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I didn't think it was a terribly bad idea as it would get people out in other parts of the game to hunt for materials, and they were not too hard to come by. Oh well it will open up more room in my stash then.

Yesterday I was all up ons for legendary drops. 21 in total!

>You are in a room. You see SKELETON.
>What do you want to do?
>throw ROCK

Redwind went through some big changes after the expansion. As my dedicated magic finder she earned the most paragon levels prior to the update and now as her magic find job has been outsourced she has become quite bitter about her lot in life and has taken to throwing heavy objects. With devastating results.

Primary: Weapon Throw, Balanced Weapon
Secondary: Rend, Blood Lust

1 Furious Charge, Merciless Assault
2 Avalanche, Lahar
3 Ancient Spear, Boulder Toss
4 Threatening Shout, Grim Harvest

Passives: Superstition, Animosity, Unforgiving, No Escape

So what stayed the same is Rend, Furious Charge, Threatening Shout and the passive Superstition. Incidentally rend is what replaced Whirlwind a long time ago. Defensive passives have been replaced with fury builders and No escape has been added to give extra circumstance damage to the new build.
What has changed is Weapon Throw now a fury generator has replaced cleave as a primary, Avalanche replaced Wrath of the Berserker, and Ancient spear now sits in place of HotA as the primary damage dealer.

I had the luck of getting a pretty good 300th Spear early in the expansion. With a re roll of its damage mod it was boosted to better effect. Since the beginning of the new loot system it is not as advantageous to keep one character on dedicated magic find duty. This meant Redwind was due for a new build and this spear offered a chance to try something completely different. So let's talk about the damage dealer, Ancient Spear, Boulder Toss. You may recall the rune Corpse Bomb on weapon throw from pre-expansion. Well that basically got moved to the end of Ancient Spears list and the graphic effect is now a great big rock. The skill costs 25 fury to activate with no cooldown. It also burns all remaining fury and adds 20% damage per point of leftover fury used. So the way to get the most out of this skill is to add as much as you can to the maximum fury. The first two ways to go about that is through paragon points in the core section, and with the passive, Animosity, which adds 20 to the max total. In items barbarian weapons and belts can add to the total as well.

 Now that you have a big fury battery to power Ancient Spear you need to fill it up as fast as you can. Weapon Throw, Balanced Weapon boosts the fury generator to 8 per use. There are a couple of others one might consider but in this case I use weapon throw since it also gets a damage boost from the spear and from No Escape passive. Next to help get it powered up are the passives Animosity and Unforgiving. Animosity adds 10% to fury generated and Unforgiving replenishes fury and keeps it from bleeding away during idle time. Superstition also makes a good fury builder. When you really want the fury to build up fast is during a battle against elites and most elites use some form of non physical attack, like molten or plagued. So long as you can handle standing in the fire, superstition will keep you well charged.

Additional fury builders come from Furious Charge and Threatening Shout. Furious Charge works exceptionally well against large groups. If you can plow straight across a big pack then the Merciless Assault rune will knock enough time off the cooldown that it will be ready again immediately. Thus you can go back and forth repeatedly across the group building up fury in nice chunks. Now then Threatening Shout adds fury per use as well, but with Grim Harvest attached it often forces monsters to drop health globes. With the crafted bracers Reapers Wraps, those extra globes will also restore fury quickly in chunks.

Avalanche is an excellent skill to dish out extra damage in synergy with Ancient spear. Consider that avalanche does not require fury and its cooldown gets time taken off it for fury spent. With Lahar it goes down one second per every 15 fury. Now I run at about 174 Fury when its all filled up. That means that a fully charged throw will instantly knock off 11 seconds from avalanches downtime. Thats over 1/3 of the cooldown. With some cooldown time reduction from paragon points or on items and you can pretty much have whatever fashion of avalanche you like always ready to use when you need it.

Rend is a skill I keep on there mostly for a little extra damage and some reliable healing. It does use fury and thus will slow down the build up for the big skill's use but the cost is not too hard and as a damage over time skill it means I just need to tap it once in a good sized group and let it go. A possible replacement for rend would be Wrath of the Berserker, Insanity to add even more punch behind the boulder. However no matter what you do, even using Boon of Bul Kathos and some cooldown reduction gear there will be some downtime on this skill. Ultimately I don't get as many bigger hits out of it as I would really like. With some modifications it certainly will be worth it but at the moment I do not have the gear for it. Rend on the other hand with no cooldown is more available to keep some more damage going while you build up fury.

Now let's look at the damage. The two biggest damage dealing skills the barbarian has are Earthquake and Avalanche, capable of dishing out as much as 4500% and 4400% weapon damage respectively. Mind you these are DoT skills needing 8 and 5 seconds to complete this. This breaks up into 562.5% per second on earthquake, and 880% per second on avalanche. Most monsters are not going to sit in the area of effect for the full duration of these skills. Ancient Spear, Boulder Toss with a starting Max fury of 174, subtract 25 for skill activation,  149 fury brings an extra 2980% weapon damage in one shot with a 9 yard radius. Now the observed damage feedback Without using The 300th Spear, at a max fury of 186 and only running a paper DPS 163K with a 26% crit chance and 91% extra crit damage, this build can return critical damage averaging at about 5 million and peaking at around 9 million. With the spear equipped and taking a hit on the max fury to bring it down to 174, and squeaking the DPS up to 166K with the same critical modifiers it returns an average crit damage of 8 million with peaks up over 12 million.
So, massive damage returns with a low starting base. The down side to this build is that it is awkward to play as it is counter intuitive to the barbarian we know so well. However it has taken my poorly equipped magic finder and made her a good ass kicker with only a minimum of upgrades. As this char gets some better gear and improves the critical modifiers she will deliver even harder hits than now.

An item just dropped for me with a name that made me laugh out loud. Sent a pic of it to Throbble at work and her comment was, "comedy gold".

This is one pair of gloves that will never have a chance to blind on hit:





-420

These shall henceforth become a required part of the habit of the holy church.

Okay this is insane. New amulet pretty nice but this freaking bow man! Total game changer! Now my old favorite skill is the resource builder and that opened up a chance to add another skill to stack on more damage. To which I now use vengance. Had to change the placement of my skills to be a little easier to use. Still trying to get used to that. Between this bow and the amulet my dps jumped over 100k.

Suggest a caption for this picture.

"Well lass, how do I explain? It usually begins when a boy angel and a girl angel start to like each other a lot..."

Here's a new find. Pretty nice. Have not tried it out yet, gotta take some time and think about if I can like the skills it has.

Alrighty here's a few goodies. A new helm for my Barbarian, and some of the new crafted legendaries for my Demon Hunter.

Don't like the new level 61 Vengeance skill? I replaced Gloom on my primary DH with it. Dishes out a lot of damage, can't wait to see what the various runes do.

-420

I'll save my opinions of that for my second DH. So far it is not really doing anything I need. The chain web of hurt is more reliable for its versatility.

Profile: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Fogtreadder-1202/hero/6443656

Old build:
Primary: Entangling Shot / Chain Gang
Secondary: Elemental Arrow / Ball Lightning

Additonals:
Caltrops / Hooked Spines
Marked for Death / Grim Reaper
Vault / Tumble
Rain of Vengeance / Dark Cloud.

Passive Skills:
Vengeance
Cull the weak
Sharpshooter

After a while I changed Marked for death to Spike trap for some extra damage. It worked well for a while but the monsters seem to be more erratic in their movements now and don't step on the traps as much anymore so I began to play with some other options. I switched out the passives many times and found some things that worked but none that really made anything special out of the build.

Current build:

Primary: Evasive Fire / Hardened, replaces the back flip with a 3 second armor boost of 25%
Secondary: Elemental Arrow / Ball Lightning. Still love this one!

Additional skills:
Marked for Death / Contagion
Vault / Tumble
Sentry / Chain of Torment
Rain of Vengeance / Dark Cloud

Passives:Custom Engineering, Archery, Brooding, Awareness.

So what has happened is Fog has gone from a very mobile char to one that stands fast in the face of danger. Kind of funny since he's still not very tough but it is working. The crux of the changes came from spike trap not doing what I needed anymore. It ate up a lot of hatred and rarely got to fire off. Monsters now seem to be unwilling to walk across one even if I'm standing right over it. So i tried out different sentries for more reliable damage and got to like Chain of Torment. I swapped out caltrops to bring back Marked for Death, this time under the contagion rune. So the best way to use that is target the weakest enemy and start killing. Once it dies everything near begins to take extra damage. So put this and sentry together with custom engineering and they last long and I get 3 sentries on the screen. With the right placement it makes a cat's cradle zone of pain. The trick is that as the fourth point in my lovely parlor of death I have to hold still. That's where evasive fire and most importantly, brooding come into play. Evasive fire is a no brainer, its boosts your armor. Brooding can now stack 1.5% regen up to 3 times if you just stand still. Fog's base regen is 4.6K with brooding fully stacked it's 21.5K.

I am holding onto my elemental arrow and rain of vengeance skills because they still work just the way I liked them. Vault could be changed though. I thought of bringing back caltrops with either Bait the Trap or Jagged Spikes for more damage but sometimes I need to get the smeg out of the fire right away. Thinking of going to action shot or trail of cinders. The Awareness passive is interesting but it could be changed for something else especially if it makes for a good synergy.

Three Hounds showing off their new wings. Shiny. And also I found Glamdring the Foehammer today.

The new patch has gone live and I have already found 2 legendaries. Think ill leave the crossbow unidentified until i have the expansion installed so it can get credit for transmogrifiying.

Put together a new Fire and Forget gun on Loadout today. Here's what it looks like and what it does. Next step is to upgrade it to 6 rockets on a 3 shot trigger.

Act 4 finished.

Next section is up, voting on a power. Blizz has given the following five options from community suggestions:

 Legendary Power 1

You radiate an aura of Hatred. All monsters near you deal and receive additional damage.

 Legendary Power 2

Attacks have a chance on hit to cause your current target to be hated by all nearby enemies, taunting them to attack that target for the duration of the effect.

 Legendary Power 3

When you are near death, your hatred for your enemies grows, significantly reducing your resource costs and cooldowns.

 Legendary Power 4

Elemental attacks have a chance to trigger one of powerful abilities inspired by the Lord of Hatred himself: Charged Bolt, Poison Nova, and Freezing Skull. Lightning damage has a chance to trigger a Charged Bolt. Poison damage has a chance to trigger Poison Nova. Cold damage has a chance to trigger Freezing Skull.

 Legendary Power 5

Summons an Evil Force to fight alongside the player for a period of time. This force would take the form of a non-attackable melee pet, and it would be possible to potentially have more than one Evil Force active at once.

So far option 4 is winning.