Barbs IIISupport, Attack, Melee, Strike Category: Barbs Tier: 5 Cost & Reservation Multiplier: 120%Support Requirements: +5 StrSupports MeleeStrike Skills. Supported Skills deal your Thorns Damage on Hit twice after you've Retaliated with Thorns Damage.Supported Skills deal your Thorns Damage twice on their next Hit after you Retaliate with ThornsPlace into a Skill's Support Gem socket in the Skills Panel to apply its effects to that Skill. You cannot have multiple Support Gems of the same Category socketed within one Skill.
Acquisition Drop restricted It can be obtained by engraving an Uncut Support Gem.Metadata Item class: Support Gem Metadata ID: Metadata/Items/Gem/SupportGemBarbsThree
With a skill supported by Barbs equipped, you gain stacks of the Barbs buff any time you retaliate with Thorns.
While you have the Barbs buff, hitting with the supported skill works almost exactly like being hit: both cause your Thorns to hit the enemy in exactly the same way. The Thorns effect is a separate hit from the supported skill's hit.
Therefore, a Barbs-focused character may want to focus solely on a strike's ability to hit as many targets as possible, as fast as possible. The strike's own damage and effect do not affect Barbs at all, nor do its other support gems.
The only difference between hitting someone while you have Barbs III, and being hit by someone while you have Thorns, is that hitting with Barbs III doubles the Thorns damage, and is not "retaliating with Thorns" for effects that respond to that. In other words, Barbs is not self-sustaining; hitting with Barbs will not give you more stacks of the Barbs buff.
Because attacking with Barbs causes two simultaneous hits (the one from the attack and the one from Barbs), it could be useful for applying two stacks of an ailment at once. However, Thorns cannot poison (since no damage type has an inherent chance to poison, and the player's modifiers to the chance to inflict an ailment like poison do not apply to Thorns), making it very difficult to leverage in the current state of the game. Right now, only a Stormweaver can take advantage, to apply two Chills with Heavy Snows or two Shocks with Strike Twice.
Item acquisition
Barbs III has restrictions on where or how it can drop.
