For hardcore you have a couple of options.
You could go Concentrate and go for max block. This would accomplish several different things at once, since Concentrate is uninterruptible the block is not going to screw with your attacks. You would also have decent attack rating with crappy gear. The downside of course is that you're going to have a hell of a time doing decent damage and you'd probably have to have a Holy Freeze merc just to mitigate more damage since you'd be surrounded by mobs almost constantly (slow kill speed).
Whirlwind suffers from many of the same problems Concentrate does. Low damage, difficulty in finding weapons with both damage and attack speed. Yeah you might get lucky and find a Bonehew or an IK maul but I wouldn't count on it.
Frenzy is pretty good once you get Treachery, Ravenfrost, lawbringer phaseblade, and another decent sword.
The option that I prefer is to roll with a 2 handed berserk barb. Basically you just get the biggest damage 2 handed spear or polearm you can find, howl mobs and then taunt them one by one to kill. Use 1 point into battlecry for champions/superuniques/act bosses. Depending on whether or not you use the runeword mod for singleplayer, you'd have a very easy weapon progression.
The downsides of zerk are that it is interruptible and you have neither defense, nor leech. The upside is that berserk is massive damage and the attack rating on it is also pretty good. Even if you only get 20IAS on your gloves and a polearm with zero attack speed, you're still hitting like a 15 frame attack. Slow attacks feel a lot less slow when you're one shotting everything.
Starting out : Exceptional savage polearm (cube recipe, any diamond, staff, kris, and sash).
Midgame : Insight in the biggest 4 socket polearm you can find
Endgame : Obedience in an elite polearm like thresher or cryptic axe
As far as build, it's pretty obvious but here goes.
Max berserk
Max battle orders
1 pt battle cry
1 pt leap attack to GTFO of dangerous situations
1 or a couple points into find item
A couple points into weapon mastery (attack rating)
Max howl first depending on how soon you reach Hell. I got to Hell at level 70 so I needed like 15 points to be able to reliably howl Hell mobs (each points raises the level of monsters you can howl away, it's added to your base level)
Then weapon mastery (attack rating again)
Rest of points into shout.
Stats
Str - enough for gear, unless you want to be a legend and go full Titan build
Dex - enough for gear
Vit - the rest
Energy - none
As far as gear choices, one that gets overlooked a lot is Peace armor. Peace gives Critical Strike (so does Insight) and it stacks with your weapon mastery, so you can easily have like 60% to do double damage with absolute crap gear. It's a decent armor until you get your hands on Treachery or anything better.
For boots, anything with FRW or res or both will do. I used Sanders Riprap for a long time (attack rating, 40 FRW).
Jewelry is hard without magicfinding. I used magic rings with attack rating until I got a hold of angelics and a ravenfrost.
Belts are pretty much the same as boots. You can shop a half decent belt with a ton of life and like 30 cold res. Anything you can get. It took me many, many Meph runs to find String of Ears.
Gloves - Item shopped gloves with 20 IAS on them are easy to get until you find LoH.
Helmet - Guillames isn't terribly hard to find and gives great mods. Most of the time I used a 3 ptopaz crown.
Switch weapons - Nightmare Malah is easy to buy +3 warcry sticks from.
A staff with teleport charges on it is also very valuable for running certain areas.
Weapons:
Insight is an excellent weapon if you use RWM. Cheap, high damage, + to Critical strike, shitload of attack rating, and meditation aura. I easily got all the way to act 3 Hell with an Insight Bill, at which point I was able to farm a Cruel Warpike with a socket in it.
To make your own Cruel weapons, you first get a magic weapon that has a quality level over 74 (use arreat summit). The easiest way to do this is to buy it from a vendor, there is a shopping calculator that will tell you what you can find. For example, Farah in act 2 sells magic War Pikes. Halbu sells Thundermauls, etc.
Then you roll the weapon in the Cube with 3 chipped gems, 3 standard gems, or 3 flawless gems. You can roll them as many times as you like. I've gotten lucky before and rolled a 287% cruel weapon with 2 sockets on my fifth try (the recipe grants 1-2 sockets).
The fastest way to get gems, imo, is to run Lower Kurast for them in players 8 mode. After that it would simply be to do Cows as fast as possible in any difficulty, more or less.
It's no Breath of the Dying, but it beats the hell out of any exceptional unique and many elite level uniques if you can get 2 shaels in it. Sure you might get lucky and find a Butchers Pupil, a Lum and a Pul rune, but why not save that for an Oath instead?
Edit :
You said this was going to be your Grail character. In that case, 2 handed zerker would be fine until you get Grief phaseblade. Even after that I still wouldn't go max block as zerk is interruptible. You could use wizardspike offhand for FCR, beast for more damage, alibabas for MF, etc
This post was edited by Dr_Lecter on Dec 2 2020 03:06am