http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#aVQiPT!ZSV!bcbZcb This build utilizes Revenge in tandem with Overpower. Currently the Skill Calculator does not have Elective Mode, so I was unable to list Overpower and Revenge as the left and right click mouse buttons. But they are the primary attacks of this build. The elegance here is that Revenge has no cooldown (perhaps an inherent one; From Beta patch 10 was said to be 1.5 s) and is triggered by getting hit. Using the Tough as Nails passive, this makes it a perfect candidate for Thorns damage. Thorns has been tweaked since Diablo 2, to do a flat damage amount to any monster hitting you. Historically thorns only activated if you took damage, thus stacking Armor (mitigation) and Dexterity (block, dodge, avoid chance) made thorns never work. In Diablo 3, they seem to have done away with "chance to hit" and replaced it with Armor (mitigation), Dodge (mitigation) and Block (mitigation). So you may get hit by a mob, and mitigate all damage associated with their attack, but they would still take thorns damage. Getting back to Revenge, the goal of this build is to get hit. Standing in the middle of a large pack is where you will notice the biggest gains. When Revenge is used, enemies are hit in an AE, and since each mob can heal you, you have the potential to take a serious beat down. Even better, each enemy has a chance to be crit upon, and for each time you do crit, Overpower's cooldown becomes 1 second less. Using Crushing Advance, 30% of a monsters damage gets reflected back to them for six seconds. Thus, there is no need to stack dodge, block or armor for this build. Walk into the fray, and hit Overpower. Chances are some of the crits landed will lower the cooldown a bit. When you are hit by the first mob, he will take 30% reflected damage, plus all of your thorns damage, and has a chance to pop revenge (with Provocation, this is every 3-4 hits). With the ability to attack mobs whenever they charge you, Overpower with Revenge makes this build a fury-free combo that absolutely demolishes waves of monsters at once. Other supporting skills: Battle Rage with Ferocity - since Crit is fueling your Overpower this, is a no-brainer. Each crit increases the duration for this already long buff. Stacking with Ruthless, this gives an 8% chance to crit. When you're hitting waves of mobs at a time, you're bound to crit multiple times per use of Overpower/Revenge, making this buff up almost always. Earthquake with Mountain's Call - This and the Boon of Bul Kathos enable you to have a free Earthquake Cast every 75 seconds. This is perfect for long term boss fights, or if you're dealing with an exceeding number of enemies, you can cast this once your first Overpower/Revenge combo hits. With Earthquake, active you're bound to see crits everywhere, lengthing Battle Range and increasing the times you can use Overpower. Here's where we can see some variation. Currently there isn't a need for a fury generator, except for when you need to use Battle Rage. There are going to be times when Overpower/Revenge isn't worth using (single target monsters, bosses, etc) so a cheap Fury generator is helpful. I chose Bash with Punish for an all-purpose skill, but i'm not convinced it's the best skill. Also as a bonus buff, Wrath of the Berserker is available. This is mainly to stack with Battle Rage and Ruthless to give a whopping 18% chance to crit without factoring in gear. Since Boon of Bul Kathos lowers the cooldown to 90 seconds it makes sense to throw in Thrive on Chaos to increase the duration of Wrath of the Berserker as long as possible. This is potentially an unnecessary buff, and could be replaced with something more utility-based or offensive. Keep in mind, the main goal is to not stack armor, dodge, block, attack speed or movement speed, you want to be hit a lot taking advantage of Overpower/Revenge. Definitely need to work out the kinks, and find the perfect skills for the support slots, but the basis is pretty solid.
After toying with this build idea and some of its finer points, I realized that Bash as a Fury generator is unnecessary; Since Fury builds when you are struck, and the primary purpose of this build is to get hit, you'll be constantly generating Fury, and rarely spending it (just to refresh Battle Rage). This allows some flexibility with the last 2 skill slots. Currently, I'm toying with the idea of Ignore Pain and Contempt for Weakness. Using that mid-battle to give you time to use a potion and reflect a ton of damage back, seems like a nice way to prolong the Overpower/Revenge chain. And as a flavor item, I'm considering using Weapon Throw with Dread Bomb, to throw the bodies of your victims back at them for the ultimate demoralizer. The biggest flaw for this build is not having a strong a boss/single-target skill. Taking a beating is great, but focusing damage is very difficult to accomplish. I'm also considering changing up a passive (Boon of Bul Kathos/Earthquake) to add in some more damage and boss killing ability. The main build (Overpower/Revenge/Battle Rage) stays intact, and many variations can off-shoot from it. Feel free to add to the discussion.
I've experimented with this build through Normal and Nightmare and found two main variations that I enjoy immensely, although have not tested at the high end. The standard Vengeance build uses Battle Rage, Overpower and Revenge to generate chains of criticals and lots of AE damage. However, the tricky part can be what to do when waiting on timers, or if there's only a single target. Here are two build variations that support these skills. Destroyer http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#bXiTQV!ZYg!aYZaZZ This variation is primarily used to wade in to swathes of mobs and take them out by the handful. Critical hit chance is the most important part of this build as it fuels Overpower, becoming more than just a once every 10 seconds ability. Notably, it can not be used as a primary ability at all as a limitation of the ability type. Therefore Cleave is used to supplement basic attack needs so that you're not waiting for timers on other skills. In doing so, you can generate a lot of critical hit damage with few swings, making this ideal for a 2hander. Since you won't be limited by attack speed using Revenge and Overpower, your hits become bigger, and with the Brawler passive your damage is going to be huge against monster packs. Adding Leap to the mix for mobility and some debuffing, you are able to control the size of the pack whenever you Leap into or out of a group of monsters. Lastly, Earthquake is one of the most damaging spells at the Barbarians disposal, thus making it integral on Boss fights. Taking advantage of Giant's Stride maintains some damage over time while running to avoid whatever monster abilities might force you to move away from them. Reflector http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#XViQgk!XbV!acZbYa This has been one of my favorite ideas since Beta, the idea of damage reflect. Thorns in Diablo 2 was an under-used and under appreciated, mainly due to an unscaling mechanic. Thorns in Diablo 3 however, has taken a step in a positive direction. For Dodge, hits do not land and cause damage from thorns. But if the hit does land, regardless of the mitigation, the thorns damage hits for the full amount (in Diablo 2, only the mitigated amount was reflected). This opens the door for a world of possibilities, and provides a nice scaling feature to Thorns damage. The biggest thing for this build is to stack Vitality primarily and Strength secondly. With Nerves of Steel each point of Vitality acts as a point of Strength in regards to Armor. This small benefit makes this build one of the stoutest and potentially longest lasting in the game. Adding in Tough as Nails, gives a 25% armor boost while adding 50% more thorns damage. Most items you'll want to keep an eye out for will have the attribute "Melee attackers take x-y damage per hit" such as Blind Faith. Stacking these types of items will increase the thorns damage output, and with Tough as Nails, every 1 damage acts as 1.5 damage. Another interesting aspect of this build is that it is suited for for duel wielding, not because of the need for weapon procs, but because of the unique ability found on socketed weapons. When using a Topaz, your weapon becomes a vessel for thorns damage. The effective outcome might be unsettling for some, as you're basically standing there in the middle of a large group of monsters as they wail on you. But the net effect is that your damage increases as the number of mobs grows. With Revenge proc'ing every in 1/4 hits, you'll be healing whatever damage you don't mitigate regularly. And each time Overpower is used, you'll be reflecting even more damage back through Crushing Advance. The last skills are for the most part self explanatory. Leap is used to add an armor buff and give you mobility if necessary to escape tricky situations. Threatening Shout debuffs all enemies near you so that their damage done is less, which makes it easier to stand and tank more mobs. And with War Cry you'll be buffing Armor even further taking advantage of every bit of damage mitigation as possible. Using Inspiring Presence adds regen per tick based on 1% of your health, further fueling the need for Vitality. This could have some playstyle variation as well, by using Revenge as your Left Mouse button and Overpower as your Right mouse button, you could potentially use Ignore Pain, to give you that extra bit of damage reduction, but I believe Leap in this case would give you both mobility and defense, and can be a more useful utility. Also, since you won't be spending fury swapping out Inspiring Precense for Brawler or Berserker Rage is viable. I would love to hear people's experiences with this, as thorns gear becomes more available. Edit: After doing some testing with Dodge and Block, Dodge does not trigger thorns damage where Block does, and mitigates some of the damage done by the attack on top of armor mitigation. Thorns acts as its own separate damage and isn't affected by criticals, or other damage increases (that I know of). Damage Reflect (e.g. from Crushing Advance) does in fact get affected by Mitigation (e.g. mob hits you for 100, you reflect 50% so you reflect 50 damage. With mitigation you might take 60 damage, thus reflecting 30 damage back).
After beating Nightmare Diablo focusing on the Reflector (defensive) side of this build, I went back to early Nightmare to see what I could put up in terms of damage numbers, and fell into a slight tweak of the Destroyer variation. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#bXiPQV!ZYc!aYaZZZ By utilizing Ruthless and Weapon Master passives, combined with Battle Rage and Wrath of the Berserker as well as Revenge: Best Served Cold and Overpower: Killing Spree, I was able to maintain over 50% crit chance, and made Overpower pop every few seconds. It was pretty stellar to see in action, when I could walk into a pack of mobs in Act 2 and one shot them, with 20k crits as if I was a Wizard. It made my low level DH friend ooh and ahh. I was able to knock out the Short Reign achievement as well as Why'd It Have To Be Snakes and Good Eye. It was pretty awesome to watch a Barbarian (supposedly unable to do awesome damage in higher difficulties) to unleash that kind of Fury. Truth be told, I love the 2h Vengeance build (Overpower + Revenge). But I would love to see a Destroyer duel wielding in Inferno. The AEs will do most of the damage, and using Frenzy as the main skill, duel wielding would just be used to trigger Overpower faster. I'm not sure how fast Overpower can be triggered, but I'm keeping my eye on it.
After spending some time Soloing Act 1 Inferno as an undergeared Barbarian, I've learned quite a a bit about how they are approaching Difficulty Scaling in Diablo 3's endgame. While I have tried more combinations than I can remember, I have almost always settled on using a specific staple group of skills, primarily Revenge and Overpower. I've constantly tried to build my main attack to support these two skills, however, Revenge lends itself to big slow weapons with high damage and Overpower favors the fast attack, high crit chance playstyle. I thought it may be too difficult to combine these two into a playstyle that works, until recently when I combined all of the ideas into a fun, fast-hitting build, that I've dubbed The Avenger. In some ways this is a one-off of the double tornado build, but it sticks to it's roots as the Vengeance build, and employs the same things that you would expect to see from Vengeance. Namely, Overpower Revenge and Battle Rage. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#.UkTiQ!VYZ!.ZbaYb (Secret Weapon - the primary mouse click is Revenge - Best Served Cold. The key to this build is the use of Sprint - Run Like The Wind. Each sprint buff lasts 4 seconds, and has the potential to drop a max of 4 Tornadoes. (EDIT: Apparently this is based on run speed, so with 25% bonus and WoTB Active, you can get up to 5) Tornado happens to hit extremely fast, procing Life on Hit far faster than any Frenzy build. But in order to keep spamming sprint every 4 seconds, you need a good fury generator. Battle Rage - Into the Fray while active can sustain long chains of sprint, and allow you to refresh it without seeing your Fury bubble drop below max (so long as you are hitting things with the tornadoes, and criting often). The synergy between Battle Rage and the Ruthless and Weapons Master passive is extremely effective. These buffs alone provide 18% to crit passively (when using a mace or an axe). With moderate crit gear you can get this number over 30% relatively easily. In this build damage doesn't really matter. Instead you want to hit as many times as possible and provide yourself the ability to continue criting via tornadoes. One of the more effective tools I implemented was to map the Move key to something other than the left mouse button. While you can't change that the left mouse button fires, you can move use the Move button to constantly move your avatar, and allow you the maximum chance to spawn a tornado while running. With the left mouse free, you're able to point and click where you want to use Revenge. You can simply run into the middle of the fray and use Overpower and Revenge simultaneously creating massive pockets of damage, and use Sprint to run away and spawn tornados useful for decreasing the cooldown of Overpower. The results are staggering. With Tough as Nails, You gain a passive increase to your armor, that helps alleviate some of the high Strength diminishing returns on mitigation that most barbarians feel. On top of that, the boost to Thorns is significant as well. A shield with thorns damage and crit chance becomes your best friend, and a modest 5000 damage per hit you take is nothing to laugh at. Needles to say this build is primarily a kite build, but for times when you can stand in a weak group of enemies, nothing stops you from standing there, and nailing Overpower and Revenge for maximum effect. This has stood thru Act 1 Inferno and I plan to use it through most Inferno. This had no problem soloing Hell Diablo (not a single Health Shrine was used) and really should be counted as one of the more survivable ways to progress as a barbarian.
