[3.0] The Honest Barbarian (Blood Magic, Starforge)

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5L Cyclone, 6L Heavy Strike

Flasks and Warchief are unchecked, you can check them for more deeps.
Phase Run should remain unchecked, I heavily doubt this really offers 30% more damage all the time.

Level 94

Progression:
1) Follow the path to Resolute Technique.
2) Grab Blood Magic and Mortal Conviction, do not take the stuff along the way.
3) Enter the Duelist zone, grab everything there.
4) Take the long journey to Vaal Pact, so you can allocate it once you finished your uber lab.
5) Jewel sockets last. First the sockets for 2 points, then the ones for 3 points.

Along the journey, when your damage feels a bit weak, grab the damage nodes, otherwise grab life, life, life.

Bandits
Kill all.

Ascendancy
Greedy: 40% damage before 100% life leech.
Safe: The other way around.

Pantheon
Brine King: Even though we cannot be stunned during Cyclone, I like the "cannot be frozen" part when the Brine King is upgraded.
Gruthkul: reflect protection seems to be quite useful.

Why Acrobatics?
Why not? As a 2h build that aims for Kaom's, we won't have any meaningful amounts of armour in lategame, so we may as well grab the 30% chance to dodge for 1 point.

Main attack:
Cyclone
+Brutality
+Melee physical damage
+Fortify
+Increased AoE / concentrated effect
+Maim
You can get away without fortify when you put it on your leap slam instead, but I find that very inconvenient. So I lower my DpS a bit, but constantly have it up without any worries. If you choose to do otherwise, add Ruthless or faster attacks as the 6th gem.

4L - Warchief
+Brutality
+Melee physical damage
+x
I chose Vengeance here so this skill also gets 2 damage supports, but it's really up to you. You could also add a third link to your Warchief, like Maim.
Another option is to use Vengeance and Warchief for pure utility, with curse on hit and a curse of your choice.

4L - Cast when damage taken
+Immortal Call
+Increased Duration
+x
I like Phase Run here. It lets you move through monsters, which is very helpful for Cyclone, you cannot get cornered. But don't forget to uncheck it in PoB, I highly doubt its damage bonus is very reliable. ;)
Note that Immortal Call duration is very short, but it's enough to save your life with this setup, in example when you hit a reflect rare.
Another choice would be Blood Rage to generate frenzy charges, but Blood Rage + Vaal Pact feels horrible, in my opinion. You can also stick in Vaal Haste or Vaal Grace, they will not be triggered automatically, but they benefit from increased duration.
Or you use a Golem, but my Barbarian wants to fight alone.

2L - Leap Slam
+faster attacks.

This leaves 2 more sockets you can use for whatever you want. You could turn Leap Slam into a 3-4L, give it Fortify and another utility gem like Culling Strike. Or you use the 2 remaining sockets for something else. I put my Vaal Grace here.

No Enduring Cry?
Barbarians don't cry. ;)

If you don't have a Kaom's Heart, you have 6 more sockets.
Feel free to do whatever you want, maybe turn your warchief into a 5-6L.
Or you can use the gem setup I use in "Endgame Luxury" in your chestpiece.

This character is pretty easy and straightforward to gear because we can use a lot of rare items. It's enough to have mediocre resists on every piece, you don't need to shoot for super expensive triple high tier resist pieces.

Weapon:
1) Some cheap unique (5L on a super cheap rare chest)
2) Some 500 DpS rare/unique with a 5L
3) Starforge 5L
4) Starforge 6L
5) A second Starforge, see chapter "Luxury in Endgame"

Rest:
1) Once you enter maps, always have 75% to all elemental resists.
2) Try to aim for high life rolls everywhere.
3) Try to get a bit of flat intelligence on your helmet or amulet, so you can use blue gems.
4) Try to get some chaos resist, poison ground can be quite annoying with Vaal Pact
5) Luxury: Cyclone enchant on helmet, attackspeed on gloves, movespeed on boots, flat physical damage on rings and amulet.
6) Kaom's Heart

Jewels:
1) Aim for 6-7% life on every jewel.
2) Attackspeed with swords is the best affix to scale DpS.
3) If you want more damage affixes, it starts to get really expensive, so I would settle for a resistance or some other minor bonus instead. It's really nice if you can find "chance to shock" on a jewel or two once you have Starforge, since physical damage can shock with that thing.

I do not recommend Belly of the Beast in this guide. I collect so much % life in the tree, the difference between a +100 life rare chest and a 40% belly is minimal.

In the current version, this belt is BiS for almost every build because it adds another "more multiplier" to our damage with intimidate:

This build is no exception, though a rare belt with high life and resists will also be fine.

Flasks:
Get freeze removal and bleed removal. Add immunity to curses if you can. Fill the rest with DpS.
I really like this setup:

With Vaal Pact, you don't really need a life flask, but I find it nice to have in some situations.

When you have your Kaom's heart and your 6L Starforge, but still have currency to spend: Buy a second Starforge. A 5L is enough here, though a 6L would certainly be even more p.i.m.p. ... ;)

You can now do Press "x" for single target:


For maximum effect, use two Weight of the Empire jewels, one in the socket left of marauder start, one in the socket below duelist start.

This setup will more than double your killspeed against lategame bosses. And for any non-boss out there, even in t17, this 5L setup is more than enough, except 1-2 scenarios, like the ads of Chimera or the t15 beachhead map boss encounter: swap in concentrated effect then.

In case you're wondering: Do not put an active skillgem into the 6th socket of the 5L Starforge. It messes with the weapon swap skill allocation, you'll sometimes find your enduring cry (or whatever you put there) on your right mouse button instead of cyclone.

This is 9.2k life, ~100k Cyclone DpS unbuffed (basically on a 3L) and ~700k Heavy Strike DpS with all flasks up and warchief down.

Uber Lab:
Vaal Pact is horrible in Lab. So invest 1-2 regret orbs to remove it. Put the point into the .8% regen at marauder start, or just leave it unallocated.

Physical reflect and/or no life leech maps:
Just don't.

Atziri
With the heavy strike setup, we simply delete her.
With cyclone, be careful in the split phase not to spin around too much and hit the one holding up a mirror. ;)

Guardians:
With Kaom's Heart, you can facetank everything Minotaur and Hydra do, unless you stack too many damage mods on the map.
For Chimera, the only dangerous parts are cloud phase (be quick) and the ads, though I can facetank them most often.
Against Phoenix, you need to dodge his AoE fire attack. Rest is pretty much facetanking, though I recommend to take your time to kill the little firebirds from time to time.

Shaper:
We have easily enough damage to keep Zana alive during the minion phase.
The rest is up to you and your mechanic skills. I bricked a couple sets until I finally understood what I have to do: dodge more, facetank less, this is the opposite of what I do in all other content. ;)

Uber Atziri:
Didn't try her yet. But I killed the Vaal trio in corrupted t16, and Atziri herself is, again, a very mechanical fight.

The following chapter is by no means necessary for progression, you can clear all content without it.

Resolute Technique puts a limit on your DPS, that's the price you pay for the convenience of never having to bother with accuracy. Maybe you get level 21 on some gems, maybe you divine your Starforge to perfection, maybe you have t1 flat phys on steel rings etc.
But those are all minor increases in DpS, you'll reach some sort of "soft cap", with this build, it will be around 900k to 1 million Heavy Strike DpS in PoB with all flasks up, buffed by warchief etc.

If this somehow isn't enough for you, the logical progression is: we go crit.
This puts two new DpS suffixes into the mix, crit chance and crit multiplier, and a third suffix (accuracy) that you also need to adress a bit.
Because resistances are also suffixes, all those stand in each others way, so you need better resistances on your gear slots, which allows you to spend even more exalted orbs for gear upgrades. Hooray!

With the tree above, we are already sitting next to all relevant crit clusters:
*Disemboweling at the right of RT
*Fatal Blade and Heart Seeker near the ranger jewel socket
*Assassination in Shadow Start

However, you cannot just cut 13 points from the old tree (14 points for the crit nodes, -1 for RT), you'll need a new layout. The most efficient one is probably this:
Click me for a lvl 95 tree
This will cost around 40-45 orbs of regret if you do it correctly.

Then you add "increased critical strikes" to your Cyclone and Heavy Strike, you now use a Diamond Flask, and you buy a new amulet that not only has life and flat physical damage, but also crit multiplier, ideally even accuracy and crit chance (if you can afford).

My setup:

(Accuracy is handled via one ring suffix, that's 90% chance to hit)

You could also try to get all your resists without the helmet, and then use a Starkonja's or even an Abyssus (a bit suicidal, I wouldn't do that), but that was a bit too costly for me, I would have had to change too many gear slots.

Apart from the increased gear cost, you also pay with lower life.
Expect your life total to drop by around 10% (I went from ~9400 to ~8600 with the new tree).

What you get is some very spiky damage output, between "a bit lower than with RT" and "Holy shit, that boss just disappeared!".
No matter what you try, you will not get the consistency of a dagger or wand build, you will stay at around 40% crit chance, maybe 50% when you're really pushing it.
This also means that crit alone won't do too much for your DpS, it will maybe go up by ~30-40% (you lost a more multiplier support gem, some normal damage from the tree, and the chance to hit is no longer 100%).

But you get some crazy top end damage, when Ruthless, Crit and Weight of the Empire trigger at the same time (x2, x2, x4, that's "normal damage x16"!). What this allows you to do, is to click "target is shocked" in PoB. With such crazy damage per crit, you can consistently apply shock to bosses, including guardians. This new multiplier alone is worth taking the crit route.