The gold find barb is a favorite toon of many D2 players. Although it does not kill anything, your barb will have no problem surviving.
Overview
make your barbarian impervious
Make your merc into a killing machine!
gamble your gold or sell it for FG
Your Gear
weapons
2x duel lem'd ali baba (dont even attempt to argue this, you simply cannot win)
*switch 3/3/3 CTA, hoto (resist do not matter)
Ali babas simply provide the best 2 stats for your GF barb, and the loss of 160 GF at lvl 88 is justified by the 176 MF you get
Helm
5 BO Delirium (also look for find item and battle cry)
screw CoT, get skills and maintain some amount of gold find + MF
Armor
Wealth Arcon
there just isnt anything better for this slot... if you use must enigma then you are loosing so many benefits
Belt, gloves, rings
80 GF goldwrap
40 MF Chancies
2x dwarf star
best in slot
Boots and Amulet (the hard to find stuff)
In order to make your barb the best he can be, you need to find tri res boots and 4 res ammy.
this is vital so you do not have to put more than 1 point in natural resistance and can pick up more iron skin

here are my boots and ammy

Boots
Light res 39
fire res 40
poison res 36
goldfind 70
MF 18

not the absolute best you can get but these do the job.
Amulet
1 Barb skills
56 Cold res (rare +47 res mod)
19 all other resist
Goldfind 72
MF 16

so here is what the resist look like over all

-100 (hell base)
+ 30 (all anya quests)
+20 (min from torch and anny)
+52 (lvl 8 natural resistance, 1 point, +3 form torch, +1 from anny, +2 form Deli, +1 from ammy or BC)
= 2 All res in hell
not impressive... here is where the gear comes in

up to 40 in 3 different res from boots
ammy with up to 20 in the same res as boots and up to 57 in the other

this turns out to give roughly 60 all resist. any additonal from torch or anny, and you are set.

the over all stats of my suit are here
Gold find 1696 before inventory or merc
Magic Find 405 before inventory or merc
resist
Fire res 71
cold res 68
Light res 68
poison res 70
10k armor post buff (30% chance to be hit@ lvl 88)

I would sudjest filling your inventory with 40 GF GCs and 10 GF SCs, but any GC can be replaced by a WC Skiller with any ammount of GF
The idea here isnt to have max GF (and MF), simply to have the stat on as many items as possible

Merc suit and stats
Might Act 2 merc
EBOTD War pike (nuts damage, simply the best you can get)
Ebugged fort (30/1.5 necessary for when the Counsel has conviction
Crown of thieves MUST HAVE A CHAM RUNE IN IT!
w/O Cham, your merc just gets owned...
After buff stats
5k HP
26k Defense
9-16k Damage
your merc will just rape everything in 1 or 2 attacks

Skills
War crys
MAX BO
MAX Shout
MAX Find Item (preference, most people just put it to 50%)
(1 in all other WCs except grimward)
Combat masterys
1 Increase stamina
1 incrase speed
MAX Iron skin
1 natural Resistance

Combat skills
atleast 1 in Leap
*CAUTION, NO NOT EXCEED LVL 11 LEAP WITH SKILLS
BEYOND THAT, YOU LESSEN YOUR ABILITY TO HELP YOUR MERC


How to play in trav runs
1. run everywhere and leap over enemies (seams trivial)
2. go down to Durrance lvl 1 and prebuff
3. hop out of the Durrance. Leap onto your merc and Battle cry everything
this is my we do not exceed lvl 11 leap... the KB puts them out of range of Battle cry
4. War cry stun everything as you pick up gold and items
pick up all gold and items you want before you start using Find Item, the screen will get too crouded
5. Wait till everything is dead (minus Phys immune brem) THEN use find item.

Run stats
Time roughly 1 min
gold found 250k-1.7 mill (average of 700k)
Items tons of rare rings/ammys/charms not many runes


I Fill up on gold about every 4th run, then i gamble it away (make sure you have an Edge rune word bow)
One item i find tons of are Tiaras (rare and magic), i have found a few good ones, but the fact that i find them here is surprising.


Conclusion
your barb should never die...
your merc should never die (provided you assist him with WC and BC)
your intake of gold and items will be massive
If selling in game gold for FG (@1 FG per mill) you can make 35+ FG an HR easy

This guide is original but not perfect. If you can provide any reasoning for changes, let me know and i will test them.

Thanks for reading and submit all comments to me VIA PM as well as posting them here.

ZOMG_Goldfinger

whirler or brand amper>this

have a link?

no. both have been posted in this subforum thou

i read them, his number are not bad, but it seams underpowered... they cant stand up to my merc

Stopped reading here. (Moved right for the merc gear to see if you made anymore mistakes, which I was right)

I believe you need to recheck the stickies.

P.S



That is a most horrible merc setup.

This post was edited by Synonym on Jun 30 2010 02:29pm

No its not.

And for once people arent talking about killing stuff themself. If you want max profit, you let the merc kill, and his merc setup works exellent. Frozen armor dosent make any real impact. No need for high res fort or cham though, merc dosent die.

Wouldnt use delerium though, it sucks to turn in a fight. Prefer 3xlemed high EG circ, CoT or even IK helm for mf+EG. Also, enigma is much easier to use than wealth, also makes your merc more potent, as you can position him easier. Leap sucks, tele + war cry/battle cry to stun and lower dmg.

I would kill the classic bosses+eldrich,pindle inn the same run, to give you more rares. hork, getting 4 goldens a boss

This post was edited by LouisCyphre on Jun 30 2010 03:12pm

So wrong

I'm also assuming you're doing solo runs?

i agree with most of your build, its fun and works.
But you can still improve your merc, and definitely your skills.

In case you do your runs in solo games, there is really no need to max iron skin. Instead, you got other skills that even help your merc a lot.
imo max BO, Shout, War Cry and Battle Cry
war cry stuns and injures your enemies a bit (crowd control together with leap), and battle cry lowers def and dmg of your enemies = faster killing merc
i chose to stop at 45% find item, but you can still get 50 while maxing the other 4 and putting some in nat resists, iron skin and preqs.

now for merc equip:
imo speed > extra gf
exchange CoT for guillaume`s helm because of cb and ds = faster killing merc
and cham is not needed at all from my experience
maybe even get an eth upped hone sundan to reach 80+ cb, but then u might have to throw your merc a potion once in a while cuz he aint got no ll anymore.

you could also enchant him real quick with demon limb or get gravel of pain for amp charges on switch