Diablo 2 Resurrected Best MF Berserk Barbarian Build - Variant of the Pitzerker Build in D2R

Diablo 2 Resurrected Best MF Berserk Barbarian Build - Variant of the Pitzerker Build in D2R

4/24/2023 11:11:18 AM

An mf-focused Berserk barbarian, or "pitzerker" is usually one of the last characters that you will build, optimizing endgame gear and game mechanics to push magic finding efficiency past the upper limits of any other build in the game. Unfortunately, absolute peak efficiency requires very specific gear and actually playing the standard pitzerker requires f o c u s. Swapping weapons at the wrong time means attacking with a weak weapon, horking with reduced Find Item chance, or using a slow cast breakpoint for Teleport/Howl/Find Item. You also need to be paying close attention to find the bosses, Teleport on top of them, and focus your attacks and horking on the boss, which can be difficult when playing with a controller.

This variant of the pitzerker is easier to play while multitasking, while consuming adult substances, when using a controller, and generally increases the time you can spend efficiently magic finding. The key difference from a standard pitzerker is that you use FCR gear to hit the 63FCR breakpoint on your main weapon swap, so you don't have to constantly swap weapons between attack mode and cast mode.

Gear

This is an easy pitzerker, but it's still a pitzerker. Unfortunately, there is no feasible budget variant.

Armor: Enigma
Main hand: Grief
The rest of the gear is a balance of stacking as much mf and skills as you can while getting a source of Cannot Be Frozen, 42+ IAS (including the IAS on your Grief), and 63+ FCR. There are a lot of different gear combinations that you can use, but a basic configuration that works is:
Offhand: 5x Ist Rune Master for CBF (start with Rhyme while putting this together)
Helm: Shako with IAS jewel (works for any IAS roll on your Grief)
Gloves: Trang's gloves
Belt: Arachnid's Mesh
Rings: 2x FCR rings
Amulet: Any amount of FCR, including min roll caster ammy
Boots: War Traveler

There is some room for optimization, but it would take pretty godly gear to make much difference.

There is always room to upgrade the jewelry with extra AR, resists, life, mf, etc. For example, a 15+ FCR caster ammy opens up a ring slot for Nagelring or a nice rare

A 20 FCR circlet lets you use Goldwrap in place of Arach's or Chancies in place of Trang's, but keep in mind 1% Find Item chance is (very roughly) equivalent to ~10% mf. You need a very nice circlet/belt combo to do better than the +3 skills and 50 mf that Shako/Arach's provides. (note: Goldwrap only providing 10% IAS means you need at to roll least 32% IAS on your Grief to hit 9 frames per attack with Berserk)

Weapon swap: Your swap gear doesn't really matter. HOTO/CTA is probably best in slot, but we just use dual Spirit for BC/BO and teleporting to The Pit at 105 FCR.
Charms: An inventory full of 3/20/7 small charms is ideal, but use whatever mixture of damage and mf charms you have. Theoretically, damage and clear speed is more valuable than mf, but use whatever feels good. Also, torch, Anni, Gheed's, etc. You don't need amazing resistances for The Pit, but if you are feeling squishy or want to farm terror zones then you may want to sacrifice some mf/damage charms to shore up your resistances.

Alternatively, you can fill your inventory with Warcries skillers if you want to go all in on Find Item. Find Item has pretty hard diminishing returns, so it only boosts your chances by a few percent, but it's a reasonable strategy, especially if you have low +skills and/or high mf on your gear.

Merc: Insight. Other than that it doesn't really matter. Over time your merc accumulates a decent number killing blows on uniques and champions, so we're using Stealskull and Duriel's Shell (for CBF), both socketed with Ptopaz, for an extra 98 mf on his kills.

A note about damage, ED, and AR: Berserk has very high Enhanced Damage, so additional off-weapon ED from a Might mercenary barely makes a difference. With the flat damage on Grief, min/max damage on jewelry and charms also doesn't have much impact. What does make a significant difference is attack rating. Extra AR on jewelry and charms gets the full multiplicative bonus from your skills and Mastery, and can be boosted even further with Blessed Aim from your mercenary. It doesn't look amazing on paper, but you can really feel the difference when you stack as much AR as possible and cut your effective miss rate in half.

Stats

Just enough Dex to equip a phase blade. We like to also add 2 extra Dex, on the off chance that my Shako breaks in the middle of a run.
With a torch, Anni, and mage plate Enigma you should only need a few points in Strength, if any, to equip Rune Master. The original pitzerker guide recommends pumping Strength to boost off-weapon ED but, as mentioned above, we don't think it helps much.
Dying really slows you down and kills your efficiency, especially if you want to recover your body and XP. Dumping all extra stats into Vitality will let you tank hits from all but the worst combinations of boss mods. It also just fits with the more chill play style of this variant of the pitzerker.

Skills

One point wonders: Increased Speed, Natural Res, Battle Cry. We also like one point in Leap, in case you see a sick drop and die before you can pick it up, or if you think you will ever want to recover your body.
Max: Berserk, Blade Mastery, Battle Orders, Find Potion.
How many hard points you put into Find Item depends on your total +skills and +to Warcries. You can dump all your remaining points into Find Item and max out around 72%, but we like to put points in for as long as a single point increases the Find Item chance by 1%. That usually works out to around 4 hard points for 69% total Find Item chance. Don't forget to activate BC and swap to your attack/hork weapons when determining how many hard points to put into Find Item.
Any remaining points not spent on Find Item should go into Howl, but as a wildcard you could instead dump any extra points into Concentrate. Conc has the same attack frames as Berserk and they share BO as a synergy, so you can use all of your gear exactly the same and have a decent physical damage alternative if you want to change things up and run AT or terrorized City of the Damned.

Piloting Your Pitzerker

The gameplay loop is pretty chill.
Swap to your FCR weapons, prebuff BC/BO
Teleport to The Pit, swap back to your Grief/Rune Master as you enter The Pit
Teleport around and look for boss packs. Usually bosses are easiest to spot by their color, but also keep an eye out for boss names or the "minion" label for stealthy bosses that have normal coloring.
Teleport directly on top of the boss (or as close as you can easily get if you are using a controller)
Howl a couple times to push minions away.
Berserk until the boss dies.
Spam Find Item. On PC you can right click and wave your mouse around, but on controller you need to actually mash the button over and over while walking around a little. You will usually know when you hork the boss corpse because it will drop a bunch of D2R items at once
Move on to the next boss pack.

Miscellaneous tips

Howl isn't super reliable. You really just want to keep the bulk of trash mobs away to make it easier to focus on the boss and to keep from getting killed. Don't stress if a couple minions stick around, but also don't be afraid to Howl again if monsters come back while you are killing bosses and horking.
Avoid getting the Black Marsh and Jail waypoints. There are few things more annoying than clicking the wrong waypoint.
When horking with kb/mouse you can just hold right click and wiggle your mouse over a pile of corpses, but for some reason on controller you have to mash the button for each corpse, and it can be easy to miss the boss corpse. If you have a controller with a turbo button (like the Hori Split Pad Pro) put Find Item on turbo and walk around a little over a pile of corpses. You will be able to hork with a controller almost as well as with a mouse.
Berserk doesn't leech, so you don't really have any sustain. The only realistic solution is potions. In The Pit you should find enough full rejuvs to keep your belt full, but you will need to play a little more careful in terror zones, especially if your resistances are low. If you keep your inventory full of charms and use the cube to pick up D2R items, you don't have to be super accurate when picking potions up from big piles of items on the ground. The only open slot will be your belt, so you can spam click near the potion you want. Not as helpful for kb/mouse but it can save a lot of time on controller.

Drops

While a blizz sorc or WW barb are better at general mf and rune hunting, a pitzerker's job is to find super rare tc87 unique and set items. So how effective is a chill and slightly less optimized pitzerker? It may be somewhat obsolete now that TZ Andy is a thing, but it's probably still the best tc87 farmer during the other 31/36th of the time that you spend waiting for an act boss to be terrorized.

To put the build to the test we farmed 100 hours (according to our Switch's play activity counter), mostly in The Pit with the occasional terror zone in the mix. It is easy to waste time in town, but we had long stretches of consistent 90 second runs with a pretty good pit map, so we probably killed at least 15,000 alvl 85+ unique monsters. We started with 23 items remaining on my grail and finished the 100 hours with only15 items left to find. We didn't keep track of the Shakos, Arach's, Tal's armors, or other lower tc items along the way, but we did keep track of tc87 finds.

Uniques