All aspects that require swapping weapons are very subpar

Barbarian
1

Just posting an opinion here, but having multiple characters and being dedicated to min maxing my barb lately (my main is druid), I really feel a disparity in the quality of the class-specific aspects.
Like my object says, I feel all the aspects that require to swap weapons are very subpar in comparison with what other classes and other much more straightforward aspects give.
The average formula of all these aspects is nowdays : “swap weapons X times → gain effect” .
Battle-mad : 8swaps for 4seconds berserk+40%damage in that duration : i play a walking arsenal build and this effect is up like a scarce 20-30% of the time, for laughable average benefit;
tempering blows : 5times for 797 fortify : totally laughable effect without counting in the frequency of the procs, i would really like to see the stats of how many players choose this…
earthstriker : 8times for an overpower proc at +30%damage : this is the only one that could be worked in an overpower build, but needs using the paragon board+glyph together with this in order to have a good % of overpower procs. Druid is in a much better position with overpower procs with far less investments in talents+glyphs.

In my opinion the absolute cause detrimental to this mechanic is the fact that A LOT of barb skills are not tied to a weapon, and don’t count as swaps : this limits the applicability of these aspects to very few builds.

Moreover and very specific, the pinnacle build of weapon swapping (this by blizzard design, not mine…) , which is any version of the walking arsenal+iron maelstrom build, basically can’t use these aspects because it’s tied to STEEL GRASP and STOMP skills (check the very same uniques blizzard has designed…ancient oath, unbroken chain, 10.000steps), that …wait a moment…DON’T COUNT AS SWAPS because they don’t have a weapon tied.

this is bad design and should be corrected.

The detrimental fact is that barb does not have a lot of alternative aspects to pump the damage, and as a result, it’s mandatory to choose non-class specific aspects : inner calm, et cetera.

A quick fix that wouldn’t be in any way overpowered is to count “non weapon” skills as valid weapon swaps.

Please blizzard consider this.
Thanks

2

I aggree what you said. People in the past cried too much “barb is strong” and blizzard team nerfed class to the ground. I do not know if it was the reason but basically all key passives were nerfed with skills, temper recipes and paragon nodes. However, that is also true barb had some broken builds. But all the other builds were crap. There is not much build variety as other classes. Core skill are sucks, for example, you can NOT deal damage with whirlwind, only way to do that is through dust devil. As you said you can not assign weapons to kick, ground stomp… Technical slots are terrible other than 2 handed axe. Nobody uses the others tech slots. I like playing melee and was enjoying too much in season 4 with bash barb, it was really fun. Now they created dance of knives rouge instead fixing whirwind. And worse, they introduced this new skill mighty throw. I do not want to play ranged archetype. That feels terrible honestly.

On the other hand I tried unbroken chain, ancient oath, iron malestrom combo with Shattering Steel aspect and 100,000 steps boots. You are basically pushing all the buttons and can not deal any damage, like a joke. I think class overall needs to be reworked. As far as I understand dev team is following so conservative approach changing the barb because of extra aspect slots can make barb super powerful.

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