Building an LLD conc on D2r...



I've decided to document my journey in building the top LLD conc barb in D2R here in my blog, not only for my own purposes but because a lot of people have asked about me about it. I don't mean #1 in a snooty way, but say it because he is currently #1 on the (inactive) LLD gm melee ladder with a 9-1 record

I am an exclusive gm melee player in D2R and I only play wolf druids. I needed a departure from that for a bit and have always been interested in conc barbs and BvB, but some of the gear I would want for a good HLD conc barb was and remains too rare and expensive in D2R. I thought an LLD conc would be the best alternative given that you can get good LLD gear for cheaper (but, counterintuitively, it's also more rare) -- not cheap, but cheaper compared to HLD. This would allow me to play a barb with the cool rares in a more affordable format, and also play a character that is not a wolf druid for the first time in forever.

Once I started building my LLD conc, I realized it was insanely fun to acquire LLD items in a way that it was not fun in HLD. It definitely felt like more of a fun project than my HLD character. I think it's because it's just hard to find genuinely good LLD gear (the supply is much scarcer than good HLD gear), so when you find that one really solid LLD item you've been ISO forever, it is extremely rewarding and satisfying. The LLD community told me it would take months (if not years) to build my LLD conc the way I really wanted it, and I think I understand why now.

Unfortunately, the LLD gm melee community where my conc would shine is not active right now. It was active for a short time where I ended up going 9-1 in official ranked matches (my current win/loss record). But it just became fun simply to build him and get the gear for him, even though it's not a super active dueling scene at the moment.

I'll start documenting the journey of acquiring the items I currently have for him and update it as I get more of my ISO, which at this point is pretty rare and inaccessible stuff. This is kinda just for my own personal interest in building an LLD GM melee char at this point, but also because many HLD gm melee dudes have asked me about it. Maybe it will spark some interest in LLD gm melee duels and get more of an active community going.

I guess the goal is kind of twofold right now:
1) be an “ambassador” of sorts and try to get more HLD melee people into LLD melee
2) document my journey in completing the character

Huge thanks to the following users for getting me started and teaching me everything LLD (in no particular order)

Nupper
chum
ferdia
ThisDonger
Rawcore
Kado
TheClockKing

Note: this blog was a repost, messed up on the first

1. Armor

Hypothetical perfect : 100ed, 50-60 life, 2os eth rep Ornate Plate with 1300+ defense (bonus: strength or dexterity, -req)
My item : 100ed, 7str, 52life, 28cr, 2os eth rep Chaos Armor with 1028 defense

I had initially decided I wouldn't move forward with making an LLD conc unless I could acquire a higher-end rare weapon and armor. I heard that these would be the hardest items to get if I wanted to go with rare items instead of traditional cookie-cutter stuff, such as an Honor or a Robo naga.

After starting to ask around, I found the person who had most recently bought what was considered to be the #1 LLD gm melee rare armor at that time (early 2022 to late 2023). Although it wasn't an Ornate, its stats made it very well-known amongst LLDers, and its low str req would be good for low strength SoE builds. Every stat on it was considered useful, and the perfect 100 ED was nice lookin too. It brought so much attention it was even posted in the HLD melee Discord a few times and discussed there. To add to its popularity, D2R streamer Cooley included it in one of his "trophy room" Youtube videos which garnered over 115k views



Even HLD people or people who did not have an LLD character at the time were bidding on it in its initial FT thread here so that they could build a barb around it

I believe it was bought and resold 2-3 times since that thread, and I ended up buying it for the same price of ~20k fg from whoever most recently had bought it at that time, making it my first LLD item I had ever purchased, and one step closer to making a LLD conc. I actually kinda quickly replaced this armor with an upgrade (an Ornate)... I'll post about that later

2. Weapon

Hypothetical perfect : 30ias, 165ed eth repair Naga or Zweihander (bonus: high AR, flat damage mods, 2os)
My item : 30ias, 163ed, 99ar eth repair Naga

My next step was to acquire a good rare weapon that would clearly beat Honor and/or a robo Naga. I kind of told myself that I would not make an LLD conc unless I could get such a weapon, so it was a wild goose chase trying to find it.

At the time, most LLD barbs were using Honor or a robo. There weren't really too many "godly" LLD rare melee weapons, so I didn't go into my search feeling too optimistic about this. I was able to quite easily find weapons that were close but not quite what was I was looking for. These included things like erep Nagas that unfortunately had some sort of elemental damage that bugged the weapon, non-eth 2os weapons, etc. I was mostly interested only in a very solid high-end erep Naga or Zweihander (obviously without elemental damage) with as close to 30ias 165ed as possible. The 30ias is really important for IAS breakpoints for conc, and the high ED was very important so that it could beat Honor and/or a robo Naga. I was told by several people right off the bat that this was nearly an impossible ISO and could take months (or longer).

After finding a couple of weapons that missed the mark, I was given a "lead" on an erep Naga with absolute insane stats. I was told that it might be very hard to acquire and to message the owner about it.

The Naga in question was 30ias 163ed erep. This is pretty insane for LLD as it is a nearly 100% perfect IAS & ED roll (only 2 ED off perfect). The only way it could have been improved was if it had 2os, but such a weapon would be insanely rare for D2R. This was basically as close as you could get to a perfect LLD melee weapon in D2R. As far as I know (at the time I wrote this), it remains the #1 eth repair melee LLD weapon in the game (it actually rivals Nagas in LoD too, besides the ones that were spawned with Charsifood). Eventually, I realized it kind of had a "unicorn" status and many people knew of it and talked about it (and several ppl had offered on it and tried to buy it too, I think, but I'm still pretty unclear on the details of what was happening with it before I purchased it).

After a lot of back and forth (I'll spare the details) with several people, I was able to buy it in a private trade. I had to talk to several people to make it happen but I felt it was worth it. In particular, I bugged the person who first gave me the "lead" on it for days, asking if he had any info about it or heard anything new (sorry to that person for being such an annoyance, lol). This purchase definitely solidified my LLD conc barb project and was the beginning of my attempt to build a "trophy" LLD conc, no matter how much he was going to actually be used. In other words, it sort of sent me down an insane rabbit hole that I'm still in, lol

For what it's worth, there are several eth repair Nagas now although they remain very expensive. They mostly seem to fall in the 30ias 100-140ed range and typically cost tens of thousands of fg



This post was edited by Koston on Aug 6 2023 01:42am

3. Helms.... lots of helms

Hypothetical perfect : CTC Frost Nova, +1 barb skills, +3 Battle orders, +3 Shout, +3 Iron Skin, 100ed, +60 life, 2os Eth Repair Rage Mask
My item : +1 barb skills, +3 Battle orders, +3 Iron skin, 87ed, +40 life, 2os Avenger Guard

After acquiring both a really cool weapon and armor, I was ready to start looking for other pieces of gear. In the meantime I had also purchased pretty basic stuff I won't write about here, like IK pieces and 40 pcs of 3/20/15.

I wanted to find a really nice 2os rare helm. Based on the advice of others (mostly the people I thanked in the first post above), it was pretty clear I needed some combo of barb skills, +BO, +Iron Skin and/or Shout, +life, 2os. Surprisingly, I found out pretty quick that CTC Frost Nova is a very useful mod in LLD, particularly in gm melee duels. There's not an easy or direct way to implement Cannot Be Frozen in LLD (compared to HLD melee where you would simply wear a Raven Frost or put a Cham in something..) This was a little counterintuitive for me since most CTC mods in HLD melee are banned or don't really do anything at all other than look cool ;p

Based on advice, it seemed like the perfect conc barb helm would have been something like CTC Frost Nova, +1 Barb skills, +3 BO, +3 Iron Skin and/or Shout, at least 80 ED for some more defense, +40-60 life, 2os. Big bonus would be to have it eth rep and/or in a Rage Mask for optimal defense (hypothetical Maxroll pic below)



I think the odds of such a thing dropping would be astronomical so I honestly didn't want to put that much effort into finding something like that. The "hypothetical perfect" barb helm seemed to be 100x harder to acquire than a "hypothetical perfect" weapon or armor.

My first helm I started out with was this (Shadow Brow, soc'd with 2x 24 max jewels here):



I went with this because it was for sale when I was building my conc barb initially and it had the basics (+1 Barb, +3 BO, 30+ Life, 2os) on top of CTC Frost Nova. Although I ended up winning quite a few duels with this, I wasn't super happy with it overall. It felt kind of boring and I didn't like relying on the CTC Frost Nova to win.

My HLD melee instincts told me to rely on simply a better statted helm with no CTC Frost Nova. So, I tried to hunt down a helm that looked more like: +1 Barb, +3 BO, +3 Iron Skin or Shout (too rare to have both, I would be satisfied with one or the other), 40-60 life, and 2os. I also had made up my mind at that point that it had to be red, preferably Arreat style, and I wanted 80ed at least so it had some sort of defense.

Interestingly, finding a helm like this proved to be more difficult than finding the weapon or the armor. I guess they are quite rare. It also felt like every single helm I did find didn't even remotely hold up to LLD conc barb helms in LoD which were able to spawn shit like +3 Concentrate and other stuff (no longer possible in D2R).

The first helm that I found that was even remotely close to what I was looking for was this (Fiend Brow):



This was still a decent ways away from what I actually wanted but it was headed in the right direction. It was a red Arreat!! style for one, but it had a lot of stuff I wanted: +1 Barb, +3 BO, +3 Shout, +57 Life, and some good ED. The +2 Natural Resistance was cool too to help with being frozen. The biggest issue here is that it was 1os which, no matter how good the stats were, still made it a temp. But it was my first helm that I actually liked... and not to mention it was kind of an easy painless buy via d2Jsp for ~4k or ~5k fg (forget exactly how much), which was nice after the fiasco of chasing down the Naga.

...to be continued lol

This post was edited by Koston on Aug 6 2023 01:52am

3. More helms...

Hypothetical perfect : CTC Frost Nova, +1 barb skills, +3 Battle orders, +3 Shout, +3 Iron Skin, 100ed, +60 life, 2os Eth Repair Rage Mask
My item : +1 barb skills, +3 Battle orders, +3 Iron skin, 87ed, +40 life, 2os Avenger Guard

I was still not entirely happy with my helm (Fiend Brow in last post). I knew I wasn't gonna be happy until I found some sort of similarly statted version with 2 socs instead of 1. At that point I had completely let go of the idea of having the CTC Frost Nova on the helm, having it be an eth repair 2os rage mask, as well as having both Iron Skin and Shout on the helm. It simply didn't seem probable. I was perfectly fine settling for something like my current but with 2 soc, but even this seemed impossible.

Suddenly, this one (Brimstone Crest) appeared for sale:



I was able to get it for a pretty decent price (~4k fg) and I was happy with it. I haven't actually been able to use it yet at the time I'm writing this because it's on ladder and my character is NL, but I've been excited to socket it and try it out.

Unfortunately, the helm wasn't totally ideal for two reasons. First, I preferred +1 Barb skills instead of +2 combat skills. I talked to a few people and the consensus seemed to be the former was better than the latter for conc, but no one was 100% sure about that. Someone told me it would be far better on a non-conc barb for regular dueling. Second, it had no ED on it and therefore had no defense when I was really looking for something with at least 90 defense. My hunt continued for something better...

...which brings me to my most recent helm purchase, Death Shell



I think I got pretty lucky when buying this one. A few other people were eyeing it and I think it was just a matter of me getting to it first. It just hits all of the important stats for me and I'm pretty sure I won't (and can't) find better in D2r at least for a while... It has the +1 Barb skills, the +3 BO, the +3 Iron Skin, the high life, the 2os, and pretty high ED so that it has nearly 100 defense overall. Also, it's a fuckin cool red Arreat which was the style and color I wanted from the beginning. I suppose if the CTC charged bolt was Frost nova and if the +energy was +3 shout it would have been an absolutely bonkers helm but I'll take what I can get. I'm more than happy with this and OK socketing this one with very high end jewels when the time comes

This post was edited by Koston on Aug 6 2023 02:16am

4. Shield

Hypothetical perfect : 30/20 100ed 2os eth rep Grim Shield, 400+ defense overall (bonus : DTGM mostly, not sure what else is possible on these)
My item : 30/20 84ed 2os eth rep Grim Shield, 415 defense overall

It was kinda funny that everyone told me the armor and weapon would be the hardest to acquire trophy versions of those items but it ended up being that the armor, weapon, helm, and shield all ended up being somewhat hard to get. These 4 items - the weapon, armor, helm, and shield - basically make up the bulk of the barb's items in terms of what can be considered a rare trophy. The other stuff - the amulet, gloves, rings, boots - was all pretty basic stuff that could be purchased with ~5fg (stuff like IK Gloves and Belt, Angelics, etc.)

Based on LLD conc barb guides from LoD and people's trophy room posts of their LLD conc barbs, it was pretty clear that I needed a 30fbr/20icb 2os eth rep grim shield with enough ED on it so the overall defense would be 400+. I think this meant it needed around 80 ED at a minimum. Coincidentally, right before I decided to build an LLD char, two of these had just sold to other LLD folks, so I had terribly bad timing with this one. On top of that, I was told that those two were among the the only ~5 or so that existed in D2R. One of the known ones sold here and I can't seem to track down the thread where the other sold, but both sold for ~20k fg each. 20k fg is considered a fair amount for an LLD item so that just reflected the rarity of these shields.

At this point I was basically stuck bothering the two people who had recently bought these shields and seeing if they would sell to me for overpay (aka more than what they bought it for, so they could turn a profit). Obviously, neither person was willing to sell theirs at the time due to incredible rarity of these shields, regardless of how much fg I was offering. I knew there was a strong possibility that I would be using a temp grim shield for the foreseeable future (a temp is basically a grim shield with all of the right stats, but missing a socket). I really didn't wanna go down that route because every socket is so crucial in LLD (we'll get more to the jewels later and how crazy jewel hunting can get).

Eventually, I did settle for a temp, albeit a nice one (Eagle Guard):



Given the fact that my other items at this point (my helm, armor, weapon) were all "trophy" items, I knew I wasn't gonna be totally satisfied until I got something like this but with 2 soc, but this would do for the time being. These with only 1 soc are relatively cheap as there are many of them (~2k fg).

...

I continued to bother the two people I knew who had recently bought the 2os eth rep ones. My discord dm's from that time period are full of me annoying one person in particular about his that he recently bought. I also asked people like ferdia if I should just do something crazy and offer double what they paid (which would have been ~40k fg) to just try and persuade one of them to sell. I was advised that that would have been totally idiotic to do, and a 40k grim shield needed to have a lot of extra good stats (DGTM, life, etc) to justify a price tag like that. I was again told to be patient and wait for another one to pop up.

After ~2 months had passed with not a single good 2os eth rep Grim Shield appearing for sale, I started to get a little antsy and was more and more fine with the idea of making some ridiculous offer to try and get one of the two Grim shields I knew of...

Privately, I made an offer via d2Jsp to one of the people who had one of the Grims. I don't remember the exact details of my offer but I think it was something like ~25k fg and the Eagle Guard I was currently using so that the dude had a replacement. This honestly didn't seem totally crazy to me as it was only 5k fg more than what he paid, plus a temp shield replacement more as a "thank you" for selling me his. At this point, I think this person had bought the shield like two months prior. Apparently, I asked him at the right time because he was willing to give up his shield, and he finally accepted my offer. Finally, I had a 2os eth repair grim Shield with all of the right stats, Plague Tower:



I'm pretty sure a better one will spawn (ie, one with 90+ enhanced defense and potentially some DGTM or life mod). I'd be pretty interested in buying it whenever it pops up but I'm more than happy with this too.

GG

5. Armor upgrade

Hypothetical perfect : 100ed, 50-60 life, 2os eth rep Ornate Plate with 1300+ defense (bonus: strength or dexterity, -req)
My item (improvement over last one) : 86ed, 53 life, 2os eth rep Ornate Plate with 1257 overall defense

I had been using my Chaos Armor (100ed, 7str, 52life, 2os eth rep with only 1028 defense) for some time and it was working well. Based on the advice of others, I was looking out for a similar armor but in an Ornate Plate instead of Chaos Armor. I guess the defense is pretty vital to an LLD conc and I was missing out on a potential ~300 def by choosing a Chaos instead of an Ornate. Although the Chaos was cool for a lower strength build (because of its 130 str req), I was pretty sure that using IK gloves + Belt with an Ornate (160 str req) would be better if I could find a good one since I would only have to dump 5 points into strength to be able to wear it (IK stuff gets you to 155 str). The idea is that LLD conc barbs wear a decent amount of stat jewels so I could easily just put a +6 str jewel (with other mods) into shield or helm and not have to dump any strength to wear an Ornate. This is typically seen as a better conc build than going with a lower defense armor with 24 max jewels (which is what I was currently doing).

I guess good Ornates are hard to come by. The most desired stats were 2os eth repair with 90+ enhanced defense and 50-60 life and this is what I wanted. I'm not really sure if I knew of any at the time I was initially building my LLD conc and when I asked around, people directed to me to ones that were close but not quite what I wanted (there's quite a few of them with 50-75 ED and 30-50 life). I also was still learning about the differences between my Chaos Armor vs. using an Ornate - some people were telling me that I did not need to upgrade my Chaos Armor ever and I shouldn't look for an Ornate. So I was jumping back and forth a lot between sticking with the Chaos Armor and going on a more intense hunt for a good Ornate

Just as I was contemplating this, a buddy of mine coincidentally found a very sick ornate - it had 86 ed, +53 life, 2os eth rep with a total of 1257 defense. Some folks told me they hadn't even seen a better one yet. Because I wasn't entirely convinced it would be better than my Chaos armor, I didn't really jump on buying it immediately. I was actually helping this particular friend sell items as he did not have the time to do so, so he asked me to help sell it by making a d2Jsp thread and taking offers on it, which I did here. I kinda had it in the back of my mind that I might be willing to offer my friend 20k fg for it if no one else offered that high, because that's what I spent on the Chaos armor a couple months prior. I also decided that if someone else offered the 20k, I obviously would just sell it to them and stick with my Chaos.

I got slammed with pm's asking me BIN, but no one was willing to go to the 20k area. The highest it went was 15k and I received some messages that it would probably not go higher. I asked a few people if they thought 20k was reasonable and they said it was too high of a bin. I continued to bump the thread for a couple days to see if anyone would change their mind, but they did not. I think a couple of days after that I bit the bullet and offered my buddy 20k for it, which he accepted. (I guess I should mention I was able to immediately resell the Chaos Armor for the same price I got it for, which was nice)



It would be nice to get one with the same stats but 1300+ defense but this is definitely a top LLD conc armor and I am totally happy with it

This post was edited by Koston on Aug 6 2023 01:52pm

6. BvC detour

At some point, the lld gm melee scene kinda lost life pretty quick. I'd love for more people to come join so that we could start up an actual LLD gm melee ladder, but in the meantime it's pretty much dead. I continue to collect stuff for my conc almost just as a weird collector's urge at this point (I feel like he's already such a trophy char that at this point I just need to continue perfecting him for apparently no reason at all, lol).

For this reason though, it seemed like a good idea to get some items for my conc that would allow him to crossover to BvC and participate in regular non-melee duels as well, which I heard was very active on D2r. It seemed like there was a pretty lively LLD community based on the activity in Discord servers that I was seeing, so it didn't seem like a bad idea to get the items I needed to be able to join in. The problem with that was that I really only do gm melee duels and I haven't done non-melee duels since I was much younger on LoD. I've kinda lost my ability to do duels where teleport and similar game mechanics are involved. But I really did want to give it a go.

In my typical and annoying perfectionist way, I didn't really want to get into the BvC side of things unless I could get a similar Naga to the one I already had (the 30ias 163ed eth rep one) for my offhand. The thought of doing an LLD bvc with two eth rep rare Nagas did seem cool and I was drawn to that idea. I figured I would just buy any good BvC stuff I could find on ladder and wait for it to come to NL, starting with the Naga. After finding the Naga though, I know I would have to buy almost an entirely different set of gear that was more FCR-oriented than what I had for my conc. I needed at least one solid fcr ring, an fcr ammy, etc. The idea of buying all of this stuff didn't seem awesome, but it was still so much cheaper than what my HLD stuff cost me that I didn't care too much

At the time, those Nagas were still really hard to find. For IAS breakpoint stuff, I also needed this one to have 30ias, and again, I needed it to have some good ED so that it beat a Robo/Honor or at least was on par with it. I kind of knew immediately that I would not get something like I currently had in the 160-165ed range. It seemed statistically unlikely for one to even drop again anytime soon. So I was fine with a 30ias 120-140ed eth repair one as well.

After a month of searching, I was able to find one and purchase it (Glyph Rend):



It was pretty close to my main Naga, it had 30ias 130ed. I was pretty stoked on this and having two solid eth rep Nagas to try out to BvC with.

I was able to buy some other really nice BvC stuff, although the Naga was probably the nicest item I had for it.

Here's a ring and ammy I bought too:



Among other things like a tele staff with high mana, some nice ED jewels (I'll post about em soon) and other stuff.


As I've been slowly buying BvC stuff over the past 3 months though while waiting for ladder reset, I got more and more discouraged and unmotivated to try a BvC. I just don't really have the time to learn a whole new style of dueling, and it seemed like it was a lot to learn. Every single person I asked for tips/advice about LLD BvC was giving me wildly different information about what build I should use versus which class, how to play, etc. It started to seem rather daunting and I realized that ultimately I would probably just stick to my gm melee duels. This led me to sell my 2nd Naga (Glyph Rend, pictured above) to give someone else a chance to own a really cool rare weapon. I ended up getting the same price that I paid for it which was nice (since it was kinda expensive). I still have the other BvC items I bought, so if I ever do decide to go down that path, I will just use an Honor/Robo as my offhand instead of a rare weapon.

This post was edited by Koston on Aug 6 2023 06:40pm

7. The damn jewels

Well, I was kinda dreading writing this part of the blog because there's so much to write. I quickly realized early into my foray into LLD that getting your GEAR is one thing, and getting your JEWELS for your gear is, well, a whole other (incredibly shitty) thing. Actually, getting your jewels is the most difficult part of making an LLD character IMO, and I think it's the reason why it can take months upon months, if not years, to actually fully "complete" your character.

Let's start with a few notes regarding things I've learned about LLD melee jewels, and I'll throw in some comparisons to HLD melee jewels since that's what I'm familiar with

1. Good LLD jewels in general are scarce. Why? Many botters (especially big mass botting operations based in Asia) do not pick up many LLD items besides basic things such as 3/20/15 charms and things that are easy to look for. LLD jewels are complicated in that it's not exactly common knowledge what their perfect stats are. For example, almost everyone playing D2r/Lod knows that a 30/60/9/9 is perfect, that they are extremely valuable, and that it specifically refers to a 30ed/60ar/9str/9dex jewel. By comparison, the LLD equivalent would be 20/60/6/9. First of all, that looks fuckin weird and seems random. Second, its not super common knowledge to botters in Asia (where LLD isn't even played) that 20ed is perfect on an LLD jewel instead of 30ed, and that 6str is perfect instead of 9str. I'm not saying that we have 30/60/9/9 jewels in abundance (I haven't even seen 1 on D2r), but there is a plethora of 20-30ed/50-60ar/8-9dex/8-9 str jewels at least, and they get cheaper and cheaper all the time (you can get one for 3k fg, or like 20 or 30 bucks). Meanwhile, there's very few of the LLD equivalent. In fact, there's very few that even have just 3/4 perfect mods (ie, there's really only a few 20ed/6str/9dex jewels... forget about having a useful fourth mod, lol). When they do appear, they are far more expensive than the HLD equivalent at this point. A 19ed/51ar/6str/9dex (1 ed and 9 ar off perfect for LLD) sold for over ~10k fg which is considered really costly for an LLD jewel. I suspect these will only increase in price too.

(On another note, even outside of botting, casual magic finders and PvMers are less likely to pick up and keep good LLD jewels for this same reason - they simply don't know what a good LLD jewel is, they see them and think they are Charsi, and toss them. Whereas they usually do know what a good HLD jewel is when they see one. I myself bought a 100% perfect 7fhr/30ed/9str/9dex jewel off a casual non-botting player on d2Jsp who simply found it while doing Trav runs, which is insane, but it happened.)

2. Because really high-end LLD gear is scarce in general, you really only want to socket perfect (or damn near perfect) LLD jewels into high-end gear when you're finally able to get it. Imagine in LoD buying a crazy 5 bo barb viso that was 2os eth repair with crazy stats and putting in crap jewels. That's gross and no one would do that. The same is true of LLD. When you get a very sick 2os eth repair Ornate for example, you really want the best jewels to go in there. For a collector, perfectionist, or someone just looking to make a trophy char in general, this leads to a dilemma: not only do you have to find the very rare gear to begin with, but then you need to find even rarer jewels to put inside, and tbh, this chase for 100% or 99% perfect LLD jewels seems to be never ending because the jewels just simply never appear.

The only good thing I had on my side was the fact that I was not after ED (enhanced damage) jewels. Instead, i was after jewels with FLAT DAMAGE... (ie, +minimum or +maximum damage). These are less sought after so when they do appear, they're actually a bit cheaper than ED jewels. ED jewels are used by BvC because the ED scales well with whirlwind, and BvC is far more popular than conc. Conc should use Flat dmg jewels because that scales much better with Concentrate than %ED...

OK, so what this means is I'm looking for flat damage jewels with some combination of the following stats that are good for gm melee barbs: AR, dexterity, strength,-15 requirements (low priority as I am going with a high strength build), and defense

Here are some hypothetical 100% perfect examples of jewels that would be very cool to have (all 4 stat jewels with completely perfect mods)



These jewels look simple but keep in mind they are damn near impossible to find due to pts #1 and #2 above. Other things to note are that each socket in LLD is extremely important due to the amount of damage/life/AR/defense it can add, so jewels feel much more meaningful in LLD than HLD. And there's a small group of people who are fiending for these jewels due to their scarcity. And, finally, because of my "trophy" items that I've already mentioned above (mainly the armor, shield, and last helm), I was absolutely set on getting 90-100% perfect jewels to put in them or I would not be satisfied, loool

Sooo.. this leads to my jewel ISO:



This post was edited by Koston on Aug 6 2023 09:12pm