I've been trying out a lot of different builds on my barb at varying MP levels. Here are some of my (admittedly anecdotal) results.
Running mp0/mp1,
spin to win is the way to go. Bloodthirst as a passive can be swapped out for superstition or tough as nails/nerves of steel(only if very high vit) if you have enough LS from belt+weapons.
At mp2 and beyond, survivability starts becoming a concern. Even if well-configured, sometimes the bot just doesn't play very intelligently. Whirlwinding around through plague pools and arcane sentry beams is a pretty regular sight for me, and that gets really tough to live through, at least with ~700 resists and 42k hp. Enter the overpowered nature of
rend+bloodlust combined with a ton of aoe stun action. With this build, I successfully bot up to mp5. A major thing to note is that the stun from HOTA also stuns fallen maniacs, which greatly reduces the death count from them (which is pretty high risk for me, even on mp0, while running spin2win). Rend, running with a decent skorn and only 3% LS from belt, joined with the massive crits of HOTA (900k-1.5m) pretty much makes you invincible against anything other than one-shots. There are enemies that are problematic, specifically shielding elites and the fat demons that cast the damage reduction shield on allies - basically, anything that nullifies or negates your damage greatly is a risk. However, typically, they don't cause deaths, just a bit of potioning.
Some comparisons to note in the stat differences between these two builds and different MP levels on my barbarian, all on tinnkaizer 0.8 with a paragon80+, 150k unbuffed dps barb, after 12 hours:
Code:
Stat: MP0 spin2win -- MP5 HOTA/rend
GPH: 650k -- 530k
XPH: 33m -- 28m
Legs/hr: 0.4 -- 1.6
ilvl63s/hr: 90 -- 75
Deaths/hr: 1 -- 2
