diablo 2 critical strike and deadly strike

More flexible gearing options than other barb specs - you do not need cannot be frozen.

It's fun and can clear all content, in end game gear it can clear high end farming areas very well.

Nice options for gear progression if you have the right knowledge.

One of the highest melee damage specs in the game, bested only late game by extremely expensive Dream Paladins or Fireclaw Druids, yet neither match the all around stats of the whirlwind barb, and both are considerably more expensive to make functional.

Lategame a well geared barbarian is arguably unkillable, with good gear the only reason to take a shield is to protect from deaths due to client crashes/disconnects, and also to fight stygians while amped :)

Extremely tanky - whirlwind has no synergies, allowing for max investment into shout and battle orders early in the game, this is often overlooked in frenzy vs whirlwind debates.

If anyone is good at formatting things like this with contents etc, please let me know. This guide isn't really to give you a copy and paste format to copy, it's to teach you how WW barbs work and hopefully give enough information that people understand why certain items are best, and so allow people to have the knowledge to gear barbs themselves while knowing why they are doing it.

I hope this guide helps people and if you have any suggestions or believe some information is bad, please post why and we can go over it, either I can help you or you can help improve the guide. I've left a message on their boards asking if they want help with a guide, but for the meantime I want to put this on reddit as a source for new players and even veterans not well experienced with barbs. I have looked around a lot and it seems a lot of the better guides from the past are not accessible, and the one on Icy-Veins leave a lot to be desired, with wrong information and bad gear suggestions. Long time barb player here, I wanted to make a definitive whirlwind barbarian guide for players who like to play barbs and like to do that from ladder start.

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Diablo 2 critical strike and deadly strike