Buff/debuff stacking and 4 man barb xp build

I multibox four barbarians and lately I've been wondering about debuffs and buffs stacking, seems like it's pretty random. For example there's reports that all but one rune on WD Piranha stacking between multiple players.

The team I'm considering running is two dps with cubed crown and ruby for 82% xp and two zdps with 227% xp

The skills:
DPS Barbs:
Furious Charge - Merciless Assault
Whirlwind - Blood funnel
Sprint - Forced March (Can be switched to WotB and the cube zodiac, however I dislike the movement speed difference to my zdps whenever the sprint timing is incorrect)
Threatening Shout - Falter (Might do one taunt) ?STACK?
War Cry - "Veteran's Warning"/Impunity ?STACK?
Battle Shout - Bloodshed

ZDPS Barbs:
Furious Charge - Merciless Assault
Whirlwind - Blood funnel
Sprint - Forced March
Threatening Shout - Falter ?STACK?
Ignore Pain - Mob Rule
Call of the Ancients - Duty to the Clan ?STACK?

Gear:
DPS Barbs:
Cubes: Furnace, Crown, Elements/Zodiac
6 Wrath, 2 BK
Chilianik's Chain
Strongarm Bracers ?STACK?
Focus, Restraint
Hellfire Amulet
Trapped/PainEnhancer, Stricken, Taeguk

ZDPS Barbs:
Cubes: Vigilance, Crown, Grandeur
2 IK, 2 BK, 3 Borns, 3 Cain
Hellfire Ring, Amulet
Leoric's signet
Pride of Cassius 6 seconds
Strongarm Bracer's ?STACK?
Gem of Efficacious Toxin ?STACK?
Defense Gems

To sum up the things that I wonder if stack:
Threatening Shout - Falter, no clue about this, hoping it does stack to 100% additive though (Should be easy to test if I ever get around to it)
Call of the Ancients - Duty to the Clan, harder to test and even if it doesn't stack it really doesn't matter
War Cry - "Veteran's Warning"/Impunity, Easy to test but once again never getting around it...
Strongarm Bracers, Unsure but I think they do
Gem of Efficacious Toxin, Should be stacking

Well that's what I'm wondering about right now, any improvements to the build would also be welcome.

Might want to take a look at Dev's speedfarming build from the last patch. It's slightly out of date [in terms of the info] but 2.3 didn't change all that much really.

I didn't think about Falter stacking; I just round robin it. It might, though.
The various runes of war cry do stack.
Conventional wisdom is the gem stacks; unsure about strongarm.

More generally; you have to wonder if doing higher level greater rifts with less +xp would be faster than doing lower greater rifts with more +xp. I dunno; but it's an interesting idea. I'd recommend building towards 4 speedfarming builds, and then just gimp one or two [ie toss on xp gear] and see how it goes.

I've been playing Barbs for months now, all pretty much fully ancient geared already. The only items in your list that I ignore are Threatening Shout Falter and CotA Duty to the Clan. The others, ALL stack. WarCry different runes, Strongarms and Toxin Gem.

A few tips:

• Strongarms kinda suck for WW builds cause the cold rune only pulls trash. Elites are never pulled. Can help on low GR where elites die fast anyway and maybe benefit a little bit from the stacking but since u focus more on speed, there might not be much stacking and could be overkill anyway. On high GR is not recommended cause u lose Blood Funnel which is pretty much your only source of healing. This may work with a Seismic Slam Shattered Ground build but u need to test it and see how efficient it is anyway. I stacked Strongarms with Crusaders and Phalanx Stampede build and it worked AMAZINGLY good. Sometimes Crits were crazy high.
• WarCry stacking is great but don't stack all 4 runes. Just focus the best 2. The rest wont provide much toughness. I usually go for Impunity and Hardened Wrath only. That way I can have in that same skill slot on the other 2 barbs, Threatening Shout Falter.
• CotA Together as One is prolly the best rune. I really don't think Duty to the Clan stacks and even if it did, u already have 60+ crit chance or even 70+ (if u go with Overpower Killing Spree). Is it worth more than 50% damage reduction? Maybe, dunno.
• Toxin Gem is prolly the main gem I use for most of my builds. 40% poison debuffs is huge, assuming u dont have already a ton of additive debuffs. Tho Bane of the Stricken could be a better choice for high GRs in S4. On my latest build for 2.3 I'm not using it tho. I go with Taeguk, Gogok (to hit higher breakpoints and some CDR for WotB uptime) and BotT. Maybe if I get more CDR amd IAS in gear I would go with Toxin again instead of Gogok but for now its the fastest source of CDR and IAS to get a ton of damage for your Dust Devils.
• F&R kinda suck for speedfarming cause u need to stop to proc and waste 1 skill slot for a useless skill. Even using Furious Charge which doesn't make u stop much, it dsyncs a little and the multiboxing gameplay feels clunky. Also forces u to make some hard choices: Leoric vs Hexing Pants? RoRG vs ORotZ? CoE vs RoRG vs ORotZ? I rather have all 3 a forget about wasting 1 skill slot.

Also about EXP, from my experience, stacking a ton of EXP bonus + fast low GRs (less than 3 minutes) beats by far doing higher GRs (more than 5 minutes) with less EXP bonus. This is fairly easy to test. Just do like 10 tries for each scenario and average the amount of exp gained versus the time. That should give u a EXP/hour factor to compare.

The last build I used for speedfarming before fully dedicating to WDs on S4 was this:

2x barbs with: http://www.d3planner.com/868680157
2x barbs with: http://www.d3planner.com/274926593

No zDPS. All DPS, no Falter ... simple, nothing complex. A case could be made for Falter vs Overkill but on high density maps, I don't think 25% additive debuff matches AoE damage of Overkill + 8% crit chance. Single Target yeah, no doubt Falter will be better but I think Bane of the Stricken will be a better choice there. For speedfarming u move so damn fast that Falter mostlikely won't be hitting half the mobs u attack while Overkill gets spammed really fast cause of your Dust Devils help reset the cooldown. Also, 1 barb uses WW Hurricane without Strongarms just to help clearing stuff on the run. A lot of times I kill off screen and it helps to pull trash to the DDs path which is your main source of damage. Strongarms could be better than Hexing Pants on a single barbs but I need to test if Fury is not an issue on that barb without Hexing Pants.

I still need to do a ton of testing here but that will take quite same time after I'm done with WDs. Eventually I will update my guide.

PS: Can't provide feedback about Seismic Slam or HotA builds but I will definitely try HotA for high GR, mainly on a mixed party.

PS2: Keep an eye on those Dust Devils breakpoints. The build may be off by a little bit. I updated it fast today on d3planner without checking IAS and breakpoints. Just make sure to have 10% IAS from Paragon + 13% IAS from gear. With your 15% IAS from Gogok should be enough to hit the 5.45 DDs/sec breakpoint without WotB and 6.67 DDs/sec with WotB. That's quite an insane damage and tick rate. I use this tool to keep an eye on breakpoints since D3planner is not that friendly. This is of course using BK weapons.

So much text!

There's two reasons to using zDPS for me, first one is that I'm playing Season 4. Still only have two barbs with ancient BK weapons and only three with cubed furnaces, and basically making zDPS barbs is doing a hellfire ring and some bounties for plans and then just craft away. The other reason is that a 227% XP barb vs only leoric cube 82% gives a 277% total xp gain for the party over the leoric cube version. There is no way in hell my two last guys will ever be able to get close to that value in improving clear speed for a higher rift to compensate for the xp loss. I'd prefer another class than barb for my zDPS but I really like the WW moving through mobs and syncing the move speed (If only I could sync berserker on them with two main dps)

Concerning Strongarms I use Furious Charge to proc it with all barbs at once, the WW pull on the zDPS is just a bonus for proccing it I guess. Also I'm not a 100% certain put I'm pretty certain that some of the really tiny elites can be pulled by the WW also not that it really matters (I think it's those blue scorpion thingies).

CotA Duty to the Clan is just a filler for now really I guess, I couldn't really figure out any better items than two piece IK, maybe go crimson, aughild or even resonance but the ability to boost the toughness with together with one if necessary is a pretty good deal for the 2 piece IK. The zDPS barbs actually seem to tank everything with their defensive gems atm using no blood funnel or together as one. I will actually consider what you said about overpower on the two dps barbs though and just maybe keep falter on the zDPS.

Furious Charge is really a love hate affair it seems, yes it does cause some desync issues however it can also fix desync issues because if you use it without hold position it smart targets, can be really good vs the RG for example. I generally use hold position charge otherwise except for the initial charge into a new pack of enemies where I smart target the closest enemy which makes all barbs charge it as long as they are somewhat in range. I'd really like to get rid of FC but the damage with it + CoE or berserker is just too good even if it totally fucks me when I try to speed run normal rifts in GRs it's actually usually not that bad.

No hexing pants isn't really that bad thanks to some extra FC rage every now and then, in fights you have no problems keeping it up but long spins without enemy groups can wear you down (like 15+ seconds).

Thanks for reminding me about the DD breakpoints, I'll need to check on those at some point again but farming all the necessary gear is currently on my top priority. Can't hit those breakpoints without it! Question is what is better, 4x strongarms or 4x bracers with aspeed when you're using F+R.

Played a lot of S3 with 4 barbs and I must say once you went up to like 44 in GRs the worst part was yellow elites and the RG, I'm really hoping the stricken + cubed furnace is going to help this part. I'm already doing 45s in the same time I was doing 44s in S3 at mid season so going good so far. So ye I think stricken is going to be a necessary evil if you want to do higher GRs fast due to the guardian.

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Originally Posted by Ishar

More generally; you have to wonder if doing higher level greater rifts with less +xp would be faster than doing lower greater rifts with more +xp. I dunno; but it's an interesting idea. I'd recommend building towards 4 speedfarming builds, and then just gimp one or two [ie toss on xp gear] and see how it goes.

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I've gotten so bad at math lately but looking at it like this just freaks me out.

Leoric + Ruby = 82% xp (pretty much the baseline you need to farm XP on the whole party)
Leoric + Ruby, Born, Cain, Hellfire, Signet = 227%

If it's first added up across all the party and then divided by amount of party members the result for 2 dps 2 zdps is 154,5 per party member vs 82 in 4 dps with leorics.

Dividing 154,5 with 82 gives 1,8841.. more xp per mob with 2 zdps than 4 dps

A GR level seems to be 1.08 xp increase per level, solving 1.08^x = 1,8841 gives 8.23114 levels higher in GRs to compensate the xp loss with not having 227% zdps classes.

How much is that in monster health? Each GR level is 1.173 unless it's changed, 1,173^8 gives 3,584... So to fight on even ground with 4 dps vs 2dps2zdps you need to play on at least 8/9 levels higher than the zdps group where the mobs have over 3,5 times more health!!

Now the question is can those two extra dps make your group do 3,5 times more dps than the zDps group, and this is not considering how much harder it is to survive!

Can someone care to tell me I'm wrong because I wouldn't be surprised if I'm wrong and I do hope so because xp gear reigns supreme compared to dps gear.

A thing dev pointed out, is that speed is pretty important as well; e.g. how long it takes you to do greater rifts. That would complicate the math a bit more. Honestly, the easiest thing to do would be to just do practical testing. You are likely to obtain bits and pieces to make them into 4 DPS eventually anyway simply through attrition; if not exactly in full ancient.