ye but it was a matter of balancing vs life leech and any barb building around it would trivially leech through it
honor has 7%, string has 8%, and they could have other sources if they're swapping like circlet, sigons, craft rings/boots, even etlich and its offset by their % dr so that string build is 15% there on top of the leech
edge is 810% with 1/8 penalty
I really don't know what the penalty is on spirit of barbs in d2r or whether they removed it, but you could get as high as 15 spirit and have 221 integer reflected, which at best is 37.5 damage to a 0% dr opponent which frankly isn't worth using even in this contrived scenario
since there's no penalties in norm its like 1% life leech = 47% thorns, so 15% leech = 705% thorns and some % dr on string pushes that back to healing. Ex you deal 1000 damage to a bear, it loses 1000 life, reflects 1012.5 damage, honor string barb loses 146.3 life, but leeches back 150 life
Fun times! find a cocky barb with low LL and get off maybe 1 kill to troll.
Worrywart had a similar BM build but it was summon necro, if it got off a tele stomp it could surprise some people.
my attempt at that type build was a poi dagger sin, with OW. if it got a single stab on an ES sorc they just died in 1 shot. but such a pain to get the dmg u want and enough AR to hit something, plus 75% block on everyone it was really a tough char to play in anything but tvt. there it worked because it was just a support char that used only MB unless we got advantage and i'd tele kick in and try to hit a dagger.
its a shame the dmg scales so hard on the lvl of poi dagger charges, because rings and gloves give such a low lvl compared to dagger, otherwise u could use Jade and get CBF. never did find a 2 os, 20 ias, AR stack, charges dagger. had to slum it with a larzuk'd magic one.
D2:R