Leapquake is a really fun, mobile build once you have the right aspects assembled, however once you reach end game it falls off quite dramatically. It’s hamstringed by one big factor; Earthquake isn’t a skill!
Having Earthquake and therefore it’s damage, tied solely to 2 aspects means that all of these “+4 ranks to all skills” uber effects are entirely useless, not to mention a whole host of confusing itemization scenarios leaving players wondering what actually affects Earthquake’s damage.
The “Rumble” paragon glyph helps the build immensely, but the legendary aspects that work with Earthquake are few and far between. We have to settle for generic aspects with low global multiplicative modifiers due to a lot of the good aspects being worded to only affect “Core skills”, “Brawling skills” or “Basic skills”. And therein lies the problem. Earthquake isn’t a skill.
Leapquake was my favourite skill in D3 and without some changes I struggle to see it perform anywhere close to pretty much any other barb build right now.
I think that including Earthquake as an actual ability in the skill tree (Tall order) would fix the end game chase item scaling problems, fix us having to use two gear slots for aspects that are required, while also improving clarity over itemization when assembling the build.
Other improvements that would really help:
- Increase Earthquake size (It’s fairly small)
- Change Aspect of Perpetual Stomping from a Mobility aspect to a Utility aspect. Currently the only unique which somewhat interacts with Leapquake is “100,000 steps” and Mobility aspects can only go on feet or neck.
- Provide an option to remove the knockback from leap, it knocks mobs out of the earthquakes
- Aspect of Ancestral Echoes’s leap proc doesn’t spawn an Earthquake, which is a shame because it would be a really cool and flavourful option for an aspect when so few already affect Leapquake meaningfully