Braven

Barbarians need some of every stat, so min-maxing is not that useful. INT, PER, and DEX are the most important, so that stat spread looks good. I am not sure what you can really give up for more might. Perception and Dex is very important for the interrupts, and INT is important for carnage and all of your ability duration. You will get +4 might/con when frenzied. That is 16 more Fortitude.

I solo mostly, so figurines are my go to. I like how they are not "used up" when used. Near the end, I switch to the +50% speed potions, mainly for the big, boss fights so I can switch to a single powerful weapon without recovery penalty, or spam out spells if a caster. Some people are addicted to the speed potions and use them every battle. My main problem with the healing potions is that they take action time to drink and don't solve the problem of being surrounded and mauled to death. If I need them, I am usually losing as much health during the time it took to drink one as it restored and am going down regardless. Better strategy is what I really needed, not a healing potion. There used to be times when I didn't -quite- have enough endurance for a battle, but that is no longer an issue with Second Wind.

MIGHT is a good idea even if you don't use the damage chants or invocations simply because it affects healing. High might (and INT) combined with talents like veterans recovery and memories (and a healing multiplier) provides much more endurance than high CON. Also, it is not like a chanter has any other worthwhile talents since the offensive ones are not needed. Extra damage is just the cherry on top. Because of the plate and maxed out high defenses, burst damage is not a concern, which is the primary argument for high con over high might, in regards to total endurance. I feel like high con got a lot worse, relative to might, in patch 3.0 since healing abilities/skills/items/talents were buffed so much across the board.

If you want to stick with war hammers, there are a couple good ones for barbarians. You could try a high interrupt build using shatterstar (buyable in Defiance Bay) war hammer which has an interrupt of 1 second. It also has guarding to help keep engagement as an off-tank. If you want to focus more on attack speed later on, you can swap out Shatterstar for Strike Hard, another war hammer. It provides both a -5 deflection debuff on your enemies and higher attack speed. That weapon, combined with frenzy, Durgan steel, and gauntlets of swift action will allow zero attack recovery (with light/medium armor) which will increase your damage output quite a bit.

The main purpose of the stronghold (besides the rest bonus), is to get the quests with unique (and often strong) items. For that reason I recommend getting the keep first to get the quests going. Then, the bounty hunter is good as it is a nice source of EXP and gold. Then get the inn and something with a rest bonus. After that, you can wait a while and spend gold on other things if you want. The rest of the upgrades are less important but eventually you want to upgrade everything since gold is plentiful and getting prestige will unlock more frequent and better quests offering better items. One other benefit is getting plants and monster parts. Two building do this. However, you can also buy these from merchants so I don't think there is a huge rush to build those.

Ranger will be easier than rogue. The animal companion is really helpful and I like using it to setup flanks and such and tank early on. I recommend wounding shot and an arbalest (enchant with fire lash) for the early game. It will one shot anything in ACT 1 and is a good option for "alpha strikes" for the whole game because wounding shot doubles the damage. With high dex and swift aim, the reload is pretty fast. Later, you might want to switch to melee as I found the animal starts to struggle tanking in the mid-game and you get items like sanguine plate armor and shod-in-faith boots which really helps melee. Maybe a bow with just cloth armor would be strong enough with summons, though, if you want to stick with a bow. When you get the stunning shots ability (which also works with melee now), dual-speed weapons can be nice for inflicting the stuns much faster. However, It is possible to solo everything in the game with any class on Easy with a little planning.

I think veteran's recovery would be great (particularly if soloing, of course). Even with high defenses and DR, some damage will still make it through. With the max Might and INT, veterans will heal for a ton. Since the goal is to make the battle last as long as possible, this seems like a good fit. Does ancient memories also heal the chanter and stack with Veterans?

Confident aim min damage only helps when you are stopped by DR? Are you sure? I thought it helped the "damage range". Instead of doing between 25-35 damage, you would do like 28-35. The UI doesn't show anything at all, so it is hard to see what it does.

Isn't cheese the whole point? Regardless, it is not needed since there is usually only one or two spells that are any good (for your crazy build) anyways, so it is not hard to get everything you need. The big advantage of wizard is the third level spell that doubles the speed of all your actions. It allows you to spam out spells twice as fast, which is really important once you have more spells than time to cast them. Since you can rest as much as you want, casting twice as many spells per battle will always be better than any individual spell. Other classes could achieve this "haste" with an item, but only wizards can do this with a spell. Slicken is great first level. AOE prone with a large effect area. For other spell levels, you need fast cast spells.. The goal is getting as many spells off as possible while enemies are disabled. This is why fireball at level 3 is also really good.

The Best benefit of confident aim is the +20% min damage. This is 10% net overall damage increase, it is not just an additive bonus applied to base weapon damage like most damage % modifiers. It multiplies existing damage modifiers.

Ultimately a caster would be best. It is just so hard to get them past the early levels. The basic formula would then be "spam spells and kill one enemy", escape, rest, return, repeat. Sure, you need to rest a million times, but in theory it is possible. I haven't played the caster classes enough to know which is best, but I think wizard, with proper planning, would be fine as long as their initial spell book doesn't count as an item. Just the spells from level up is enough with proper planning. Also, you can always retrain if you need a particular spell... you don't list that as outlawed and it is not "an item".

Isn't this the same as your monk? A monk doesn't really need items (at least as long as he is not attacking a crush-immune enemy). Particularly after getting the ranged fist attack ability at level 7. He could just take some wounds (to max passive attack damage), dash away by using a wound ability, and then just run around and shoot everything with his fists (and recovering the endurance loss with something like veterans recovery). Monks have a lot of ways to increase movement speed to sky-high levels so they can easily kite all day and get out of trouble. They also have abilities to help with avoiding or minimizing enemy disables and ranged attacks. This is my choice since monks have a ranged attack. Any other martial would need to fight in melee with Novice's Suffering and get swarmed. The other obvious choice is a caster class. They can just go nova with spells every battle and rest. They also don't really need items. However, the early game would be brutal because of lack of spells and they would have a harder time staying alive, compared with a monk. Finally there is probably the best class - Chanter. Chanters don't actually need to ever attack so they can have a 3 DEX and recovery doesn't matter. With chants like "Dragon thrashed", they can passively kill everything from afar with the power of their voice alone. As an added bonus, it does both fire and slash damage to avoid immunities. All they need to do is have Maxed out MIGHT and INT and run around in circles. The biggest danger for them is ranged enemies and spell casters since they don't really have anything to protect against those. Without items, defenses will be very low for all classes making it hard to avoid enemy spells and arrows. Oh, and you left out Ranger as an option. Just let your old friend Bear kill everything. He doesn't need items. ;P

If you can achieve 0 recovery, there is no difference in speed between any "average" speed one handed weapon and "slow" two handed weapon - those labels are misleading since they are the same speed. For that matter, there is no difference between a weapon + shield, dual weapons or two-hander if you have no recovery. The reason to dual wield is that it is easier to reach zero recovery. Without dual wielding, you have to drink potions all the time in order to have any chance to achieve zero recovery. A great option, if you want more defense, is to just use a one handed weapon and a shield since that is the same speed as dual wielding anyways with no recovery (just don't use one with bash). Or, you can drop the shield and get the inherent +12 accuracy bonus for using a one-hander with no shield. I suspect that setup could result in more damage than a two-hander because of the additional crits the accuracy bonus provides. There are many one-handed weapons that are nearly as strong as a 2-hander (some arguable stronger due to enchantments). For example, the new soulbound dagger spits out bouncing fireballs which do very high amounts of fire damage. I have seen it do hundreds of points of damage bouncing back and forth between enemies until they are all dead. With no attack recovery (and no other weapon stealing attack time), the firebug procs quite frequently. The downside is that it is not as reliable. Sometimes it goes off over and over and sometimes never goes off during a battle if you get unlucky. I tried comparing the dagger with a two-hander (tidefall) and I seemed to kill things quicker on average with the dagger at zero recovery because of the firebug. I didn't do the math, but it certainly felt a lot more damaging overall. I am currently working on a zero-recovery barbarian who attacks with nothing but a single dagger. The firebug chance, I've heard, is checked with each carnage hit. If completely surrounded by enemies (often the case on hard difficulty), firebug will happen with almost every 0.5 second attack if that is true.

For me, the resolve loss was "suppressed". Maybe because I had the +3 resolve ring on? You can also suppress the endurance "gain" by using something with endurance over time, like the Scars armor.

Yeah, I was sad about gallant focus not stacking with barrage. I presume actual paladin aura doesn't either. There are so many good fighter abilities, you can easily skip ones you don't like, or does not fit with your party setup. I had a tough time choosing. Unbending is a very nice alternative which seems to stack with everything and I have seen it give insane numbers; hundreds of endurance restored over time.

There is a neat belt from a stronghold quest that massively boosts concentration. It is a minor quest so possible to get quite early but only reliable way is save scuming for the quest.

That is an interesting strategy, Boeroer. Seems like the guns would do quite a bit of damage with all the lashes. While waiting for the wounds, you could use quick slot items or talent abilities like aspirant's mark. With a couple buffs from potions or scrolls, and enemy debuffs, you will be even more deadly when unleashing the bullets.

Blood thirst sounds lousy to me for the reasons you stated. I don't think it would waive the reload, making it still pretty bad for firearms. Also, I think carnage only works in melee so you would waste your best ability. I guess the best use would be if playing solo (and not using speed weapons) just because you are killing all the enemies so it triggers more often and the recovery is a factor. I wonder if non-direct weapon damage, like scrolls or weapon procs such as firebug or wounding trigger it.

Except for your own personal satisfaction, you get absolutely no reward for saving either of them as far as I can tell. Might as well steal the ring and leave them to die.

The gloves are bugged. They harm the wearer instead of enemy. If you use them (for the other benefits), I suggest wearing an item with endurance regeneration (like The Scars armor), as that will suppress it. Without the endurance, another pair of gauntlets is probably better. Note: I have also noticed other bugs with those gloves. In certain situations it seems to offer more than 10% attack speed (like it doesn't actualy expire and stacks with itself). I have had a dagger and shield offer zero recovery and no other speed buffs because of this until I saved and reloaded. Doesn't always happen... Not sure what triggers it, but I have only seen it with the new soul bound dagger. Maybe the firebug proc causes it somehow? I also know for sure there are health bugs with triggered immunity. It often heals me to full health when it expires. Lots and lots of bugs in 3.01.

The higher resolve and con matters more in this build since the +20 defense ability wasn't included. Resolve helps to avoid interrupts, which is the main benefit. The biggest thing I would change is swapping the INT and PER stats. Perception mostly just adds a bit of extra accuracy, but INT does that and a lot more. The longer an enemy is prone, or barrage lasts, you (and your allies for prone enemies) have effectively a +20 accuracy boost. INT helps a lot of things for fighter including equipment effects (like the armor's frenzy, shod-in-faith boots, and cloak of tireless defender), the 3 knockdowns, watcher abilities, scrolls, a multitude of "instant cast" passive buffs like constant recovery, rapid recovery, triggered immunity, unbroken, unbending, activated barrage/defense buffs, frenzy, and more. All fighter abilities (and equipment powers) take zero additional action time to activate and can be used every encounter which makes long durations so good. No reason not to try and use them all. That said, this build still has a decent INT, so maybe it is not a big deal. Also, wounding weapons seem to be negatively affected by INT, so PER might be better if using Tidefall and constant recovery duration is less important with a endurance-draining weapon, since at that point you are likely taking much less damage. Another talent choice to consider is choosing between savage attack and weapon mastery. The difference is +10% damage modifier vs +5 accuracy. Most people prefer the accuracy gauntlets over the 10% damage modifier gauntlets, which is the same comparison as these two talents. For boots, in the late game, I really like the +4 dex boots. Not only do you get the dex (to speed up your attack speed animation and do even more damage), but it comes with a whopping +3 lore. Granted, in a party you might have someone else better suited for the lore wearing the boots, but it is great for solo when you want to cast the "protection scrolls" for immunity to various status effects (aka priest replacement)

I never found them in my fighter play through, which made me sad.

I like how this option fits in with the rest of Lady of Pain and mostly agree with your changes. I found that having a minimum res/con was actually going too far. Just a little below average in those ( like 6 - 8 ) is actually a more powerful distribution. Early game, I really liked the +2 int hat which is easy to get and the amulet of +25% healing (particularly if you get rapid recovery early). That is when the constant recovery is most important (particularly the duration) since you haven't got all the items yet to turn the fighter into an ultra fast killing machine. Hopefully the lower INT won't hurt too much. Another option I would suggest is "Unbroken" at level 11 (instead of fearless or critical defense). It can be a real lifesaver and I actually used it quite a bit. Because of the high MIGHT, it restores endurance back to full and gives defense bonuses. I strongly agree with "Charge" - I found that more useful than sundering blows. It does so much damage and is tactically invaluable by getting to the priority target.

The biggest shame of The White March is that the best helmet is so ugly. Now, not only does my character have a floating skull following her, but a skull covering her head. Apparently The Watcher is into goth or something, A pity that the actual matching helmets that look good are pretty weak.

Daenysis is great. I like combining it with March steel dagger since both are available at the start of Act 2, no fighting required, both are Noble weapons (for weapon focus) and have different damage types (to mitigate immunities) and both have speed, which greatly increases attack speed because of how they multiply with each other and apply to both weapon recoveries. Add vulnerable attack and anyone can be a great damage dealer.