I've been working on a single player frenzy barb. I'm starting feel like there is this 'dead zone' in the gearup process where you need to find elite bases to start doing better damage but your current damage is so shitty that there's no way to efficiently farm areas that drop those bases. Even with 75% crushing blow, farming P1 lvl85 areas is still slow as hell since my exceptional-tier weapons don't hit that hard.

I realize that respeccing War Cry is an option, but I'm making a point to play a melee barb this because I want to force myself to learn about weapon progression in D2.

What kind of weapons would you plan to be making along the way? Hoping a Headstriker drops doesn't constitute an actual plan.

What are the best exceptional bases and runewords to use to farm Hell for the elite bases you really want? Honor or Passion in a Naga/Zweihander/Divine Scepter?

Should I be using Berserk or Frenzy as my main skill?

This post was edited by Kayeto on Jun 20 2019 08:29pm

frenzy

farm nightmare until dual butchers

enter hell farm cuntness for some runes (ok place to find bases too if kill easy mobs before countness + pop rakes if happen to be on way)

upgrade butchers or make a rw if have good base and runes.

Make 1x lawbringer and go pits (will make ur life 100x easier)

If you go with Berserk, you can farm countess to make an obedience polearm. That would beat hell easily.

dual butchers, upgraded.
crescent moon is an awesome runeword for early hell.
eth oath is also quite decent pre-grief.
lawbringer is also amazing. 'lem' is the highest rune required and gives decriptify so you practically take no damage -- or if you run a5 merc throw one in a pb for him.
grief is a no brainer and easy-ish to make since Lo is the only high rune required. Mal you can get from countess fairly easily.

what bases would you recommend?

I ran countess many times(checking the racks and rerolling trying to spawn Phase Blade racks) and only managed to get one white Phase Blade which sadly rolled 2 sockets.

I'm trying to determine a reasonably efficient path to good elite bases (zerk, caddy, pb, cb). What are the ideal exceptional bases to use as a stepping stone?

This post was edited by Kayeto on Jun 20 2019 11:58pm

pb (-30) is typically your goal since it's so easy to achieve higher ias breakpoints. you can check an ias calculator and enter your gear and +ias to determine what your breakpoint would be depending on your weapon.

http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/items/elite/swords.shtml

... but the whole question from the beginning is ...



I'm trying to determine the most efficient way to get to the elite bases

so click on the link, click exceptional and do the same thing as mentioned above.

that's what I did before making this post, which led to the question in the original post:



I posted my best guesses but was hoping to engage other D2 fans in a discussion to get their opinions as well.