Firewall, firewall, firewall. Foothills, foothills, foothills. Bleargh!

A friend of mine made a very astute observation on trying BattleNet D2X for the first time:
"Oh, I see, the only thing that can really kill you is boredom."

I think that the barbarian is the least boring class in the game

So how do you get the most out of it?

Here's one idea

The Safety Barb: Strategy
The thinking behind this build is that you dedicate your gear to keeping yourself alive and dedicate your skills to killing things fast.

You use crafted safety gear to give yourself virtual immunity to being hurt (although a little life leech doesn't hurt)

The recipes require common magic items, any jewel, common runes and perfect emeralds. In practice the limiting factor is the emeralds

With average rolls and 8 slots used you'll have damage reduction of 48 and magic damage reduced by 28. You may find better gear like an amulet/circlet of life everlasting (damage reduced by 15-25) or various uniques that offer MDR of 15. And you have 2 slots left for something more exciting (like a BIG weapon)

You can improve this by recrafting items which got low random rolls.

You will find some of the rare runes that you need to craft elite safety items but you will be lucky to find the items you need to craft with except by trade until late in the game. Tough decision here, do you get gouged by a higher level player for some blue item which later on you'll just be leaving on the ground or do you hold off? Dunno, you decide

You will be pretty safe up to Act 1 of Hell from physical attacks from regular monsters. Most things in late Hell Act 1 hit for about 40-80/early Hell Act 2 so this is where you'll start to need better stuff

Coronas turn up in the gambling screen at about level 75 so gamble one till you get a blue and craft it with an AMN. Alternatively just revisit the shop until one shows up for sale. I used Act 4 as there are two shopkeepers very near where you start and got a mystical sword and a corona in a little over an half an hour (bit tedious though) with a 76th character. The sword cost 25K and the corona 130K

In fact they're probably around before but your chances are too slim to make it worth bothering with

Magic damage reduced by takes the amount of damage (say 100), multiplies it by the difference between your resist % and 100% (say 50%, giving us 50 incoming), then subtracts MDR (-28 above, so the attack would do 22).

Against attacks like firewall that do damage per second multiply the MDR by 25 (because it's applied each frame, there are 25 frames per second). So our MDR -28, with 75% resist blocks 2800 firewall damage.

You may see people posting about the weakness of higher levels of the Natural Resistance skill because of "diminishing returns". This is faulty thinking and faulty maths.

At skill level 5 (assuming for the time being no other mods), our barb with MDR 28 takes
100 times (100-40) - 28 = 32 damage

At skill level 10 (assuming for the time being no other mods), our barb with MDR 28 takes
100 times (100-54) - 28 = 18 damage

At skill level 15 (assuming for the time being no other mods), our barb with MDR 28 takes
100 times (100-62) - 28 = 10 damage

At skill level 20 (assuming for the time being no other mods), our barb with MDR 28 takes
100 times (100-67) - 28 = 5 damage

So the jump from skill level 15 to 20 is actually a bigger % improvement than the jump from 5 to 10

For those not interested in the maths the message is : get good resists if you want MDR to work

And a general point on the safety build: half doing it (eg 4 safety items) doesn't really work.

So now we know how the character works we can think about building it

Skill allocation
Masteries:
Weapon mastery - whatever you want to use except thrown, max it. (Just one!)

Increased stamina, speed - stamina is redundant, you'll never run out later in the game. I'm a big fan of walk/run speed because I think that a lot of play time is spent looking at your character moving instead of looking at your character killing things. Your choice, no more than a point of each

Ironskin - 1 point, prereq. This is not an important skill for this build

Natural resistance - 3 points asap, more as you near Hell difficulty, eventually max unless your equipment gives you max resists in Hell.

Combat skills:
Decide first how you want to kill things. Leap attack and Whirlwind is the classic D2 Barbarian set-up, Berserk is highly regarded now that DX2 Hell monsters have 50% physical resist and particularly for physical immune and stoneskin monsters. Frenzy is very effective, especially if you have good reflexes and like excitement. Stun can be useful against bosses.

The other skills do not have the same impact. Concentrate is for more defensive builds. We've gone for defence with our gear. What we want from our skills is killing speed.

You need Leap, probably Leap Attack, regardless of fighting for the mobility

You need a workhorse skill that will kill crowds. They are not dangerous to you so you simply need to drop them as fast as possible. Frenzy or whirlwind or both. In my experience whirlwind isn't very good until you've got about 5 skill points so don't be disappointed when you first try it

Bash, Leap, and Double swing are all pretty useful as you build the character.

Double throw, as it says in the description, is only useful for showing off.

Stun
I'm not a big fan of Stun but a fellow called Nobbie posted on the Lurker Lounge that he uses Frenzy, Berserk and Stun together which seems very strong. Lot of key-tapping, concentration and careful timing. Respect to Nobbie and anyone else who can use this well.

Leap attack
Leap attack is too slow to use as a main attack. It's great for getting into or out of a fight but if you fought, say, Diablo, with this skill it would be very tedious. You would have to click on him, click off and move away, click on him again, etc. I recommend 1 point here as a supporting skill but I do use it quite often

Both this and leap can be useful for comic effect.

Be aware that leap attack moves much slower than a charged up high level Frenzy and so it is not always the best way to approach

Frenzy.

Frenzy!

FRENZY!!!!!!!

What can I say. You either love it or hate it. The skill combines attack speed (which everyone loves) more damage, more AR and improved walk/run speed (which it seems only I love). If you pump this skill you are committing yourself to either fighting two-weaponed or leaving the skill behind (in effect wasted skill points). My personal style is to fight with two weapons but to switch to secondary weapon + 3 diamond tower if I need high resists against a tough boss.

You move so fast with this skill that if you're killing with one or two hits you need good reflexes to snaffle the next monster because if you move the mouse halfway across the screen click, hold for a moment then realise you missed the monster, you'll have flown through another screen's worth of monsters waking them up. But that's just more things to kill

Very fun, very chaotic

.......frenzy!

Berserk
You need to kill physical immunes/stoneskins which means either berserk or supplementing another attack with high damage elemental charms. Don't dismiss the second possibility, it's certainly viable. With both the werewolf character and the safety barb using frenzy I sometimes haven't even noticed a critter's PI until it's already dead and I'm just starting to think "this is taking a while".

Having said that berserk is not a bad skill - it hits very hard indeed. It's supposed to do magical damage and physical damage but it just does magical damage (with version 1.08) so it doesn't leech at all but you really hurt physically immune critters. Remember too that all monsters in Hell (& Nightmare too?) have at least 50% physical resist and besides +400% or so damage is very cool.

Whirlwind
This skill alone was enough to propel legions of barbs to the top of the ladder last year.

It's been slightly nerfed but it remains astonishingly good.

As I said above put 5 skill points into it asap if you decide to use it.

There is a certain knack to using this skill. First find a group of monsters. Click and hold behind them and you'll whirl through them. If most survive click and hold at your starting position. You'll whirl back through them. This is the basic technique

Find another group. Click past them again this time holding and dragging towards the bottom of screen. You'll whirl in a "C" shape, an arc. Again whirl back to where you started, trying to follow the same path.

Now try a long whirl by clicking past another group of monsters and pushing ahead in the direction you are whirling

Try to whirl through them and back on the same whirl using just the direction change to hit them twice. (Very mana-saving, this one).

Try to find a fairly tough group and whirl backwards and forwards through them several times until dead. You'll need more than one. Get a feel for when it runs out and how to best keep it effective.

One significant effect on a whirlwind is if you start are whirl then get frozen or slowed. Whatever's in the path of the whirl is so dead! This is because you attack at the same rate but move through them much more slowly (so getting a lot more attacks off). It's brutal.

Try it on stairs, in tunnels, round corners.

Whirlwind damage depends on weapon damage and then is boosted by weapon reach, +50% if using two weapons, bonus for attack speed effects like Frenzy (although there is no on-screen indication of this), plus the usual charms and other items that boost damage. It ignores weapon speed so it works very well with big, slow, long reach, high damage weapons such as lances.

Charge-up skills
Frenzy, Berserk are charge-up skills. This means that once activated you can switch between them or to other skills and still get most of the bonuses.

Frenzy lasts 6 seconds, Berserk starts at 2.7 seconds and goes down to 1.3 at 20th level.

In practice it's difficult and demanding to constantly hot-key between skills. The build also means you don't have to. I just frenzy all the normal critters because they can't hit me much anyway and it covers ground fast, then I hotkey between frenzy and berserk for a tough boss.

You can raise your damage output by hotkeying more skills in but if you need to take a break after an hour because it's too intense then it's been counter-productive

Be careful not to get it wrong. It would be a shame if you were letting berserk run out to hit em with stun

Warcries
I'll go out on a limb here - I'm not a big fan of war cries.

Consider this play style. I spot a group of monsters. I'm still frenzied from the last lot so I charge from monster to monster hitting them lots, they all die, I flash the ALT key, pick up anything interesting and charge off to the next group before my frenzy subsides.

Or.....

I spot the monsters. They spot me. I cast Battle Commands, Battle Orders and Shout and they're on me, hitting me. I frenzy through them, drink a mana potion cast find potion a few times to get replacements then I'm off looking for the next lot

War cries is a safer style of play. But you get safety from items so you don't need sophisticated tactics.

I don't think it's true that other people will like you more if you cast spells to help them. You're a barb. Other people want to see you up front fighting the monsters.

Battle orders is particularly disconcerting for others as it drops apparent life and mana by a third. They're not expecting it, they have to stop and look for something that just hit them. Hard.

It won't make you friends

My main gripe with war cries though is the short duration. Werewolf was tedious enough, having to recast it every 3 or 4 minutes - powerups that last a few seconds I'm not interested in.

Recommended: One point in a cry if it intrigues you

Anyway going through them:

Howl
The monsters leave. That's exp getting away from you. NOOOOO!!

Seriously, you don't really need a crowd control skill. Maybe 1 point in Grim Ward. Otherwise just leap out and run away.

Howl needs the monsters to be your character level or lower. In practice you will spend most of your career fighting monsters above your level (which is the only time you would get into enough trouble to need Howl anyway)

Find potion
Now this is useful. After a big fight drink a mana potion and spam this. You'll get one or two full rejuvs (from Act 3 normal onwards), 3 or 4 mana potions and all the healing potions you can carry.

Much quicker than going back to town and invaluable if your leech % doesn't fully replace your mana or to help berserk

Also good if you want to stockpile potions for a big fight. Brista had 16 full rejuvs in his belt and another 12 on the floor when he soloed the Ancients in Nightmare

One very-well spent point but no more

Shout
DR is irrelevant to this build

Taunt
It's probably quicker to chase things down as to cast this, especially if you use frenzy.

That damage reduction % is interesting except the cry doesn't work on bosses which are the only things that can significantly hurt us

Find item
This is now vaguely fashionable as Magic Find% boosts it. At first, at around 30th level, I found a cracked voulge, a stamina potion and a small handful of gold. Also at skill level 1 + 2 it hardly ever worked. You can only cast it a few times before running out of mana.

At higher level (around 60th) I was now doing enough damage that I could frenzy some beasties and fill my mana bowl cast a few find items and then find something else to kill. The items improved slighty - I found a white poleaxe

Then I tried seeing if I could turn up some arrows or bolts to shoot some of those frenzied suicide bombers as there was a concentrated pack of them. Bang! three rares. No bolts though.

So finally, in the mid 60s my mana pool and the quality of items appearing make it worth using for me.

Extra skill points only increase your % find so be sure it's turning up good stuff and you know you definitely want to use it a lot before investing more than a point here

Battlecry
Now here we go, damage reduction % that works on bosses. Definitely an interesting and potentially useful skill

I wonder what the maths is: damage received = incoming damage x (100 - damage reduction %) - damage reduction number, perhaps?

If so, using the example figures I started the guide with (ie cheap safety equipment) a hit for 80, normally reduced to 32, would be reduced to 12 by a 1 point battlecry!

Definitely interesting

Pitiful duration.

Also requires two not very useful prerequisites

Small radius too but that's OK we're looking at it as a boss handling spell

I've some skills with Brista to develop yet (nat res & Berserk) but then I'll either develop this (if I'm feeling public-spirited and want to make a worthwhile contribution to the community) or Find Item (if I'm unable to control my urge to spam out more loot)

I wouldn't raise your hopes too high

Grim ward

Possible 1 point here for crowd control. Nice that it doesn't work on bosses. Sometimes in Hell, you get a chaotic battle with 3 or 4 boss packs and you can't even see the bosses, much less tell if they have got abilities that can cause you grief. It means that you can kill one, grim ward, then kill a boss with an annoying special (eg aura enchanted or mana burn) without the minions around

Or just fight more tactically, use leap attack to get in and out try to lure some away from the big group.

Useful for comedy in conjunction with pressing ! before your chat message. Especially if the really annoying party member is off-screen for the moment

"!Look it's Blaze's Dad", etc

Alternatively use it to drive monsters out of sorcs' firewalls

Battle orders, War cry, Battle command
I'd rather be killing than casting

Skill development
Don't develop skills that will become obsolete.

Don't be misled by people talking about "everyone has + skills". You won't - you're going for different items instead. (At 67th level Brista has +0, +1 from the secondary slot and +2 or 3 to masteries. I own stacks of + skills items, I just don't use them for Brista)

Get prerequisites quickly and try them out. For instance Leap is a prerequisite to Leap Attack. Don't wait till 17th level to get Leap, get it around 7th and see if you like it. Some people think a lot of its Knockback effect.

Crucial skills are the attack mode(s) you usually use, weapon mastery and natural resistance. Each of these needs to get to 3-5 asap. Then max weapon mastery. Late Nightmare is a good time to develop Natural Resistance to cope with Hell

Try out any skill if you think it will make the character more interesting to play. Your enjoyment is everything. If it improves the build let me know.

Stats

Strength: Enough to carry your weapons and armour. You may want to build this up if you're comfortable that nothing left in the game offers much of a threat (maybe after level 85)

Dexterity: Enough to carry your weapons and armour

Vitality: Everything left

Energy: None. Restore mana by mana leech (5% should be enough) or damage to mana. Find potion will also create plenty of mana potions.

Equipment

The most important choice is what weapon you will use:

I was very intrigued with the stats for the phase blade (elite crystal sword) on the Arreat Summit, and besides the original Brista that I played last year used swords so I chose swords

Poleaxe and Spear are good for Whirlwind and rule out Frenzy. So you should probably make your choice based on which skill you want to go for.

Two handed weapons have the disadvantage that you will only be equipping in 9 slots instead of ten. Effectively you lose an item's worth of mods.

Consider weapon speed, base damage and durability.

Number of sockets is not really relevant for this build.

Try not to base your decision on super-rare items. If you build a character to wield Messerschmidt's Reaver it's very unlikely you will ever see one

Besides if you have an 85th level sword barb and find the Reaver you could build up another high level character very fast by passing on his equipment

Equipment management

If you are likely to try out other characters then hang on to stuff that they might use. One of my proudest possessions is a socketed cap that now adds 9-24 poison damage from a jewel I put in. It's usable by a 2nd level character. That sort of damage dealing at such a low level is awesome.

On the other hand an item with a few useful mods not usable until character level 50 is not going to get used

Keep your number of mules down. (Mules are dummy or retired characters whose only role is to store gear). More than two accounts is probably unmanageable

Trading
Be realistic about trading. Most people are only interested in trading top of the range items. In fact if your item is not worth a Stone of Jordan then don't bother keeping it for trade

(Quite surprising things ARE worth that much or more: small charms of 4% or more MF and jewels with 15% IAS plus something else as well as most uncommon or rare runes. Elite weapons with the cruel modifier as well as powerful exceptional or elite set items or uniques)

Most people want to trade items in the same categories. How many perfect emeralds is a +1 skills ammy worth? Most people don't want to have to think about this and are nervous of getting ripped off

You can try trading dissimilar stuff but most people will only agree to trades that are obviously very much in their favour

If the other person doesn't bite on your two best items then it's not worth working down your less powerful items in the hope that they'll suddenly see something they want. Just note their account name and get back to them when you have something they might trade

People generally don't trade down in quality. They might if they see something that benefits their character but even this doesn't happen very often. (For example an Amazon was trying to trade for my Buriza-Do, the third best bow in the game. She offered me good blue items. No chance. I want one of the Bul-Kathos Swords for it or enough SoJs to get a Sword because it's probably my only realistic chance of getting that item)

Read the item if you don't know what it does. People lie.

There's not a lot of scamming here (there's not that much that's possible to do) but the commonest seems to be "give me your SoJ, I'll dupe loads of them for us both to have"

So this is an offer to give one of your most prized items away to another person with no security when they've already tacitly admitted that they're dishonest.

Think this through. Slowly

Items and single player mode

It's harder to build item-dependent characters in a single player game but this is one of the few viable builds because the items are cheap and relatively easy to come by. You may want to consider crafting other items if you find quality gems - the hit power belt goes very well with this build as will any blood items. Just remember that the build needs emeralds - it's better to hang on to chipped emeralds than jewels and magic gauntlets. Keep hold of everything green and sparkly and you can do it.

Equipment: Levels 1-10

Anything that ups damage is good and probably more useful than anything else. The most powerful early game weapon is a two socket weapon with chipped gems. If you find a jewel that adds damage add it to armour or shield rather than a weapon (especially if you dual wield).

Poison damage is especially potent at this level but don't waste your chipped emeralds

Charms are useful, ID them as soon as they drop and even if you dont think you'll need it now leave it in the box for later

Upgrade armour etc as you find better stuff. Keep improving DR until you can swap it out for safety gear

Save all runes, jewels, emeralds for crafting - you don't need to save the items as you can buy them in the shops later

Levels 11-20

Weapon power is where it's at. You want the best weapon possible. Check the shops and if there's a chance of a relatively easy trade (ie with someone you're partied with) take it. You don't need to waste time on the trading channel yet. If you do trade try getting emeralds while you're doing it.

Andariel may be quite tough, especially if you do it solo. She does mostly poison damage.

You'll get your Horadric Cube and you can start improving gems (3 gems of the same type and grade turns to one the next grade up).

You may be able to craft your first safety item if you're lucky with gems or if you've traded well. Do it although don't expect too much from damage reduction at first. Look at your gear and decide what's weak and replace that with your first safety item. Don't make the belt - you have to work with a sash which lacks potion storage capacity, a very serious weakness

Don't worry if you can't do this yet

If you solo Duriel you may want to take adavantage of the various recipes for upgrading potions. If you can go in with a belt full of purples it'll be a pretty easy fight.

Levels 21-30

Game is starting to get hard and you don't have your best skills yet.

Try to make at least one safety item. This may mean trading for emeralds. It won't make a huge difference yet, but don't expect to much of this strategy until it is quite developed. Hang in there

Act 4 Quest 2 gives an important supply of gems and a rune. Do this quest alone, the drop is not better if 8 of you do it and you'll certainly get less gems. Alternatively if partying with friends party until you've killed H and have got the hammer. Unparty. One of you hit the Hellforge. Divide gems, start a new game, party up to H and then unparty for someone else to complete the quest.

Act 5 Quest 2 gives you 3 useful runes. Ral makes a safety ring and Ort a safety weapon. If you can get your hands on a decent exceptional magic weapon (an ancient sword is probably the best of the exceptional swords), don't be afraid to craft a safety version of it. That weapon will see you a long way through the game. (Brista uses a normal crafted safety ancient sword at level 67 - and he's twinked!).

Levels 30-40

Better equipment starts to drop and high quality gems that allow you to craft more items. Try to get up to at least 4 safety items. You will start to really notice the difference.

You'll enter Nightmare difficulty and resists will become a concern. Use a decent sword with a 3-perfect-diamond shield in your secondary slot and switch between frenzy for clearing large numbers of weak creatures and berserk and frenzy for dealing with tough sloggers and berserk and shield for tough creatures doing elemental damage.

Level 40-50
You can now actually afford to plan what gear you intend to get hold of, particularly if you are an active trader. Much trading is based on the Stone of Jordan economy and it's unlikely you'll be able to trade at that level

I decided that the best exceptional one-handed sword for Brista was the ancient sword. It doesn't quite top the damage chart but it's close and it's fast for a barbarian. Use the Arreat Summit site to decide.

Still most people prefer straight up damage dealing weapons - it's up to you

The rest of your gear should be entirely safety although you may want to slip in some mana recovery. Mana leech is better than %damage to mana in easy areas, other way round in tough areas.

Level 50-60
Lower end elites will start to drop so be on the look-out for craftable stuff (like the spiderweb sash or weapons). Build up your stock of medium level runes because once you get into late Hell elite items will become more common than unusual runes

Level 60-70
For elite swords I personally am after phase blades because they're naturally indestructible (which saves you time and hassle grubbing after repairs money) and they're super-fast which will get a lot more out of my charms, item bonuses to damage. It's a matter of taste, many people prefer heavy damage to weapon speed, especially with whirlwind. You should now be upgrading as much of your gear as possible to elite safety.

Level 70+
You'll clock the game so you are now either doing exp runs with incidental item find or item runs with incidental exp.

You will be getting exceptionally good stuff, a lot of which is not useful to your class and build. Offer these for SoJs. Rare runes in particular are worth a lot of SoJs.

Decide what items you want most and look out for people offering them on the channels. As a guide I saw VampireGaze offered for 9 SoJs, otherwise 1 SoJ will buy most things

By this time you'll need no advice from me about what might be nice to own - personally I'm after Bul-Kathos' Children and damage reduction % items

As ever in the trade screen you'll meet loads of idiots, remember the /squelch command

Play styles

Partying
This is where playing on BattleNet is actually most fun but it is very difficult to link up with a good group

Encourage people to play with you by showing humour, by being generous, by being effective, by tanking/protecting them. Don't frenzy into Lightning Enchanteds without warning them or wake up tons of monsters. Don't spam, even if you're in town waiting for a tp. Treat them as if they were your friends

If someone is really annoying in the party then it doesn't mean the rest of them are. You get people who spend a lot of time giving orders, like "ALL to MY TP, NOW!!" Just squelch them and play with the rest

Try not to get too annoyed when people nick your items. There's actually a higher drop % with more people on the field so more items will be spawned. Also the barbarian, because you're standing next to whatever you're fighting, gets more than his fair share of items. Also you're a safety barb so you can simply stop fighting and pick up loot where other characters would be too hard pressed.

It'll feel like you're loosing really good items, especially when you see someone snatch that unique ring that dropped but you really are getting more than you would solo.

Some people have fast computers and/or excellent reflexes. These people will get a bigger share of the loot. If you think you aren't getting much of a chance then you might want to either leave or load up on charms and concentrate on exp or split off from the main group.

Keep notes of people's account names as you meet people who you enjoy playing with. It's politer to ask for their account name than just to write it down. That means that they'll expect to hear from you and may write down your name. It's not nice to get a whisper from someone you've never heard of saying "Game?"

Soloing
This is enjoyable because it's just you against the game. Also no one nicks your items

It's particularly good for this build as you can beat everything in the game

You will also get very satisfying fights against the toughest bosses

Piggy-backing
This is where you join higher level parties and they get you through quests without you contributing effectively. I strongly advise against doing this - Hell difficulty is full of level 30-50 characters who can't play the game properly and spend a lot of time begging other people to take them along. It gets harder to be accepted, after all you just leech exp and gold and nick items (because there is nothing else you can do). If you know what you are doing and have a specific goal (eg to get past Act IV to the Bloody Foothills) this can speed up your progress but I recommend this for advanced players, not new players. If you go further than you can cope with the game will get REALLY boring, trust me

Twinking
Handing down good items from an experienced character to a new character.

I think you must develop your playing skill. If you have already developed a powerful character then passing some items to the next one seems OK to me. If you want the character to race up levels and cruise through a lot of the game then twink - you can be up to Hell in less than a week.

But if you feel you need better items to cope with the difficulty level drop down a little. Look up the monster levels and see where you should be playing at, you may have got too far ahead in the game.

Just as with piggy-backing, twinking makes it easy to race forward to a point where you can't deal with the monsters and the game sharply turns from easy to impossible

Role-playing
You're a barbarian!
You're a hero!
You're tough as nails!
So act like it. Like many well-designed CRPGs, Diablo rewards players who get into the headspace of their characters. If you're used to a cautious Amazon approach or a slow tidal wave necromancer approach then wake up!!

You're a barb now. Charge!!!!!!!!

Top tactics include leaping into the middle of a huge pack of monsters, leaping back to rescue a non-melee character who's getting thumped

With good timing you can start a leap just before Tristram or Tal Rasha's Tomb opens. You aim your leap for where the portal will open and click on it as soon as you land. To other people it looks like you've leapt straight into Tristram or into Duriel's Tomb

You get the biggest leap by covering the furthest distance which is achieved by leaping to one of the corners of the screen. Always greet Diablo with the biggest leap you can.

Jokes are good too. Charge up Frenzy then challenge fast moving characters like assassins to a race back to town. If they accept do the 1-2-3 or ready-steady-go bit then open a tp and step through.

Solo the Ancients. You may do it with a party if you're with a good group that you don't want to leave first time but that stuff about proving you're worthy is true. Next time you're on make a private game. Solo them. It's the best fight in the game.

Begging for items, WPs, people to help you do quests:

What do you think?

P vs P:
Now I don't do this much so you might want to take what I say with a pinch of salt.

Damage reduction is very effective against monsters but needs some work against players.

There are two styles of PvP

The first is where people agree to duel. There are generally accepted conventions for this, like don't drink potions, don't loot gold, let the person get their body back.

Might be a good idea to clarify rules first. If people want rules in like not using monsters or shrines you might as well go along with it.

If people want so many rules that you get bored listening to them explain then stop. Go and make yourself a drink. Come back. Type the following:
?
?????
WHAT MEAN "RULE"???
Then hostile them and go outside town

The second style is where someone hostiles you in the course of a player vs monster game. Usually without talking to you and with a character 20 levels higher. Personally I think all bets are off if they do this - drink potions, escape the game (alt-F4 is faster than esc), whatever. You could take it as a friendly duel if you like - in fact these people are often very beatable as they don't really know what they are doing. It's just that personally I find them detestable.

Another good tactic to use against these people if you have some chores or something you need to do away from the computer is to tp to town, taunt them, tell them how stupid they are and how easily you'll beat them. Click on your stash box. Then go and post your letters, do your shopping, whatever.

I really dislike these people

The safety barb has three main PvP tactics

1) Leap attack. Even with one skill point it's a very effective attack form. Switch to berserk as you land. Alternate with frenzy.

2) Frenzy/berserk. Run away. Find some monsters. Kill them with frenzy. You have 6 seconds now of fully charged frenzy. Run to your opponent and kill him, switching to berserk as you arrive

3) Straight frenzy. Useful against people trying to get a safe distance away from you - as soon as you charge up the skill they won't be out-running you

A fourth, slightly unusual tactic is to use an item with charges of teleport to teleport directly onto an opponent. An advantage of this is that if you have a mercenary it will hit them instantly. Then it's a matter of who has good reflexes to click on the other person but at least you're expecting it and controlling the timing

Barbarians and shapechanger druids
They will attack you with a weapon boosted by charms, possibly other items. Their attack is both physical and magical. So a high level character might list an attack as 5000 damage (this is what my werewolf can do) but a huge % of this is poison. In fact, taking my werewolf character as an example, he does about 140 ave base weapon damage, +200% strength, +435% fury, + about 200 points of non-poison elemental damage. Well your 75% resist reduces the elemental damage to about 50, and I think your MDR is applied to each attack form (fire, cold, etc) separately so that's eliminated entirely. The 800 physical damage is halved for PvP then damage reduction (which would be about 70 at the same level as the werewolf) is applied.

So you're dead in 2 or 3 hits

Safety is not very strong in PvP against melee fighters unless you have damage reduced by % and a lot of it

So just do massive damage fast. Frenzy/berserk is good, frenzy/berserk/stun if you have the knack of it would be better still. Charging up the frenzy off monsters may give you a slight edge and watch out for trickiness like teleport (or use it yourself)

Sorceress
With 75% resist a sorceress will kill you pretty quickly. You can also kill her pretty quickly. More skill is needed on your side as she has auto-targetting/area effect spells

She will use thunderstorm or frozen orb (if she knows what she's doing). If she uses fire either leap the effect or run around it while frenzied. You can also probably just run straight through it.

Charging up frenzy works well as most sorcs don't realise how fast you'll move and can be over confident of their teleport. If they're good with teleport then the only way to hit them is with either Frenzy or Leap Attack (or teleport yourself)

Sorc duellers are a confident bunch and usually move towards you fast which is great - if you charge Frenzy they may not have enough reaction speed to get a teleport off by the time they realise you've changed direction and are moving towards them at super-fast speed

There's some pretty easy to get low level gear that boosts maximum resists. The most a resist can be taken to is 95%. So if you have 95% resist and 30 MDR and the attack is halved for PvP then you are stopping 1200 listed points. This eliminates FO as a threat but thunderstorm can still get you if both it and lightning mastery are high level. Oh well

A much funnier one is if they try firewall. You stop 25 times as much or a listed 30K damage. Stand in the firewall and taunt them. Ask them why their firewall isn't working. Ask them what damage it does then tell them you don't believe them. Tell them it's been nerfed. Tell them there's a downloadable mod that makes you immune to fire damage at www.howstupidcanub.com.
Enjoy!

Elemental druid
I don't think anyone playing an elemental druid would challenge a high level barb to a duel.

If they do then treat them as a weaker sorceress, using fire and cold.

Necromancers
They'll spam bone spirits at you. The spirits are pretty slow so you can outrun them. In fact best let the necro chase you while you look for some monsters to frenzy off. Hopefully he'll run down his mana and stop spamming them. Don't underestimate the bone spirits. They can do about 300 damage (halved for PvP), auto-target and are not effected most resistance items (except safety shield which will merely scratch the surface). A fast cast necro can spam these out at an awesome rate

Charge them while frenzied using berserk as your attack. They'll IM you but that doesn't work against berserk

If for some reason they curse you with something you don't like you can dispel it by visiting a shrine

Amazon
Their classic tactic is guided arrow. Very dangerous - auto-targetting and a huge range. Probably straight frenzy is the answer - they'll be looking to run faster than you and get some arrows off. Don't frenzy off the monsters first just charge them with frenzy

If they're fast enough that they can keep ahead of you (stopping you charging frenzy) and still get shots off you're in trouble. Run off and charge frenzy off some monsters then steam in as soon as it's fully charged, berserking when you get there - your speed may catch them out.

Don't be slow

Assassin
Their traps are pretty weak and a fully charged martial arts effect is not going to hit you until their fourth attack. Assassins are not physically tough and I don't think many could survive long enough to get four attacks in a stand-up fight against a barb.

They may charge up an attack off monsters. Most of their skills shouldn't be a problem but if it is you could simply run off and let the charges dissipate. I would guess that the dangerous one would be a maxed Tiger Strike which does +1440% damage - quite likely enough for a one hit kill.

They have a teleporting kick as well. If they teleport in with this kick and have a maxed charged TS (3 swirling white balls) you're probably dead. You might be able to Leap Attack out of the way, I'm not sure

Another possibility for the Assassin is bow-delivered venom (no potions, remember?)

They could be dangerous on paper.

They should be dangerous (doh, assassins, right?)

I just haven't seen any played effectively yet.

Example

For what it's worth here's Brista at level 67:
Masteries:
Prerequisites 2
Sword mastery 20+2
Increased speed 1+2
Natural resistance 13+2

Combat skills
Frenzy 20
Berserk 10
Leap attack 1
Prerequisites 6

Warcries
Find potion 1
Find item 1
Grim ward 1 (probably a waste except for its comedy value)

Gear:
Offensive weapons
Crafted safety mystic sword (+2 masteries)
Crafted safety ancient sword

Secondary weapons
Culwen's point & 3 D tower

(if switching to Sword & shield mode I swap over my best sword)

Amulet of life everlasting (Dam red 23)
Elite safety helm
Imbued diamond mail (or Smoke for a tough fight)
Safety ring
Dwarf Star unique ring (MDR 15)
Safety gloves
Safety boots
Mavina's tenet belt

A whole stack of damage/MF/resist/life charms plus one hit recovery charm and one +1 masteries. I usually carry about a third with the rest stashed.

All found with either the Werewolf character I played in July or by Brista

(sometimes I swap in some magic find gear)

Stats
Str: 175
Dex: 125
Vit: 115
Ene: 10

Resistances: about 0 frenzying (50ish with Smoke) or 55 with sword & shield (max with Smoke)

Optimal gear

The most powerful weapons for this build are probably Bul-Kathos' Children. +200% damage, +another 200% damage against undead and demons with a load of other useful abilities
I have some top of the range gear for other character classes so I may be able to trade for the swords
A cruel weapon could get close to +300% against everything (not quite so good in my opinion)
Elite or even ordinary weapons look good to me for the time being - phase blades are my optimum weapon because they have no repair cost and are the fastest melee weapon in the game. Haven't got hold of one yet (they drop in Acts 4 & 5 Hell) but my retired werewolf is now a part-time shopper and visits Jamella to see if one's in stock every now and then.

The elite weapons are more or less balanced between speed and damage. They're all roughly as good as each other. So choose very carefully between them, based on the innate attributes of the weapon. Does the phase blade's fantastic speed make up for its weak damage? You decide.

The rest of the gear is mainly a matter of damage reduction provided that I have some way of recovering mana (leech or %damage to mana). It's quite likely this will show up as a random mod

Hopefully a four-socket shield will show up soon so I can ditch my 3 D tower for a 4 D elite shield.

Links
www.lurkerlounge.com
arreat summit
You can link from these two sites to pretty much everywhere useful on the net

Thanks to

Wazzer for the Wazzerwind
Wazzer's father-in-law Ray for putting up with all the Grim Ward jokes
Bolty for the Lurker Lounge
Shlongor for the Chaos Sanctuary and the Arreat Summit
Jarulf, Trucidation, Crystalion and others for working out and explaining the game mechanics
DaShiv, Vixen and a host of others for intelligent and entertaining guides
Spirea & many others for character biographies
The many courteous and fun people I've met playing the game
Blizzard

Legal stuff
You may freely copy and distribute this guide with or without acknowledging me (especially Shlongor - the Arreat Summit Barb strategy is very dated
If you exploit my intellectual property expressed herein to make yourself huge amounts of money you are a commercial genius and deserve every penny.
You may NOT use these ideas to jump into other people's game and hostile them
That'll make me really cross

Brista

67th Safety Barb, Europe

It was funny, you were funny, it was well writen, and made me want to start a barb.

Make more guides like this;)

True if you take no damage perhaps you dont need it, but your other reasons seem lacking. At level 20 it lasts well over 2 minutes so you do not need to fit it in right before starting a fight(I agree the other 2 have definite duration issues.) And in hell every party I have ever joined loved my level 20 Battle Orders. It definetly makes friends, sorces even invite you on blood runs often.

Edit: spelling.

"RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE" - Fighting the system, with an eye on profit.

If you bagged the entire safety gear and just got your resists in line you'd only get hit for 125. And have more slots available.

The Battle Barb (which is the skills set up layed out here) is totally viable in any act and absolutely rocks through nightmare and hell. The variant here is adding safety gear. I would suggest that anyone who starts down this path is going to bail and stop being a Safety Barb around level 75 or so when they start to look seriously at playing in hell.

Other thing: Whirlwind's attack rate is definitely modified by weapon speed in 1.08.

*K

But the kicker is, it's got mdr 15 (better than you can get on the elite safety belt) and damage reduced by 25% (percent...percent...). The percent DR will be better in just about any case than the 15 damage reduced possible on the elite safety item. Indeed, if the damage is greater than 60, you're better off with the percent one. If the damage is less than 60, the rest of your dr equipment will most likely be enough to absorb it.

There are other %reducing items. Shaftstop is a Mesh Armor that provides 30%, but doesn't supply any mdr. Would be good with max resists and otherwise high mdr. Vampire Gaze is an extremely hard to come by, but offers the same mdr and dr% as the String of Ears. It also has dual 8% leech and a high defense rating (250 or so). It's also extremely highly sought after, so good luck getting one

And finally we have the Stormshield. It's an elite Tower shield, and is extremely hard to find. It has a massive 35%dr and good resists, but again, no mdr.

I think one piece of this eq would be enough, particularly if the % reduced fires before the standard damage reduction. Therefore, if you can get Vampiregaze... go for it. Otherwise String of Ears will be your best bet. Both of these items are inherently better than the respective Safety gear under most circumstances, and the helm can even be socketed for more resists/damage reduction/whatever you want. Oh yeah, that's something you didn't mention that might be of interest... Magic items can have up to 6 mdr or up to 25 (for circlets and amulets) dr. Also, for circlets, you can get up to two sockets. This would allow you to have an additional 7 dr (Sol rune) or 7 mdr (Mal rune) per socket. Indeed, you could even socket your safety gear and put one of these runes in there. If you're lucky enough to get a Ber, you could get damage reduced by 8%, but .. heh, good luck

Just some thoughts, in order to squeeze every bit of damage immunity that you can from this game. I wouldn't overlook the safety elite shield, either, at least as secondary equipment. It's unfortunate that Blizzard used such confusing wording... since "magic resistance" isn't a normal part of the game, we can't know for sure whether it works on elemental or just bone type spells. However it would still be useful against OKs, and remember, you can get some other nice mods on it, as well as socketing it with a diamond or Um rune.

is2k

I have yet to finish reading the whole guide but I felt that I need to respond to you opinions on the entire way cry trees. I have been playing as barbarians ever since late July, 2000 and have been playing exclusively in hardcore from September, 2000. From my experience, the warcry tree is extremely helpful for softcore barbs and even more so for hardcore players.

Following are a few of the warcry skills (in the order of importance) that I use on a very regular basis and how I utilize them when I am out and about on the battlefield.

Battle Order - without a doubt, this skill is the most important skill in the war cry tree. All good barb builds should plan on maxing this skill sometime during their career. Before 1.08, this skill was widely considered to be sufficient at level 9 for its 58% increase to hp/mana, and 72 seconds of duration. Anymore investment in the skill after that can be wasteful as the diminishing benefit of the skill starts to be significant. After 1.08, Blizzard got rid of the diminishing return and gave it a fixed benefit from level to level. Right now, at level 20, you get 92% bonus to your hp/mana and 144 seconds duration. Keep in mind that although barbs get more hp per vit points compared to other classes, barbs tend to need the highest str (and for some dex as well) investment among all the classes. So any good % of bonus to hp and mana is not only a helpful thing, but an absolutely necessary skill (especially if you are playing HC).

How this skill is generally used is by casting it right outside of the town, get healed by the healer or drink a rejuv potion, and then recast periodically to "refresh" the duration. It is true that 144 seconds of duration at level 20 seemed a bit short. But if you refresh battle order before it expires, your hp/mana will remain at its level. So instead of casting battle order when you see a mob, cast it as soon as you leave the town, heal up, then recast before it expires.

War Cry - this is another skill that barbarians should all invest in. The opinions are pretty well spilt in regards to whether it should be maxed or not. I tend to think level 11 (3 second stun) is a good stopping point. One can choose to invest more at the expense of other skills in their discretion. Warcry stops the surrounding monsters in their tracks and gives you a free shot at whacking them. This may not be crucial during normal or nightmare difficulty. But in hell, when you get legions of PI baddies swarming you, it is such a wonderful feeling when you know all you need to do is spam a few warcry/battlecry to keep yourself safe. You can choose to leap out of the swarm in this situation, but you will get swarmed again soon when you re-engage the PI mobs. Furthermore, berserk is the choice of skill to deal with PI monsters. Berserk lacks the mobility and multiple targeting of WW. So you will be standing in place and have zero DR while berserking.....pretty dangerous if you are in hell. If you use warcry to stun and battlecry to reduce enemies' damage, you give yourself a big time advantage. Not to mention that your merc can pound away freely at the mobs while taking very little damage.

The way I use warcry is leap into the middle of the mob, spam warcry/battlecry a few times, WW or berserk depending on the situation, recast warcry/berserk when necessary. I can reduce a big crowd down in size under very short time. Then you can deal with the couple baddies left as you see fit.

Battlecry - as mentioned above, this is a wonderful skill to use in tandem with warcry. Without getting into the exact numbers, this skill reduces both enemies' defense and damage output by quite a bit at slvl one. The duration at slvl one is longer than 3 seconds (warcry stun length) so you basically recast it along with warcry. I recommend putting just one point in this skill and let +skill gears take care of the rest.

Battle Command - Not too many barbs invest in this skill because of its short duration. However, I do like to point out that if you have any + barb skill ammy, helm, or weapon equipped, you can easily have it at somewhere around 4 to 6 slvl and the duration at that time is quite acceptable. This is really an optional skill to get but I always put one point in it and cast it before BO and shout. And I also recast this skill regularly.

Shout - unless you are completing ignoring DR or you are lucky enough to get your hands on a godly high end armor. Otherwise it is very hard to overlook the 100% DR bonus at slvl one. I always put at least one point in this skill and increase as my equipments dictate.

Taunt - this is a pre-req skill for many warcry skills but it has some merits on its own. It is very useful in setting up those pesky teleporting or fast moving monsters before you WW their butts off. For the flayers and the imps, I would do taunt to "gather and collect" them right next to me, and then take care of them by couple fast ww's. It's very fast and makes parts of act 3 and act 5 much more user friendly to me. Another way I take advantage of taunt is when I do solo baal runs. I always tried to place my barb at the far side of the throne room and taunt the waves of boss packs out rather than fighting the whole pack at the same time. This is especially useful against the Lister mob. The ability to fight them in 2 or 3 small groups is just grand.

Well, that's what I think you should know about the various war cry skills. I get the impression that you haven't have much experience with these skills. I hope I have at least convinced you to try some of them out (via barb helms with +skills). And hopefully, you will revise your guide a little to incorporate some of the wonderful war cry skills. Remember, a "good build" is not for a char to die less, but to help a char not die at all. I hope you take my suggestions into consideration.

IronChef

using vipermagi socketed with one sol rune(-15 mgdmg and -7 dmg and 35% ress).
using a helm with -14 dmg(or more) socketed with 2 mals(got one in hc..didnt socket yet...).
using ressist charms.
and using a 3dt shield.
and the rest saftey items with high -mdmg and -dmg...
and uv got max ressist and like -6x to magic dmg and -8x to dmg.

making u nearly immune to most magical attacks and immune to all attacks except overseers/blood lords(including the sub species) or attacks from bosses(or being under amp dmg curse).

oh blizz said that -dmg and -mdmg is gonna be nerfed in v1.09

Big Guns

Check out my MarketPlace "My Page" for my contact information.

http://market.diabloii.net/cgi-bin/market/d2.pl?mypage=view&user=Big_guns

lvl 20 spear mastery
lvl 10 ww
lvl 1 battle orders
lvl 1 in all pre-reqs

(I think this is about right, don't have them right in front of me)

I used the normal item safety crafts (crown, breast plate, gauntlets, greaves, and 1 ring) since I could round them all up in about 5 minutes. I also happened to have an amulet of life everlasting (22 DR, the only mod on it) and used it as well. My belt, life leech ring, and weapon did not have any DR/MDR, but I couldn't really swap them out for anything. I ended up with 57 DR and 17 MDR. My resists really sucked after this, I think my best one was 20 lightning (with the rest being close to 0 or negative in nm). To test how much punishment my barb could handle I went into act4 nm (steppes) and just sat there. I immediately got mobbed by 8-9 venom lords, 2-3 corpulents, and 4 champion doom casters. I couldn't really even attack if I wanted to seeing how all my mana was being drained by the doom casters and I was getting nailed left and right by the venom lords, yet my life stayed right where it was. I was amazed, I sat there for maybe a full 2-3 minutes and my life stayed right where it was. After this I managed to work my way out of the swarm and start WWing them (which took a while). Simply amazing. The funniest part of all is that the safetly items I transmuted really had incredibly lame mods other than the DR (hardly any resists and not even a friggin fast run on the boots). I can't imagine what I could do with some good safety items.

Evoluder

hey,
i found, the best way to be an efficient tank is to be a pally
with either a sorc, or a group behind you (range attackers better)

with a pally, you need less dex to keep max blocking (only about 120 at 83 for me)
and you can max three auras (fan, conviction, and something else)
along with 4 points in zeal and your set

items i use:
ginthars rift (-20 mdmg, veryfast + more speed on it, nice dmg)
gerke's pavise (-15 dmg, -15mdmg, +vit per lvl)
shaftstop (-30% dmg, 60 life, nice def)
string of ears (-15 mdmg, -15% dmg, life steal)
boots - duel fastest, with two 30+ resists
laying of hands (50 fireresist, dmg to demons)
ammy - +1 pally skills, -3mdmg -2 dmg, two 30+ resists
coronet - pris (17), -3 mdmg, +2 offensive auras, 7% lifesteal
ring1 - pris with 61 poison, lifesteal
ring2 - pris with 27 cold, manasteal (both from cd2)
couple extra resist charms (4) and a cold dmg charm

with this i have
-45% dmg, -17 dmg, -56 mdmg and maxed resists (without sal)
maxed blocking and about 60% to hit me also

things at the end of the game deal up to around 150 dmg (physical)
i take around 60 dmg from them
which is not hard to refill with 20% lifesteal and zeal
i also get 83 vit from shield, and 60 life from armor
with puts me over the 1000 mark easily

as for magic attacks, the only ones that hurt me are bonespirts
(i love taking bloodstar baths in hell, 8 player games, its fun)

i have lvl 21 holy shield, 23 conviction, 23 fan, and 15+ smite (dont ask why)
with a sorc behind me, we can clear any part of the game with no trouble at all
only returning to town to repair my dumb sword

the one thing is, i can not solo any areas with physical immunes
vengence just blows, it cost way to much mana (and thats at lvl 1)
but i guess if you maxed it, it might be better, but ill just stick with a sorc in the rear

edit: i socketed um's in armor and shield for +37 resist all