Water with Hannibal Barca

This guide is part of my article series on water builds. If this build is not to your likeing, have a look at the rest of my builds on the water build page. I have multiple builds for any taste available, IB, PvE, arena/ToS builds and F2P/cheap builds.

This article is on Free 2 Play water without Attila but with Hannibal Barca instead. This build perform well in PvP and fights gnomes well.

Running Barca is one of the best alternatives if you do not have Attila. But let me be clear – running Attila will be stronger! Check out the spender guides on cheap Attila setups.

DO NOT RUN THIS BUILD WITHOUT UNIQUE ARTIFACT ON BARCA!
– A strong unique artifact needs atleast to have Iron Will + physical or accuracy main mod. Preferably physical % + Iron will Bonus.

Setup

This setup is pretty standard and revolves around pumping Merlin and Barca with high damage output and AOE the enemy down. Our Barce deals a lot of damage and will be boosted further by out Herald.

Moreover, Herald adds a very nice secondary DPS to the fight and boosts the damage output of both Yoshi and Barca.

The biggest drawback of using this as your main, is that you are unable to apply wounds, making fights versus earth and holy very difficult. This however, also means you are taking full advantage of the insanely strong Merlin (best mage in the game).

You want to run this passive loadout:

Merlin: Annihilation + Concentration + Weakness

Yoshi: Assist + Coercion + Resist

Herald: Fighting Will + Oaken Guard + Malice

Barca: Death Breath + Anger + Cleave

Countering enemies

There are small changes that needs to be made to the above default ToK setup depending on what you are fighting. Like if you are up against a lightning march with Khan Ysg, throw away Resist and put in energy suppresion. Changes you might want to consider are:

1. You want to play around with Coercion here. While it boosts your damage output significantly on Yoshi, Herald and especially Barca, it also means we are unable to run Fighting Master on Merlin since we need three aura slots. So if you are against someone with a focus on control (for instance another water with a regen setup on Attila and a Bathony) you might want to try out Fighting Master over Coercion/weakness.
2. If you fight Khan, try running energy suppresion instead of Resist. If your opponent does not have high enough technology with energy regen research you could consistently get heal off before wounds debuff.
3. If you feel you need sustain over damage, replace Coercion/Weakness with Shelter.

Published: 08-06-2022