shoedrinker hit lv20! fucking not too hard really. a barbarian is built to take the damage while punching everything until it disappears into the crowd.
there’s a nice lv10 to lv20 breakdown picture above, click it to see all the dirty character details. i think it is interesting to see how a hardcore character in diablo 2 changes after ten levels of play. i’m playing a double fisting sword swinger, so all my skill points are going towards the hard hitting skills like bash, double swing, stun, concentrate. i mainly use double swing, and throw in some bashes, stuns and concentrates. lv17-20 i was just crushing shit with concentrate. i’m holding off on weapon specialization skills until i’m sure i know what type of weapons i want to use long term. i don’t care about the war cries at all, will this doom my barbarian?
i have a ring of +9% magic find, which really seemed to make a significant difference, i am surprised by this. i found 3 set items with the shoedrinker while flyingassbang found zero. could it be that each +9% magic find??? i can’t be too sure right now, more play time with the other characters will tell perhaps. the set items at this stage seem pretty fucking nice and that rune word’d sword fucks shit up bad. i’m not sure if having over 1000 attack rating is pretty normal for a lv20 barb, or if i’m ahead of the curve.
here is a video of ShoeDrinker killing boss monsters on his way from lv10-20.
shoedrinker’s resistances are HORRIBLE. lightening enchanted shit almost killed him 2-3 times, and we’re talking normal shit not even unique stuff.
next up is TugandRun the nerco! i have a bad feeling he’s dooooommmmmmeed.
Take my comments with a grain of salt, considering my obsession with D2 was specifically spent on Zy-El, I became bored with vanilla D2 pretty quickly, however I did play a barbarian in that game for an inappropriate number of hours.
I think early on the war cry skill I used was the one that stuns enemies. It helps when you get surrounded by enemies and also makes it much easier when you are up against annoying ranged enemies that run away constantly. This skill doesn’t seem to work on most unique/named enemies and bosses (maybe all of them).
The leap attack skill is helpful for escaping when you get surrounded and for jumping over rivers and stuff in the annoying third act. You don’t need many levels in this skill to use it in this manner.
The two weapon approach seems pretty cool early on, and gets kind of crazy with frenzy where you get faster and faster with each hit. Eventually I found the barbarian to become uncontrollable because the speed was too high.
I found that as I progressed with the barbarian I almost exclusively used the whirlwind attack skill for the attack method. Non-stop use of the whirlwind requires your barbarian to have a boatload of mana and mana regeneration though, so not sure if that is feasible if you aren’t playing Zy-El. I made this switch for two reasons, it allowed you to attack multiple opponents (no meaningful mass attack method is the downfall of the barbarian, this is as close as you can get) and it allowed you to easily move through rooms filled with enemies without having to kill them first.
The beserk skill or whatever it is called that converts your attack to magic damage but reduces your defense to 0 becomes invaluable as you progress as well since many of the creatures you fight in the higher difficulty levels are immune to physical damage.
One other item of note, with the whirlwind attack you only use your primary weapon and any shield or second hand weapon is ignored. So if you do decide to go for whirlwind (this is at very high levels) you will want to go with the two handed weapon type skill improvements.
Generally speaking, each class has item types that are just for that class, and you should try to focus skills towards using that type of item (if it is a weapon) because in the long run it will likely be the best option.