Interested in a party support barb (Bard)!

Interested in a party support barb (Bard)!

I have recently been interested in passive/support class builds whose main objective is to boost party effectiveness in any way possible rather than doing damage. I've already done a cleric pally and most of the other classes' support skills are purely self-beneficial so I was wondering if there are any guides to an all party support barb.

I've not really played a barb thoroughly but have begun a Singer so was able to play around with the skills. This type of build would seem like a great departure from the usual WW and Frenzy barbs you see all the time. I guess my take on this would go something like this:

20 - Taunt
20 - Shout
20 - Battle Orders
20 - Battle Cry
20 - Grim Ward
1 - Howl
1 - Find Potion
1 - Increased Speed
1 - Leap
1 - Find Item
1 - War Cry
1 - Battle Command

Strength - As much as needed for desired armor.
Dexterity - None, you won't be doing any damage.
Vitality - Everything!
Energy - None, you will have plenty of mana from equips later on.

Mostly this build is crowd control with group support skills. Increased Speed and Leap are the only self-beneficial skills and are used mainly to quickly get to enemies that need 'tweeking' or as a way to escape enemy crowds. At first, howl and find potion will rightly help in the beginning but will lose thier usefulness later as they are replaced with Find Item and Grim Ward.

At lvl 30, your routines should be to keep Battle Command active first of all, then Shout and BO as needed Cast Taunt on long-ranged, revivers, and fallen to stop their attacks and keep them in melee range. Find Potion/Find Item to keep a healthy supply of pots for all, Battle Cry as many melee enemies as possible. Howl/Grim Ward in case of overly large crowds of enemies swarming your party. War Cry to stun some of the tougher melee enemies.

Basically you'll be plenty busy keeping tabs on which auras are active, how to control the enemy situation, and pumping items out of bodies.

Any comments on this type of support build?

 

Other than maxing grimward, this is more or less a warcry barb build. Another point to note is that low lvl howl does not seem to work on higher level characters..(right?)

 

Well the War Cry barb is mostly trying to max out War Cry and its synergies to get the best damage possible from it (which to me seems negligible in hell but that's just me ), where as this build is more worried about the status of its party memebers and controlling enemy AI.

BTW, does anyone know if Battle Cry is very effective in Hell or not?

 

max howl in stead of grim ward Grim ward requires corpses which won't help in a thigh situation. Howl work in something like Slvl + Clvl + 1 > Mlvl I think. So not that hard to get it to work really great

 

You could be right about GW. I did use a lvl 8-10 Howl and found it to be very quick to break up large crowds and notably helped in the battle in the Chaos Sactuary with the super-fast Winged-Demon cluster allowing everyone to pick them off one-by-one. I wouldn't have been able to do that with GW with no body! IMO I think Howl should have been the higher skill lvl of the two since the area of effect is centered on you rather than being limited on the fixed place of a corpse like GW not to mention its much easier to spam them around the screen and make them baddies fly!

 

Yeah But GW looks and sounds a lot cooler!

 

yeah u should definatly use GW every time u can, just for style points and u should btw mayb think of also using a low lvl war cry for the stunning. VERY useful in baalruns: just stand there, chug a mana potion, and spam away. People will love u

 

use 2 Heart Carver daggers form grim ward. really funny! i have a 2-handed zerker using howl and grim ward.

especially nice to pi$$ ppl of in baal runs :lol: