Leap: Or, a guide to barbarian speedrun team play

Whirlwind.

Frenzy.

Berserk.

Forget that those skills exist. You will not be using them in a team speedrun, I will not be writing about them, and using them interferes with your main jobs.

Now, by a team speedrun, I mean one in which the barbarian is playing with, e.g., two sorcs, two paladins, a druid and two assassins.

Those players will be inhaling every piece of even semi-meh gear your team finds. You, meanwhile, will be using a three-deep belt and whatever anyone else doesn’t need.

Why?

Because by around the end of Act 1, you’ll have 300 hp. You won’t need rare splint armor. And you won’t have the strength for it. You’ll have been pumping vit from the start. Your job at that point will be to sit there and tank while casters demolish the things that are trying to kill you.

Here’s how it works, by difficulty, then by how you’ll use skills.

Normal, Nightmare and Hell

You start with a hand axe that does 3–6 damage. You can wreck in the Den of Evil

Enjoy wrecking there. In half an hour, you won’t be able to kill even a slivered enemy.

In fact, once you level to 2, get Find Potion (FP) and start horking, you won’t be focused on killing. That’s because the other members of your party were already inhaling potions faster than you could hork them, so you’ll spend all your time horking.

Oh, and put those 5 stat points in vit. You’ll be pumping it (unless you find amazing gear justifying something else) until level 20.

Level 3. 5 vit, 1 FP.

Level 4. 5 vit, 1 Howl (a skill you will not need, but needed for the party-saving skill that is Taunt).

Save your level 5 skill and your Den skill, but pump vit. You really are aiming for 300 hp by Andy.

You’re probably to Rakanishu by now.

Don’t rampage in. Too many other fallen can chip you or send you into hit recovery. You want to clear those lesser beings and then charge in and … not die. Rakanishu is good xp at this level.

Level 6. 5 vit, 1 Taunt, 1 Leap, 1 Shout. Shout’s not great early, and it’s not a huge help against act bosses, but its time synergy with Battle Orders will help that skill eventually.

Taunt, though, is amazing early and almost always. It makes normal ranged units walk toward you instead of attacking, which turns archers etc. into free XP.

Level FP to 50%, then put another point or two in leap, but save points for Find Item. At 18, put a point in Leap Attack, which can go farther than Leap but (because you won’t be pumping it) lacks the knockback you need. (Battle Cry is a nice thing, but not essential, and Iron Skin isn’t going to help you a lot until you have armor worth talking about.)

Level to 19.5 in tombs, in which you’ll be horking and occasionally tanking (things die fast to traps and static). You’ll often be a bit behind the main group, which is fine. Just make sure you stay close enough to leech xp — which you’ll be doing for the duration of the run. The Barbarian is not a significant killer beyond the Den of Evil.

When you catch up on the map, that’ll be because your party has run into something that’s taking a while to kill. Such things often deal massive damage and have minions doing damage as well. Stand there and take damage while you can’t hork.

Once your party is all at least level 19.5, you’ll go from tombing to Travincal, where Leap can help. You’ll want several points in it — at level 6, its knockback is negligible at best. If you’ve done Radament and the Den of Evil and you’re 19.5, you have 20 skill points. You can put 5 in FP, 1 in Shout, 1 in Taunt, 1 in Howl and 4 in FI and still have 8 for Leap.

What you’ll want to do with Leap is herd councilmembers against the walls in Trav so they’re not hurting anything. You might need a few minor mana pots for this (regulars will overwhelm your mana storage ability). The only caveat here is that if you leap a lightning-enchanted (LE) councilmember, he will spew electric bolts, which will kill someone. So don’t do that.

You’ll leap again in Act 4, which will — if you know what you’re doing — take approximately four minutes. Izual is a straight teleport, and so is each seal, during which you’ll leap, possibly FI the seal bosses, and then not die against Diablo.

Put those two skill points from Izual in Shout. It isn’t an amazing skill early — buffing someone’s defense from 47 to 78 isn’t going to save a life — but you want to push the time synergy to help BO.

Level 21. Leap should be 8 already. Push Shout, and start pushing strength for the polearm for the Insight you’ll be wielding eventually. You’ll want a voulge so Larzuk can give it four sockets, though he’ll also give a scythe four if you find it in norm cows. A scythe does require you to pump dex a little, but with semi-decent gear and charms (normally, only your paladins will be looking for +dex stuff), you’ll be close with both str and dex.

Kill Baal, and then head to cows. Horking is mostly useless here — light healing and mana pots, where your players will be using supers , and FI inhales mana you don’t have— so look out for items such as white crystal and broad swords and large shields, plus that polearm.

Levels 22 and 23. 41 str and dex, and push Shout if you want.

Levels 24–43 are BO. You’ll want a point in Increased Speed at 24, and a point each in Battle Command and Natural Resistances at 30, but your main thing here is BO, with Leap your secondary thing.

Continue to push vit unless, again, you have the gear to justify better. 60 str is a nice thing to have to prep for nice rare plated belts, but if you find a piece of the Sigon’s set, it’ll probably go to someone else.

You’ll do Nightmare as two groups: you and the telesorc, the rest of the team. Prepare to have to help leap the staff clear, and possibly an organ or two. Trav often benefits from your leaping as well. Hell goes largely the same.

Max BO, then Leap (the knockback turns the Chaos seal minions into free XP), then Shout, and put more than a few in Nat Res. You should be either level 62ish by the end or, if you’re going for a low-level strategy to save time, mid-40s.

Now, your skills and how to use them:

Find Potion

This skill starts out saving lives and increasing party killspeed and ends up being damn near unused because you have Insight, which means you have your mana, and your tanks are soaking up damage. Pair that with your near-constant need to Leap and you won’t have the time or need to FP. Plus, FI will give you items you can’t just get from Akara.

Find Item

Switch to this as soon as it’s practical, and don’t look back. A season ago, I horked my team’s first Vipermagi. I’ve horked almost every rune, including Jah, Ist and Ohm, plus uncountably many midrunes. In a typical Hell Chaos full clear, I hork at least one rune and usually two midrunes or low runes. I don’t even know how many Spirits I’ve completed.

By contrast, Trav is where I hork piles of gold. I did hork an Ohm there once, but if you’re looking for 20K piles of gold, head to Trav.

FI is also great for getting rid of skeletons in Tal’s tomb. FP doesn’t work on them, and it’s not like you’re going to hork a shako, but the fact that you tried will be enough.

Taunt

Ranged units irritate — and kill — players.

Taunt turns most of those units into walking piles of XP.

Two caveats:

1. Champion and other special monsters, plus Lister’s pack, cannot be taunted.
2. Taunt things toward, not away from, where your party is killing things.

Leap

I have leapt level 50 characters through Chaos Sanctuary, and they have killed the only four enemies that must die for the player to advance to Act 5: the Grand Vizier, DeSeis, the Infector of Souls and Diablo.

I have leapt Anya, the Act 2 headpiece, Ancients, the Throne of Destruction, Travincal and Mephisto.

I haven’t killed anything along the way, mind you. But maxed Leap’s knockback is so strong that unless the enemy is LE (beetles, I’m looking at you), you take little or no damage from enemies that are knocked back and stunned most of the way across the screen. Even ranged units often can’t do anything.

I don’t need to kill anything. When I’ve rushed people using Leap, they or their mercs have killed everything. Toorc can be FICI, and the sorc I’m rushing can be a meteorb, but her Insight-wielding merc can kill him — so long as I keep Toorc from attacking the merc.

In a speedrun, I’m usually leaping:

A. The Act 2 staff.

B. An organ or two.

C. Trav, maybe.

D. Seals, definitely.

E. Lister, particularly if he’s fanat.

F. Nihl once we’re to the torch part of the speedrun. (This is generally only on reset night, on which my team has twice in a row been the first to kill Hell Baal on East.)

But there’s more than one kind of leap. Specifically:

1. Tiny leaps advance you about half an inch on the screen. Do them repeatedly if you’re basically trying to leap-walk your way somewhere or if you need to rapid-fire the knockback/stun effect, such as if you’re trying to leap a chest clear or keep the enemy knocked back/stunned. The latter is particularly useful in Trav. A close variant of this involves you leaping a tiny bit in one direction, then a tiny bit back. This is useful in Trav especially, but just generally when you want to keep one or more enemies pinned against an obstacle or a certain distance away so a merc can kill it/them. The risk if you move too far in one direction is that you’ll move so much that you’ll leap the enemy off whatever obstacle it was pinned to.
2. Slightly bigger, directional leaps can herd councilmembers and other enemies, such as if you’re trying to collect all the non-LE enemies so a weaker party member can kill them. This is particularly useful when paired with Taunt, which will grab random councilmembers but not affect Toorc or other named members.
3. Maximum distance leaps, which help when you’re rushing someone through the Arcane Sanctuary. These constitute a poor man’s teleport and often pair well with …
4. Leap Attack, whose range is far longer than Leap. Sometimes you need to leap farther than Leap can take you. Leap Attack’s range is “oh, you need to get there? Cool. Let’s go.” I have leapt more than one full screen. But more commonly, some parts of the leap from the River of Flame waypoint to Chaos are too long for Leap, so I use Leap Attack instead. Its only drawback is that if you’re doing it into enemies, you’ll end it with a swing, which can be bad if you’re using a slow weapon. Also, since you likely don’t have as many points in it as you have in Leap, you won’t get the knockback you want.

For Ubers, Trav and shepherding, you want the first kind of Leap. For escaping death when you don’t care what happens to anyone but you, you want the last kind. Getting good takes practice (and an Insight), but a good leaper turns failure into success. The telesorc on my speedrun noted that I was the reason we secured our first torch, since I leapt the portal clear so much.

The only concerns with leap:

1. Leaping enemies into players.
2. Leaping enemies out of drop range.

So don’t do either unless you have to or you ought to.

One final note about Leap: It does not affect act bosses or the Ancients. I do still leap around Andy and Meph, but that’s to keep minions away from the party.

Battle Orders

Pair with BO sticks (on switch) and a nearly pure vit build and watch your life soar past 4K without Oak Sage. My barb has +22 warcries including sticks. At that level, BO lasts more than 10 minutes and boosts life and mana by 161%. In a speedrun, I typically get at least +5 warcries, including BC.

Other skills

Nat Res helps, but I don’t pump it much. Increased Speed is a one-point wonder. So are Taunt and Battle Cry. And then I don’t bother with weapon masteries or a true attack. Why bother? Other people do my killing.

I merely immobilize things.