Why did you settle on beast?

Revisited the goldfind barb this season, running the grief zerker variant optimized to average 12-13min to 10mil runs. Still have avenues for improvement and looking to push sub 10 runs

Ultimately the gameplay is not so different than the gavel barb, and my merc ends up doing about 40% of the work. Is there a consensus best merc setup yet? Couldn't muster the courage to comb through the 200 pages.

I did have a look at op's profile and tested both coh botd wp Andy and coh botd gt gully setups, could not identify which was better. Going to testrun forti to see if the 300ed can outdo the corpse losses

Anyone done some extensive testing with a zerk/ww setup to determine bis merc? Plz no theoretical maxroll links, can't trust those. I've tried ariocs and that crap is cheeks compared to botd, despite what the planner says

WW uses the mainhands weapon range so that's why I am using BeastZ on the mainhand and it doesn't matter which is the main hand for ww in d2r for damage.

Aside from the obvious that the Beast buffs both you and the merc once you amp using Gavel on switch and you keep the gf when you are killing the mobs thanks to lem'ed eth runemaster.

I have done some trials but didn't take any logs but there was a little bit difference favoring BOTD but not much if they have the same breakpoints. May be off from the breakpoint using Arioc's?

edit - not the same usually but 0.5 frame lower for BOTD

This post was edited by eng36 on Jan 18 2026 03:57am

Im not sure but i think it has to do with the low dmg of ariocs when not landing a crit, gives council enough time to heal up, possibly several times

Could just be variance / small sample size, but botd was much faster for me

Might be a variance issue in my tests (small sample too) as well if there is no breakpoint missed on your tests.

Low damage should have evened out since the council has around 140k health and one hit is around 7k for Arioc and 14k for BOTD but there might be something there about the whether the chance to heal is based on amount of hits taken by a council member.

This post was edited by eng36 on Jan 18 2026 04:32am

There's a bunch of variants that are ~1% apart in overall efficiency, but not cham'ing your merc helm is a massive leak.

True, but it doesn't change the builds viablity since the helm doesn't need ias.

I'm still running this after a lot of trial and error.

WTF is that stick, gz mate. Self found?