Nice guide! I made one myself using IK helm on barb and an act 5 merc with ebotd, eth wealth and eth CoT. Works wonders and pulls in around 400-500k a run

I made one too.. i have coh and eth bonehew with CoT on merc, and he can kill the council on hell izily, prolly because of the high lifeleech.. pulls in some nice money
Thank you much for guide

nice guide

my friend has been took 1 botd in ba and he kill travi alone: ) he`s max gold from run-1,2 mln ;] no 10 runs 2mln

AM i wrong or doesnt it make sense to use a diadem when gambling for circlets?

Some of you have this right. But to sit back and watch your merc kill is boring and you will have trouble doing it in hell. Seems that there are a million ideas flying around in this thread. I'll sum up my ww gf barb.
Here is my guide that I just can't seem to get posted.. Kills hell trav EZILY. I won't post everything b/c some items can be changed as mentioned before in the first 11 pages of this thread.
I can't get on D2 to confirm all the numbers so I'm taking guesses, as soon as I can I will edit.

Weapons
EBOTD zerker
Grief zerker orBeast zerker (grief works better)
2 x dual lem'd ali babas
HELM- LEM'd COT - Can be switched with Lem'd arreats(DL + skills+ GF)/or ik
ARMOR - Wealth -
BELT - 1 x up'd Goldwrap-
Gloves - 2 x up'd chancies-
Rings - 2 x Dwarf
Boots- 80%fg/30frw/minor modes boots-
AMMY- 70%/2 wc ammy-
charms
6x 10max/60ar/40GF gcs -
7x 3/15+/10% gf scs -
Gheeds
annihulus
torch
8x empty spaces to loot- A hoz might drop and you won't have anywhere to put it ;-)

Merc - NM offensive (MIGHT)
COT - lem's
Eth SA Wealth-1200 defense
Eth cv Pride

With both auras from merc barb does 6k damage with ebotd. I forget what the grief did, somewhere b/w 1500-2k

Strength - 180 with gear/charms
dex -not much needed- enuff for babas - you will get high enuff ar with the charms
vitality - once i reached 4.5k life with BO, i started spliting the unused stats with vit and strength for extra damage
Energy- none into this crap. You will leech enuff

Skills
20 ww
20 axe mastery
20 BO
Find Item- I didn't want to max this so I aimed at a 50% chance to drop item with gear
I will have to check other skills and edit when i can look at the character but i know it went something like this
5 - natural resists- You will leech and sorb enuff - if you use lem'd arreats only 1 is needed here
1 - Iron skin
left overs - Battle cry - If i remember correctly, this is the one that add defenses. Instead of maxing iron skin to max your defense only, this will add to you and your merc


As already mentioned, don't shatter any trav's with any cold damage from you or merc.

Max gold drop in one trav run is a little over 900k. Average is 3-500k. Smallest amount that i remember is 130k.

Is it bad to max sword mastery for the 6 lemed crystal swords??

you can easily convert a ww barb into a hell trav gf barb:

helm: crown of thieves
weaps: grief zerk and ebotdz
switch: dual lem ali babas
armor: wealth
belt: goldwrap
glove: chancies
rings: dwarfs
boots: infernostrides
charms: wc charms w/ life or gf... really doesnt matter
torch/anni of course

skills
max ww
max axe mastery
max shout
max bo
1 in speed, stamina, bc, iron skin
a few in nat resist, a few in find item

this guy can run hell trav (dont bring merc cuz he usually dies) and i averaged 400,000 gold per run as opposed to 200-400 on the nm variant. remember to hork with switched weaps (the babas). bring blue pots in case they have mana burn. you really shouldnt die if you keep ww'ing. you also have better chance of good items in hell so i say hell gf barb > nm gf barb... plus hes more fun to play. just my two cents, the original guide works fine too.

if you use the original build and you wanna kill stuff then maybe you could use 2x 5lem'd rune master axes. i believe they do like 200+ max damage so you could do some killing with those + ww or frenzy

Apologies if someone has mentioned this already....i couldn't seem to find any mention of using 'Pride' on the merc.

Pride does far more dmg than eth bonehew, as well as giving uninterrubtible attack (from conc), pride also has gf / lvl.... if u get merc to decent lvl (80+) i'm sure this gives more gf, than bonehew ' lem lem'.

Anyone got any comments?