Barb Mage

[Crystalion]

you really ought to compare this plan/build with doing a Shockwave Werebear Druid.

Well, rather than going to edit #5, I'll try to be "normal" and comment via reply... ;)

An advantage a duration (not damage) War Cry barb has over the Druid stunning build is this: taunt.

Between Howl, Leap, Taunt and Leap Attack (not to mention Grim Ward) the Barb is more likely to be able to easy position himself and monsters where he wants them. Besides the obvious utility of this for stunning (and War Cry is more convenient than Shock Wave anyway, since you don't have to aim it and you get everything for sure) this means that such a Barb is really really tempted to use an item with CE charges.

A possible scenario looks like this...

Barb moons monsters and runs away, herding lots of monsters into a tight pack and "grabbing" reluctant monsters with Taunt (also incapacitating their special or ranged attack).

Once a nice mass is achieved Barb stuns 'em. Kills a couple with Bash or Frenzy or whatever. Re-stunning the mass if need be, of course. Now that there are corpses, Barb fires off a couple (item-based) charges of Corpse Explosion. Entire mass of monsters is now dead and Barb can hork them for items or walk away as desired.

The key is that items with charges of CE tend to have much lower skill levels and therefore radius than a Necro can easily have by pumping and +skills, so the victims need to be closely grouped yet harmless. As I've outlined the Barb has the ideal characteristics (and more) for this maneuver.

edit: items with charges of CE (from search on AS, so YMMV)...
runeword Black, Thul Io Nef, hammers, clubs, maces, Level 4 Corpse Explosion, 12 Charges. (pretty easy to acquire, clvl 35 req)
Corpsemourn unique Ornate plate, Level 5 Corpse Explosion, 40 Charges. (pretty hard to acquire, clvl 55 req)
Bonehew elite unique Ogre Axe, Level 14 Corpse Explosion, 30 charges. (very hard to acquire, clvl 64 req)

so an obvious extreme (probably unnecessary) thought is to dual wield Blacks on both weapon switches and assign four hotkeys, to have 48 charges available between trips to town for repair. Off hand it looks like nightmare Countess runs will yield up Io runes without insane amounts of time investment (which is not to say that that is better than nm hellforge rushing). Level 4 CE is apparently 3.6 yard radius and level 5 a 4 yard radius, fyi, so the monsters do need to be close together (although, if they are all stunned, you could try to get the corpses in the middle of them).

Because of Howl, Grim Ward and Taunt (i.e. a multitude of options for parking and retrieving monsters) there isn't any reason why the Barb can't simply repeat the cycle without having to bash (berserk, etc.) anything to death by leading the next group for stunning on top of the last (dead, now corpses) group.

edit2: ~2746 gold per charge of repair on Black, fyi. So perhaps a fast way to kill, but an expensive one.