Many Barbarians use a weak berserk attack as a back-up skill, you will have it as your main killing ability.
DAMRIC's COMPREHENSIVE BERSERK GUIDE
Written by Damric on 02-05-2007, for Diablo2 LoD Version 1.11.
edit: here are some fun videos for you heathen unbelievers! (no that's not me in the videos).
http://www.truveo.com/zerk-vs-hammer/id/4146838264
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdmtko0oUhk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kirqQCd2xI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYxLAoUIU18
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVK-R_1H7JM
Credit MakeLoveNotDupe for some of these links.
Hey barbs, I am having such an amazing success with my latest berserker barb build. Back in 1.10 I wrote my notes on the 20k Grief zerker based on my build at the time. It was great pvm/pvp. Recently I was going to remake the same exact character 1.11 style. I changed something this time though. Instead of very fast 1 handed swings with a grief phaseblade, I use a 2 handed ethereal "Death" Collossal Sword. I never realized just how much stronger it is, and you may not believe some of the incredible damages I can do with it.
First I'll give you some fundamental berserk skill tips, then some statistical analysis, then my current set-up.
The Basics:
-Damage = Base weapon damage multiplied by %enhanced damage, with that product multiplied by 2 if a successful crital/deadly strike. More on this formula later.
-Berserk has 2 synergies, howl and shout, each giving +10% more damage bonus per skill point you spend on them. Maxing both adds +400% more damage.
-Berserk converts all physical damage into magic damage. This includes all bonuses from weapon, skills, strength, charms, jewels, auras, ect. As long as it is physical, it is converted.
-Berserk leaves you with zero defence while you are attacking. This doesn't mean monsters and people can hit you 100% of the time, however, because attack rate and defence are only half of the to-hit calculation. Level difference makes up the other half. Meaning a lower level will still have a hard time hitting a zero defence. You can also block attacks, however with zero defence, you will be blocking constantly which can slow you down if you have a slow blocking shield.
-Berserk has excellent attack rate and damage bonus multipliers. You can easily get very high attack rating, and high damage output with this skill.
-You cannot leech life/mana with Berserk Skill using conventional %mana/life steal items.
-Berserk is unaffected by Iron Maiden, Thorns Aura, or Spirit of Barbs.
-Berserk is very much affected by weapon speed and all sources of increased attack speed. The fastest speed you can berserk is 9 frames per attack with a 1 handed weapon. 10 frames for 2 handed.
Here is a good link for speed breakpoints:
http://diablo2.ingame.de//tips/calcs/weaponspeed.php
Now for some Statistical Analysis:
-At skill level 1, unsynergized, berserk is weak, giving only +100 attack rate, and 150% magic damage bonus. However, for each additional skill point attack rate and damage are each increased 15 points, which adds up to a lot at higher levels.
-level 20 berserk skill:
Attack rating +385%. Magic Damage +435%.
With 1 synergy (howl or shout) maxed, damage bonus increases to +645%
With both synergies damage bonus increases to +835%, and keep in mind that is skill level 20.
level 30 berserk skill with maxed synergy:
Attack Rating: +535%
Magic Damage: +985%
level 35 berserk skill with maxed synergy:
Attack Rating: +610%
Magic Damage: +1060%, that's 10x your weapon damage already, but we are not done yet.
-Weapon Mastery also adds some attack rating and damage bonus, with 8% more attack rate and 5% more damage% per addtional point. Berserk skill will convert this bonus to magic damage.
Level 1 mastery (melee weapons)
Damage +% 28
Attack +% 28
Level 20 mastery
Damage +% 180
Attack +% 123
Level 30 mastery
Damage +% 173
Attack +% 260
Level 35 mastery
Damage +% 198
Attack +% 300
Notice, 35 points of mastery still gives less damage bonus than 20 points spent in a synergy.
-Strength adds %damage bonus equal to 1 point per 1 point in strength for all weapons (except warhammers and mauls which add 1.1/1).
100 Strength= +100% enhanced damage
200 Strength= +200% enhanced damage
ect, and keep in mind the berserk skill will convert this strength bonus to magic damage as well.
Other +% bonuses: You can get further +% bonuses from Auras (might, concentration, fanaticism, heart of wolverine, ect) and these bonuses will be converted to magic damage from the Berserk skill. Jewels with +% enhanced damage, when socketed into armor, will work the same way, as will any other item (but not weapon) or skill source of +% enchanced damage.
Charms: +damage charms add directly to base weapon damage. So if you had a 100 damage weapon, and +20 damage from charms, it is if you have a 120 damage weapon.
Deadly/Critical Strike bonus:
-These are % chance to deal double damage. You have %Critical strike bonus from weapon mastery skill, and you can find %deadly strike on some equipment. Both of these properties work the same. They do not stack together, however, and nor do they combine for 4x damage. If both chances are successful, you still only get x2 damage. If one fails but other succeeds, you still get x2 damage.
Deadly/Critical strike are important because they multiply your total product of base damage and %enhanced damage.
In summary,total damage is based on 3 parts:
-Base weapon damage
-%enhanced damage
-Critical/Deadly strike
Total damage= (Base weapon damage multiplied by %enhanced damage) multiplied by 2 if successful Deadly/Critical Strike.
Equipment:
Speed versus Damage:
There are 3 basic ways to go about this: highest damage per swing, fastest swing, and medium.
Highest damage per swing: you use the weapon with the highest damage no matter how slow it is, hoping to kill in 1 hit, because a 2nd swing is slow. Very high life bosses can be painfully slow like this.
Fastest swing: you use the fastest swing possible (9 frame 1 handed, or 10 frame 2 handed), using the best weapon you can. You kill stuff in more than 1 hit if necessary, and quickly make many attacks versus high life bosses.
Medium: you find yourself a comfortable balance between swing speed and damage. I consider my current character like this.
Keep in mind it is always better to go stronger AND faster, since both help tremendously.
Max fast block, and no block:
It's a matter of preference here, since each has advantages. Blocking can alleviate you taking a lot of hits because your defence is zero. Using a 2 handed weapon will do more damage. Of course there are disadvantages, like getting block-locked, or just getting pummelled from no defence and no shield.
Barbarians block at 5 different speeds, depending on how much %faster block you can get from items.
zero % faster block = 7 frames
9% = 6 frame
20% = 5 frame
42% = 4 frame
86% = 3 frame (possible with Whinstan's Guard with a Shael Rune, and Guardian Angel)
Keep in mind that 1 second = 25 frames.
In summary, if you do choose to block, block as fast as you can!
For those that use the big 2 handed weapons, I suggest maxing howl early as it will keep you alive against all those melee attacking monsters.
Now for some specific equipment examples:
Weapons:
"Death" Ethereal 1 handed or 2 handed sword/axe. This weapon has huge damage, deadly strike, and low requirements due to a hel rune. But it is inherently slow. Moderately Expensive to aquire.
"Grief" 1 handed sword/axe. Very high average damage and deadly strike. Very fast. Best 1 handed weapon for a berserker, in my opinion. Expensive to aquire.
Tombreaver Possibly the most badass 2 handed weapon. Extremely hard to find an ethereal one with 3 sockets, but if you do, it has so much damage and speed, resistance, magic find. Best weapon for a hybrid berserk/whirlwind barb. Range 4, high requirements, no deadly strike though. Zod +ed/ias jewels!
"Breath of the Dying" Ethereal 1 or 2 handed weapon. Very high damage and extremely fast. Unfortuneately no deadly strike. Very Expensive to aquire.
"Oath" similar to breath of the dying, just a little cheaper, being moderately expensive.
Death Cleaver Berserker Axe. Nice damage and Awesome deadly strike. Very Fast. Very Expensive.
Razor's Edge. Similar to Death Cleaver, but much cheaper. A solid affordable weapon.
Pierre Tombale Couant. This thing is a hidden sleeper weapon that no one knows about. 55% deadly strike, and look what it can become.
Headstriker Battle Sword. A very cheap weapon, but it has awesome % deadly strike and excellent damage for use at the beginning of the game. Lacks speed. Upgradeable to Conquest Sword.
Of course there are many more viable weapons such as up'd eth ribcracker, eth hellslayer, eth executioner's justice, obedience cryptic axe, ebotd tmaul, and on and on...
Armor:
Fortitude. +300% enhanced damage which converts to magic damage from Berserk Skill. Awesome most offenceive power armor.
Treachery. 45% ias, fade, fhr, venom. Can't go wrong with this armor until you get fortitude or engma.
Chains of Honor. Good mix of offensive and defensive ability.
Enigma. +1 teleport, strength bonus. Best Utility Armor.
Gladiators Bane, Leviathan, Duriel's Shell, Shaftstop, Iron Pelt, Twitchthroe. These unique armors have awesome defensive abilities to keep you alive.
Guardian Angel: Use this for more efficient blocking, and also high maximum resists.
Helms:
Arreat's Face: Most popular defensive oriented helm for barbarians.
Harlequin Crest: Yes the shako is a great utility helm for magic finders. Good damage reduction, +skills, ect.
Guillame's Face: Most offensive oriented helm with +15% more deadly strike, and 35% crushing blow.
Crown of Ages: good mix of defensive ability and 1-2 sockets can add more offensive or defensive ability. Super expensive.
Rockstopper: Good Cheap Defensive helm for early in the game.
Halaberd's Reign: not bad because of regeneration and +skills, but the other helms listed here are better.
Dream runeword barb helm: Interesting because of the chance to cast confuse, which can take some heat off of you. Can be made in your favorite looking barb hat (I like the conehead looking one).
Crafted: A blood helm could possibly get 10% deadly strike and the visionary mod (%attack rate per level), and be quite epic.
Boots:
Goreriders. Probably the best boots for offensive power due to +15% deadly strike.
War Traveler. Nice offensive boots. I would pick these if I already had tons of deadly strike.
Immortal king/Sander's boots. Budget offensive boots, yet very effective.
Defensive Boots: any unique or rare/crafted to balance out your resists/life.
Gloves:
Bloodfist. Good mix of offensive and defensive, increased attack speed. Cheap.
Laying of Hands. Fire Resist, increased attack speed, more %damage to demons.
Ghoulhide. Huge scalable attack and damage bonus against undead.
Magnus' Glove. My personal favorite. Adds 100 attack Rating, 20 ias, fire resist.
Rare/Crafted gloves. For better resists, +abilities to balance you out. The best of the best are the best?
Immortal King. 20str/dex can help a lot. Works better with IK belt or boot for more ias.
Steel Rends: Yes they will add some damage, although insignificant once you have fully synergized berserk. Viable nonetheless.
Gloves are 1 item you have a lot of choices to help balance your build. None except the best rares/crafts are expensive.
Belt:
Nightsmoke. Upgradeable. 10% resist all. The reason this is my favorite best is because the 50% damage to mana pretty much gives a 2-handed barbarian infinite mana in hell since you are always taking small hits.
Goldwrap. Upgradeable for more slots. Use for 10% increased attack speed and magic find.
Tal Rasha's. A nice hybrid of nightsmoke/goldwrap. High %damage to mana, magic find, and +20 dex, extra mana. All of my magic finder barbs use this now.
Immortal king's. +20 more strength, fire, lightning resist.
Verdungoes. Very Expensive, but awesome for regeneration, damage reduction, and more vitality.
String of Ears. damage reduction is nice to have. much cheaper than verdungoes. A better choice than Verdungoes if you are a whirlwind hybrid.
Thundergod's Vigor. for when 75% lightning resist isn't enough. +20/str/vita doesn't hurt either.
Rare/Craft belt. Anything with nice resists, or other defensive properties. Some of the rares, and crafted blood belts can get very awesome.
Rings/amulets
Highlord's with 2x RavenFrosts. Awesome Attack rating, and Deadly Strike make this the best combo for most situations. Also noteworthy is Metalgrid, Cat's Eye, and Crafted Barb amulets with fast cast rate. Wisp Projector, Dwarf Star, crafted and yellow rings can also be very good. Nature's Peace is good for stacking up physical damage reduction.
Angellics set rings/amulet. Adds an awesome amount of attack rating. Useful for some situations and nice for early in the game.
For anyone that cannot get these, get anything you can with +attack rating, and other useful abilities.
Shields and off hand weapons.
Whinstan's guard. The highest and fastest blocking shield in the game. It's also cheap and has low requirements.
Stormshield. The overall best defensive shield, and expensive.
Gerk's Sanctuary. The integer damage reduction works wonders pvm if you stack it high enough.
Phoenix Runeword Shield. Most offensive shield. But I do not reccommend it because it blocks so slow that you might as well just use a 2 handed weapon. People who are skilled with Howling, may overcoem this disadvantage, however.
Wizardspike. Useful for resists, and faster cast for teleporting (with enigma armor).
Beast. I haven't actually tried using this yet, but I have been thinking a lot about it. Don't actually attack with it. I would hold it in off hand while zerking with the main weapon. You would still gain the nice Fanaticism aura and strength bonus.
Last Wish. Same with Beast. Haven't yet tried this, but there should be good advantages for simply holding it in your off-hand. Might aura, chance to cast fade, magic find, ect.
Weapon Swaps.
2x Echoing weapons: adds +6 more skill levels to your warcries. can be shopped from merchants for gold.
2x Heart of the Oak. same as above for +6, however thay add resists and fast cast. Ideal for Boss running teleport barbs.
2x Wizardspikes. Add one 10% fast cast ring and you can teleport faster than any non-sorc character, and just as fast as a 105% fcr sorc.
2x Spirit Swords. The advantage of teleporting fast, a huge mana boost (so you can teleport longer), and descent + to your war cries.
2x Ali Baba. For maximum horkage.
Magic Find Gear: It would be possible to sacrifice some damage output, and fully load magic find gear. I'd probably do this with an ethereal zod'd tombreaver. You could probably hit ~400mf and still be able to have max resists and enough damage to kill quickly, and hork corpses.
Mercinaries.
I have found 2 viable ways to go. 1 for offensive, and one for defensive/utility.
Act2 mercinary Prayer aura with low damage "Insight" polearm. Since Prayer synergizes meditation, you can get a massive life and mana regeneration from this guy. This is extremely helpful since you cannot steal life or mana from hitting monsters. Cheap to make too. Disadvantage is these guys are hard to keep alive sometimes.
Act 1 Mercinary with cold arrow and "Faith" bow. The level 15 fanaticism aura drastically speeds up your attacks. She also rarely dies. Expensive to make. They say fire arrow mercinaries have longer range and can shoot off-screen, but cold can help slow monsters.
Example My current set-up (total 93% deadly strike from gear at level 90)
"Tele-Zerker"
Ethereal Collossal Sword "Death" 441-877 damage 2 handed.
2x "heart of the oak flails" on switch
Dusk Shroud "Enigma"
Arreat's Face with rare jewel (for more defensive mods)
Gorerider
Magnus' Glove
Nightsmoke mesh belt
Highlord's Wrath
2x ravenfrosts.
Mercinary: Faith Diamond Bow, Ethereal Fortitude Boneweave, Andariel's Visage (Um Runed)
Skill Selection:
This type of barbarian has a tight skill selection, with almsot no room for deviance.
Howl: If you plan on 2 handed weapons, you need to max this, and early in the game.
Shout: Synergy to Berserk, and helps others. You can wait to maximze this until late in the game.
Battle Orders: You need to maximize this skill, Try adding points to it whenever you can, and eventually maximizing.
Berserk: Your main skill. Maximize this as soon as it is available.
Weapon Mastery: 1 point to start, then Maximize this skill after your other skills are maximum.
Battle Comand, Natural Resistance, Increased Speed, and other Pre-requisites: 1 point.
Howl is your friend! The more points you put in howl increases the chance of fear on monsters. It also makes it much larger area and last longer. The best strategy is to howl everything, then pick off the monsters, 1 swing/kill at a time. This works great in places like the Chaos Sanctuary, where barbarians would normally die.
Now you saw that I mentioned an unbelievable number at the beginning, 50 thousand magic damage.
I'll show you how I got it using the same calculations as in my 1.10 post.
http://forums.diabloii.net/showthread.php?t=348209
It's simple base *enhanced damage *2(deadly strike).
I have two +10 max damage grand charms so that puts my maximum base weapon damage at 897.
I have 206 strength, therefore +206% ed from that. Level 23 sword mastery so 138% ed from that. I have level 32 berserk so +1015% from that. From my mercinary's level 15% fanaticism, +144%. And always add 100% for the base. This totals +1603% enhanced damage.
897*1603%= 14379 damage. With 93% deadly strike (not even including mastery) *2 = 28758 damage.
That's if I were solo. But I almost always have a hammerdin leeching off my baal run so we need to factor in some concentration (+570% at slvl 35). Also My friend Curby has a high level Heart of Wolverine he likes to bring (+258% at slvl 35). Kirby also has a lvl 87 might aura mercinary (+210% ed). Total%ed now: 2641%
897*2641%*2= 47379 damage.If I used a fortitude then 52762! I have some nice screenshots of me hitting that high without fortitude in a baalrun this week.
OMG it's immune to magic!
Don't worry, use your level 1 concentrate skill to kill it.
Viable for PvP?
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes.
Edit: 2 years later I figured out I can edit this thing now. I added in stuff like treachery armor. It seems like an integer pdr build is also a very viable way to build a berserker, but I decided not to put much info on that, since this guide is all about big damage numbers. A lot of people figured out that this build can clear chaos sanctuary in like 3 swings. I have seen some really bad imitation guides especially on the noob forum gold sites. (I'm a noob just for looking at them).|||I like, especially the lots of info you gave on shields. And I like the idea of a prayer/insight merc, which would be a load off. But, why not use a might/pride merc? Can you do more damage if you use a faster weapon to hit lbp while using the might/pride merc? You didn't seem to mention that warcry is also your friend.|||After drastic experimentation, I have deemed maxed howl is superior to the waste of points to get warcry.
I tried Might/Pride. Damage was not significant enough to be included as a viable option. I found the prayer/insight way more helpful for a fast swinging baerserker, and a faith merc more helpful for the slower 2 handed berserker.
I'm not saying that might/pride isn't a powerful combo, just not needed if you are by yourself. And you likely have those auras if you are with someone else anyway. I'm sure there is someone out there that has that set-up and loves it, but I didn't so I didnt include
thx for the feedback!|||Quote:Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes.
oh I doubt that.|||By the way.. I don't consider warcry a waste to get. I use my zirker to do travincal and his lev 1+9 warcry comes VERY handy.
Good call there on insight. It's what I use, but not because of the prayer aura... it's to keep zirking and warcrying in the middle of MANA BURNERS
|||Quote:By the way.. I don't consider warcry a waste to get. I use my zirker to do travincal and his lev 1+9 warcry comes VERY handy.
Good call there on insight. It's what I use, but not because of the prayer aura... it's to keep zirking and warcrying in the middle of MANA BURNERS
i guess with the warcry...to each his own preference|||Well, I could do without it in 1 player games, but for full games it's nice to stun some council members while whacking at the others
|||I think a good cheap 2 handed weapon could be Obedience (Hel Ko Thul Eth Fal in a polearm). It has a certain 370%ED and it packs some other nice offensive and defensive mods. It doesn't have DS or IAS (40% CB though), but for those who lack speed Treachery is always a nice armor. Defense rating is not your primary concern anyway. Perhaps Insight with its bonus to critical strike could be interesting as well.Nice to the point guide, which can be used by the poor and the filthy rich alike. :smiley:|||Hey sorry I forgot "treachery". It was the armor I used while leveling up because of the nice ias and bonuses. Also Twitchthroe good at low lvls.|||Do you think Berserk is viable without relying on equipment at all? I'm talking rares and uniques you can expect from NM bosses.
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