Review - Konstanten as a Berserker/Beckoner Howler

[crdvis16]

Note: I had the community patch and balance polish mod installed (in case that affects some of the interactions of abilities)

 

I modded Konstanten's subclass choices for this.  I was especially excited to try this build.  There's something about big physical attacks with a 2Her that are satisfying and the idea of stringing a bunch of them together sounded fun.  The idea is this: Barbarians have some really strong benefits when they kill an enemy (instant recovery from Bloodthirst being the strongest) but killing enemies can be infrequent.  Unless, of course, you use the Beckoner subclass to summon a bunch of little skeletons and then use the Berserk subclass to confuse yourself so that you can kill the skeletons collaterally while dishing damage to your true target.  Carnage gives you the free AoE damage to hit the skellies and boom- you can put yourself into a chain where each whack kills another skeleton instantly refreshing your attack which again kills a skeleton refreshing your recovery, etc etc all the while hitting your target repeatedly with a big 2Her.

 

The weapon arguably most suited to this build is Amra which gives you 25% weapon damage in an AoE whenever you crit as long as you have 25 might and can insta-kill low hp enemies.  I had to further mod Konstanten to give him +2 base might to achieve this (and -2 constitution because otherwise it would feel like cheating to me) but it was worth it in order to play into this build as much as I could.  Barbaric Smash helps with hit to crit to proc Amra and all this gives you a recipe to kill some skeletons along with whatever poor sap is in range of your 2Her.  One could also try this with Wahai Poraga (attacks up to 3 targets around you, friend or foe) or WotEP (AoE cone) but I was dissuaded by the relatively low base weapon damage of these two weapons.  I wanted my hits to HURT once they started chaining!

 

However, I had some trouble getting this to play out consistently.  First, it takes some time to ramp all this up.  Summoning the skeletons takes a long time.  And then once the skeletons are out and you've Frenzied yourself you can sometimes get blocked from reaching your target by those same skeletons.  Leap helps here to ensure you land right next to your target.  Then you can sometimes get bad runs of luck where something else kills off your skeletons before you get a chance to.  Sometimes your Carnage/Amra gets them low but doesn't quite kill them and then you're waiting for the next thwack with your 2Her and it can feel like it's taking forever.  But when you do get into a good groove of whack/skelly death/instant whack/skelly death it can be pretty awesome.

 

One other issue with this build- I picked up the Ancient Weapons summon just as a backup to use when it wasn't a good situation for the Amra/Carnage/Frenzy/skeleton tactic and holy crap are they powerful.  I had no idea they each have a special attack- the one with knockdown alone is crazy strong.  Even though I built Konstanten around the Amra/Carnage/Frenzy/skeleton trick it still sometimes felt like I was better off just summoning Ancient Weapons.  A single class Beckoner would probably be silly with those things.

 

Last- I wasn't always great at keeping Konstanten alive with this build.  Frenzy hides your health and I was often too focused on pulling off the combo to notice I was positioning him in spots that were a bit dangerous.  He died a lot.  There's a lot of friction in itemization between adding more damage and keeping his recovery low enough to start the chain reaction vs. adding defense and possibly heavier armor for survivability and apparently I was too far on the "more damage" side of the equation.

 

All in all, this build probably wasn't super strong and could be frustrating when things didn't pan out but is really fun when they do.

 

Edited November 11, 2021 by crdvis16