D2 Berserker Barbarian

[Deceptus]

Me and a friend play Diablo 2 together in a casual way, romping through all the acts in all the difficulty levels and just beating the game together.
I thought of an easy to build Barbarian that wouldn't need top tier gear to do stuff and my friend rolled with a Lightning Sorc.
I provide crowd control through Howl and Warcry and he usually just cleans stuff up.

I find however that when I do some runs on my own (occasionally I like to romp through the Durance of Hate), I find that it's hard for me to deal with mobs and I seem to be pretty underwhelming in a fight. It kind of shows in our duo games where my friend just kind of melts stuff with lightning and I just generally Howl/Warcry people away from him. My Berserker damage only comes to play when fightning bosses, it seems. Maybe I should respec my Barbarian into a Singer, seeing as how I really only play "second flute" to my friend? Then again, my Howl and Warcry are enough for CC most of the time and Battle Orders are almost maxed out anyway; he doesn't benefit from Shout and neither do I really.

Maybe I need some tweaks here and there? It's an untwinked build.



Weapon: Storm Blow (crafted from a magical Great Maul, Hit Power receipt: +92% dmg, +191 AR, 5% chance to frost nova when struck, attacker takes 4 damage, 1-7 lightning damage)
Armor: Twitchthroe (I really don't care for the Armor Class...)
Helmet: Sigon's
Boots: Sigon's
Belt: Sigon's
Gloves: Bloodfists
Rings: Nagelring and a rare (+115 AR, +13% fire resist, +16% lightning resist, 10% chance to nova when struck, 1-5 fire damage, half freeze duration)
Amulet: +1 warcries, 9% lightning/poison/cold resists, 17% fire, +1 max damage)
Skills: Berserk 20, Battle Orders 14, Howl 8, War Cry 2, Mace Mastery 1, prerequisites 1, skills like Iron Skin, Battle Command and Natural Resistances are all 1
Should I hunt for more gear? Change tactics?
Thanks in advance.

[T-hawk]

You need a better weapon if you want to kill things. What's the listed damage of yours, probably somewhere around 100? High-end mauls deal 100 base and can get a Cruel modifer of +300%, meaning four times the damage you've got going. If you've made it to Act 5 in Hell, you can probably shop at Larzuk until he turns up something better.

[Sullla]

D2's melee classes are extremely item-dependent. With casters, you can get buy with the damage from the skills themselves and mostly due fine. With melee fighters, you're very dependent on something good dropping along the way, which is why I almost never played them. (I had zero interest in saving gear or twinking out characters.) That's how D2 got people to keep playing the game forever, tantalizing them with the chance to get godly gear if they did thousands of Mephisto runs or whatever.

If you're intent on pure play, there's not much you can do. Protect your lightning sorcie and let them do the killing. In D2, you're literally not playing the same game if you're engaging in pure play compared to those using twinked gear.