Ranged Barbarian Solo Inferno Guide

Ranged Barbarian Solo Inferno Guide submitted by Danger#2335.

Gear

Build

How it Works

Act Strategies

Whimsyshire

I had a hard time with my barbarian tank spec in Act II inferno and further of course. And since I don't want to reroll to another other class, I've been reading and and experimenting a lot with skills/runes. Then I finally found a solution for most of the fights and "easy" elite/champion farming.

GEAR:

Most of the gear is very cheap stuff with focus on %crit chance and strength. Since you don't need survival stats (I'm farming whimsy shire inferno with 13k hp, 55k damage, 44% crit chance, 273% crit damage), getting gear with just 2 stats is easy.

If you can afford more stats, go for MF or other stats allowing you to do more damage (crit damage, +damage, attack speed,..). Only exception is the belt - you definitely want belt with bonus to weapon throw skill (reducing the cost up to 5 fury, the better you can get, the less you will be fury dependent).

BUILD:

LEFT MOUSE BUTTON - Weapon Throw (Ricochet)
RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON - Ignore Pain (Ignorance is Bliss)

1 - Leap (Death from Above)
2 - War Cry (Charge!)
3 - Wrath of the Berserker (Insanity)
4 - Earthquake (The Mountain's Call)

Passives: Ruthless, Weapon Master, No Escape

Follower: Enchantress with CC skills, mine has 5,2k dps, which helps a bit (the AoE is nice).

HOW IT WORKS:

Ignore pain + Leap are your defensive skills, use them for reducing damage when you can, or leap to/or from the fight, depending if you want to jump to safety, or to jump+stun enemy to buy you more time (for example, stun the enemy while he is in the earthquake and then die is sometimes only way to kill  a fast+illusionist+teleporter+something enemy).

War Cry is your main fury generator, because you don't have any melee ability. Use it whenever you really need fury to use weapon throw, or when you want to launch the wrath+eq. Weapon Throw you should use every time you can and aim the fastest enemies (the ability has 60% slow and I use it in this sequence: throw+run for 1sec+throw+run for 1sec…).

Soon they will be all slowed/blocking the enemies behind them or dead just few moments later:-) Also, the weapon throw with fury discount (up to 5 from belt) is awesome and combined with No Escape passive skill, critical hits will get you fury back. It's why critical chance over 30% is crucial to this build and why it is working. With nice mace/axe (mine is 1254 dps (1155-1634), 0.9 speed, 112 str, 63+60(gem) critical damage) you will get 15% just for weapon master+ruthless. Also aim for the biggest weapon damage (not the dps), because abilities do % of weapon damage.

The speed is nice and allows you to fire a bit faster, but you will fire one by one with running in the meanwhile, so the speed doesn't matter too much. Just by the way, right now I'm hitting for 30-40k and the critical hits go for 100-130k. With Wrath of the Berserker up, my crit chance is 50% and critical damage hits for +- 250k not mentioning the ricochet effect (dealing up to 750k total damage to groups of mobs per hit). And I started using this build in Act III progress with 800 dps weapon (about 25k dps) just let you know, that my current gear is double the stats from the one I started with.

Guide continued after the page break..


ACT STRATEGIES:

- Anything in ACT I or II - Wrath+Earthquake will melt anything in seconds. With my current gear,  Butcher is a question of 3-4 seconds (not the fastest, I've seen faster.. but with better gear and maybe very specific build with Battle Rage, Berserker Rage and pre-generated fury to 100 before fight starts, I guess there will soon or later be barbarians with 1sec kill :-))

- ACT III - With this build, you should be able to kill any boss in Act III (wasn't tested on Ghom because It was easy enough with public group) with some training, including the Siegebreaker (kite, shoot when at max range, learn his abilities and move from them), Cydaea (same tactics, just with killing the adds too),

Azmodan (since it's really hard to be not hitter with the fireball when there is AoE everywhere, what I had to do was kill him in seconds.. wrath, little bit shooting and at +- 50% use ignore pain + leap(stun) + earthquake to nuke him down while you probably will die). Also don't forget to switch ricochet rune for the one that does 130% (143% with weapon throw bonus from belt), but only 1 hit.

- ACT IV - You will probably have to do some changes to get through first encounter (Ishtaku if I'm correct). Just survive few seconds and then wrath+earthquake to melt the mini boss down. Then continue with the build further. Biggest challenge I had was the Izual.. you can't take him down with this build, I had to use the best tank gear I had (far from good), but keep the 2h to have 22k dps at least.

The crucial skills were Leap (to jump to safety for few seconds), Ignore pain (to reduce damage whenever it seems that something will hit you), Call of the Ancients (to add few npc's, that will attract those Oppressors summoned at 60-70% in phase 2 and care of them) and Sprint with tornadoes, your main damaging ability in this fight. Just keep running around the room in biggest circle and keep sprint up.

You will also need War Cry (Charge!) to have fury generator and Ground Stomp to use when there is something very close to you or to combine it with leap (leap, then ground stomp to stun it and slow for 3 more seconds). Of course, take the passive skill, which let's you store your fury and generate it also slowly. Kiting Izual is the easiest part when you run in the biggest circle (so he will not charge you).

Only part where you can fail after few attempts is the oppressor part and later also the fallen angel part - when I managed to kill him, I successfully avoided the angels, leaving them in middle of the room.

- After Izual, getting to the Diablo is easy, but this guide will not cover the fight itself, since I didn't kill Diablo yet (however I was able to survive in tank build, I had just 6k dps, which would take hour to fight, so I decided to keep farming for better weapon.

The most important thing is, that when you get to the Diablo, before the fight you can already purchase plans for Infernal Staff of Herding from the merchant in town and for 1.8M total costs you can get access to whimsyshire.

- WHIMSYSHIRE -

 I'm farming it right now with the ranged build and 92% base magic find (167% with 5 nephalem valor stacks). What you want is to go to festering woods and kill 2 elites (each in 1 of the two small caves) + 2 elites out of the caves (the map is not so big), then go to cemetery and luckily you will find elite near the waypoint, or you go to crypts and find some there. With 5 stacks you go to the Whimsyshire (there is already many guides how to find it) and start farming.

It will be hard at the beginning, because you will die in 1 hit from everything, but you will hit very hard and learn to avoid most of the damage (kiting) over time. Also you will be able to kill 95% elite packs/champions with some training. Only combinations with shielding/invulnerable minions/missile dampening might be hard - so pull them to away, die and continue.

In the end.. get used to the fact that you will die. But it definitely works and is playable with quite cheap gear (< 1 mil., most of it for weapon). Go for pure damage, and ignore the survivability stats, because you will die anyway (even as tank) if you don't have 20M+ for the best gear.

I guess this (melee classes are whole new difficulty on inferno) will be addressed and fixed in an upcoming patch, but why should we wait, when there is always way and powerful build to allow you progress :-)