I haven't played in a long time, and recently started back up a month ago. Now that the ladder is resetting again, I can join the "race". For the time being, I've just been playing whatever way was fun. Instead of looking up gimmicky builds and guides I just played it fresh and just rolled with the punches and just adjusted my tactics.

Now fun is getting in the way, specifically with my Barb. He's over lvl60 now and has no problem walking over normal and nightmare, but has some problems in nm-act5 (mainly with monsters I can't lifesteal).

Now the problem of Hell started. It's bad enough everything that's useful to a barb is completely thrown away in Hell mode by the added difficulty curve, but because I didn't "invest" time with a magic find sorc my gear (mainly weapons) have fallen drastically behind. That and I screwed up my last respec so I have to do hell as a conc barb which is ironicly the only way I can even kill anything.

How do barbs even remotely have a snowballs chance in hell when the difficulty for melee characters is up the roof. Hell, it's not even on the roof anymore. All I see are smite/hammerdins (since they don't require attack rating) and caster-style specs for other classes. The only thing a barb has in this field is war cry, but you have to sacrifice your entire spec just to harm the enemy and have enough mana to spam it. I can't respectively do nightmare baal runs anymore cause I'm stuck looking at hell rooms. Luckily my necro is only a slayer so I can see nightmare rooms, but that gets tiring fast.

TL:DR - How do barbs handle hell w/o the use of a magic find alt and gimmicks.

If you are playing classic, they use Whirldwind (which is broken and quite overpowered there). Otherwise, try these tips:

- BO, Shout, Iron Skin, and Natural Resists allow you to focus on offensive-oriented gear. Shout combined with a Defiance mercenary means you will sit at ridiculous defense level wearing garbage.
- Whirlwind works great on mobs, while Concentrate or Frenzy will allow you to take down bosses.
- You need Crushing Blow in this game. Find items with it, cube runewords with it, or toss some on your merc.

I played an untwinked barb through hardcore previous ladder. I even used some restrictions: no uniques/runewords. Only rare/magic & crafted.

It was a frenzy barb. I ended up shoprunning to get cruel weapons.