since Wrath increases your DPS so much, ~70% uptime vs. ~100% uptime with lower DPS still favors the cooldown method.

Looking around online, I can see that this original build is a variant/flavor of one of the popular Season 3 builds for barbs.  The main advantage 2.3 brings to the table is the ability to add Unity to the mix, which gives you even more survivability for the higher level grifts - plus the big DPS boost from Hexing Pants and Furnace.  All this to say that I am guessing that these calculations must still be wrong because people are talking about using Wrath, IP, AND CotA on cooldown and sustaining all 3 with the ring alone, and that's just not possible given my math above.  Moreover, they claim to do this with only about 50-ish CDR, which is what my 2nd formula uses.  You HAVE to be getting 3.75 procs/sec to clear three 45-second cooldowns (IP x 3 = one Wrath, so basically it's three 45 second CDs).  You need 3 procs/sec to clear three 40-second cooldowns (about 56% CDR).  And there's no way you're going to get 3 sheet APS with all that CDR, even with 400+ paragon.  (Ok, actually with a ton of perfect rolls it is possible - you could get about 60% CDR that would lower your necessary procs to something you could achieve with attack speed.)

 

The only thing I can confirm is that if you do go attack speed and don't use Ignore Pain, your formula would look like this:

After 6.5 seconds, WC goes off CD; 2.57 procs to Wrath
Wrath now at 48.15 sec CD
After 13.5 more seconds (20), Wrath is comes off cooldown

 

Giving you a near-exact 20 second window to erase the cooldown - and that is about what I have noticed, except that it can sometimes clear a good 1 or 2 seconds before Wrath's duration is over.  I don't know if this is just the fuzziness of the math, or if I am fundamentally missing something again.

[Guest diablo fan]

except that it can sometimes clear a good 1 or 2 seconds before Wrath's duration is over

I just realized this is because I'm not hitting WC as often as I hit Wrath.  Yeah.

 

So from all the sources I can find online, the most agreed-upon interpretation for how often WW procs Zodiac is your sheet APS.  So forget proc coefficients, dust devil procs, etc. - it's just about your sheet APS.  Which is sort of nice because it makes breakpoints a teeny bit less important.

 

And yeah, I think the way people are keeping all three cooldowns up is just with plain old amazing rolls.  With perfect rolls on all but 1 piece, you can get up to 61.16 CDR - which makes your CDs only 35 seconds, which means you only need 2.25 APS in order to sustain them all.  Also, my formula is a little bit off, because I forgot that while the CD for IP may be 1/3rd the length of Wrath, the uptime is not, so you'll actually do a little better than my formula because IP will pretty much always come off cooldown before you press it again, giving the other two CDs some extra time.

 

 

Another variant:  last season people were using Overpower - Killing Spree instead of Threatening Shout - Falter.  The DPS is technically a tiny bit lower, math-wise:  but Overpower has two perks.  First, its cooldown is slightly longer but it resets itself on "some" crits, so it should actually finish about the same or quicker, potentially.  Second, it gives YOU a boost instead of debuffing the enemy, so if the enemies die it doesn't affect your DPS.  Threatening Shout is absolutely better for groups, though, and technically better on guardians, so it's a tough call.

[Warden 8]

diablo fan, here's a tip to get that belt, in case you don't know it: use the Upgrade Rare item option in the Cube.  It uses only regular ingredients (spare parts, arcane dust, veiled crystal, deaths breath) and turns any rare yellow item into an orange or green of the same type.  Here's the thing, though.  If you use a generic rare, like a pair of gloves, you could convert a ton of them before you get what you want, because there are so many different legendary/set gloves.  But with class-specific items like mighty belts, there are not that many legendary/set versions, so you can often get what you want in just a few tries.  This is a great way to get the weapons for this build.  And the items CAN come out as ancient.

[Guest Harnold]

The build is okay'ish, but you can do better! Use Unity or Convention of Elements in Cube. Use Strongarm Bracers and Furious Charge with Merciless Assault (You can replace Threatening Shout with this). You will deal 130%~ more damage!