Yeah, I played a barb on expansion singleplayer and it was a disaster. On classic, when you get whirlwind, it makes all the grinding with double swing worth it because you just start molesting entire groups of monsters in nightmare. You go from level 30 to 45 within 45 minutes tristing too... on expansion, it was a huge disappointment.
I suspect that they f*cked with whirlwinds attack rating on the expansion, because barbs cannot land a hit. My barb [Level 31] is wearing a 120 ar ring, and a magic 50 ar ring with some decent mods. He's using a 19-45 damage war axe [I do have a 5 soc war axe and amn el ith tir, but Sol is elusive in normal] with a 30/20 bone shield, Biggins Bonnet, Steath armor, a very nice 30/28 resistance belt, a decent 6str/4rep life/6%Fr/23Lr ammy, some rand gloves, and some rand 20% frw boots. His double swing and concentrate are doing just fine hit wise [But their dmg is pretty crappy in nightmare], but his whirlwind is just terrible with 30% less ar. I whirlwind a big group of 7 or more monsters and manage to get at most 2 hits in total... that's terrible. I tried to nightmare trist and gave up... I also gave up on trying to kill treehead, I jacked the scroll and ran.
The monsters like treehead in nightmare have life regeneration, so it's impossible to kill some of them when you've got a 100 damage whirlwind that only seems to hit 20% of the time [My ar says 50%, but I'm doing the math and that's not even close]. My merc kept dying... he's wearing a 3 soc ringmail with 3 +min/max dmg jewels... in total it's +3-9 dmg and a couple resists. He's using a pike I shopped in act 5 normal thats 19-94 dmg, +40 ar and a bone helm I threw a skill and ort in [To max his fire res when I was in norm A4].
It's just pointless, I'm going to delete the character... it's one thing to have fun with a challenge, but when monsters get literally impossible to kill [I ran into the unique shaman in trist who kept reviving the other shamans, that was ANNOYING], it's just not fun. I understand that I could go norm baal [Which wasn't very easy to do lol] to maybe level 40, but that's time consuming. I love the grind as much as the next guy, but I like to grind when I know there is breaking point somewhere that will make it all worthwhile, and this situation just isn't like that, it's not appealing lol.
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All of that being said, saying "Expansion is easier than classic" isn't very accurate... it's true in terms of what some call "Twinked characters" [Characters that are designed for maximum performance for their level on bnet, and use xferred/traded/bought gear etc]... but when grinding solo, it's a complete 180.
This post was edited by Blockinlick on Mar 7 2012 06:08pm