>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.
