Barbarian v2.0: "Make you a sword of me!"

[Nitro]

I like it, it's a lot of fun to use and feels useful, one thing though.

What are the biggest issues You have with the current rage mechanic ?

The fact that the biteback becomes useless as soon as DR is involved. And considering how common DR is, even in the starting zones (Tyrantfog zombies, worgs, gargoyles) it gets somewhat frustrating when you see your biteback do nothing.

[Shadowy Reality]

The fact that the biteback becomes useless as soon as DR is involved.

Yes, this is my biggest complain on biteback. Anything with any sort of big natural DR (like worgs, vampires) shut down your biteback. Same for any monster with Ghostly and Ethereal Visage, your biteback goes down to 0 in the later.

It should probably be made to pierce your weapon's enchantment bonus.

[Nitro]

So, having gotten a barbarian into decently high levels now I have some feedback on the new rage. At low to mid levels its great, the temp HP saves you gold on kits and the biteback does decent damage to most enemies.

But the scaling is a bit poor, you get more temp HP while raging without investing more into barbarian, the biteback quickly becomes useless as most high level enemies have DR and the vampiric regeneration is spotty at best, not to mention that if you want the biteback to hit, you need to have somewhat shoddy AC, which means that the high end enemies chew through your temp HP incredibly quickly unless you build for AC like a standard fighter build and use the extra HP as a fallback and ignore the biteback aspect altogether.

If there is anything I could suggest, it would be to only give out the temp HP to those with a large investment of barbarian levels (75%, like rangers with animal empathy) And maybe give the biteback the same enchantment bonus as your mainhand weapon if possible. Because as it stands right now, there isn't much reason to go deep into barbarian when you can get the largest of the benefits from raging from a simple 3 level dip.

[Griefmaker]

Why not make the biteback magical damage simply to prevent it from being blocked?

[Shadowy Reality]

I assume because it is meant to represent physical damage. The weapon enchantment applying to the biteback would be great.

As for the Temporary HP, I still think it should only be given for the Barbarian levels you take. That is, if you go 30 Barbarian you get Half HP as Temporary HP. If you go 15 Barbarian you only get Half of 15 Barbarian levels worth of HP. Otherwise it just encourages people to get 3 barbarian levels and makes use of that huge boost in HP.

There needs to be some sort of end reward for Barbarians. Warlocks have bigger summon, and DR increase when they reach 30, fighters have +5 and then +6 weapons. From 20 to 30, Barbarians get nothing (epic rage feats only require 16 Barbarian levels). From 16 to 20 Barbarians get 1 Rage Level increase. Arguably, going more than 16 levels of barbarian is inefficient.

[Flameborn]

Alright, after about 20 hours with the new barbarian, i've come to a few conclusions as I near level 8.

Many of these things have been said already, but i'd like to reinforce them.

PVE monster DR is the literal death of you. My biteback damage on a con based barbarian does 3x the damage of my weapon. If something has +1/10 damage reduction, then bitebacks worthless. It should be make into either magical damage, or so the physical goes through DR.

That aside, the only issue i've found is that the barbarian gains 0 offensive ability from its rage, all of its new abilities are defensive, or require things to hit you. As the most popular fighter build (20/7/3) gets +4 enchancement and +12 ac, as well as freeing up all its armor and weapon slots for enchanting, I suggest perhaps a +1 ab per 3 or 5 barbarian levels. As it stands, a weaponmaster could sit in improved expertise and dodge 90% of your hits while hitting you 95% of the time. Even with biteback and 2x their hp, they'll kill you in just a few rounds, considering i've seen those fighters put out 600 damage in a round with crits.

This would really help the push for pure barbarians, or at least the majority of your levels being barbarian levels. Give people a reason to go lots of barbarian!

[Shadowy Reality]

You are right on all of those. Biteback needs to pierce DR and some scaling with levels would be good.

That asides, Barbarians are fine, Weaponmasters just overshadow everyone else, they need to be tunned down, either in critical range or multiplier.

[Tyrantos]

Would be awesome if someone could summerize the changes and put on the wiki.. if its not already up there!

[Ferret Roll]

Having been playing a barbarian off and on over the last two weeks, I've come to notice that the vampiric regen trait on the weapon is pretty much useless.

It doesn't proc with any level of reliability (Some other posters have noted this as a bug tied to vampiric regen), and being based on rage level alone it hardly restores enough when it does proc to make up for how rarely it goes off.

It'd be nice if this could be replaced with something more usable, like straight damage bonus or a low-tier standard type of regeneration.

[Flameborn]

I can agree the vamp regen does nothing. I think I get like 8 hp out of 20 hits. Its not even noticable. It might work if it was like 5 vamp regen instead of 1 per rage level.

A +1 damage or +1.5 for two handers per rage level would be much better. Two handers need the love.

[Scurvy Cur]

I am fairly sure that the reason vampiric regen triggers so little is that it only restores HP when you are below your maximum HP level, so the +50% temp HP boost basically murders the utility of the vamp regen: When you have the vamp regen, you probably have a surplus of HP, and thus don't need it.

My own personal feedback on the barbarian is thus: Barbarian rage has two very strong features, and two very situational, mediocre features. This is based on observation and play of Barbarian in PvE, and play of and against barbarians in PvP.

+50% bonus HP: Very strong. 3 levels of barbarian on a lot of builds out there basically provides more temp HP than said builds will lose in a fight. Current experiment is with a Barbarian/Fighter/WM that uses a 3 level barb dip to basically give me a weaponmaster with infinite HP while out hitting NPCs. Does not require additional levels to scale.

+50% Movespeed: Very strong as well (though not as strong as the free HP), for an infinite ability on such a short cooldown, especially on a class that doesn't need to stand still and cast. It's essentially a free disengage (or a free ticket to chase stuff down). I'm not sure how it interacts with the native Barb +10% move speed, especially when combined with light armor or lots of fighter levels. As with the HP bonus, a very strong ability for a 3-level investment. Does not require additional levels to scale.

Biteback Damage: An aggravatingly circumstantial feature. Sometimes feels very strong, when combined with stacked with DR feats, shadow shield, ethereal visage, and/or 10 levels of palemaster. Other times feels completely useless, and is easy enough to counterplay when met with strong permanent DR. Scales very minorly with levels, difference between biteback on a guy with 3 barb levels and 20 barb levels is about a 25-30% increase. As it is currently, do not build for biteback, treat it as an auxiliary feature that will occasionally punish certain high attack count opponents for focusing a raging barbarian: It enables them to focus on offense longer, because some of the traditional natural counters to low AC, high HP classes will look to avoid or waste time counterplaying, but should not be considered a primary source of offensive ability.

I would strongly support buffing this, were the other features (particularly the free HP) not as strong as they were.

Vamp Regen: Outright bad feature. It'll never cost you anything, but the only times it does anything for you are times when you have blown your entire pool of free HP, and are injured again while still raging. Ideally, you want to avoid this situation entirely.

Subsequent Conclusions

The above observations lead to a few conclusions about the class in genereal:

1) Don't build a purely con-based Barb if you intend to melee with it. Build a strength based barb with enough con for Epic DR feats. A good final spread might be: 26 str, 22 con. Going too much more heavily into constitution will hurt your ability to hit things with a weapon, and leave you too reliant on soaking hits and doing biteback damage. Biteback damage is too circumstantial to build entirely around it.

Interestingly, at some point, more constitution actually starts to hurt your strongest mechanic: free HP. This is because you are increasing the time between rages proportionally more than you are increasing your extra HP buffer. By the time you have a 700 HP barb, adding 15 free HP to your rage buff (by grabbing +2 con) represents something like a 4% increase of your bonus HP, but also means you get to employ your rage to reapply said HP about 4-5% less often.

2) There's not much need to take more than 3 barb levels, unless it is your only high AB class (as in the case with a barb/bard/PM). The most effective barbarian builds that I've seen to date are ones that take 3 levels for infinite HP and free move speed, and add it to another class combo that is already very strong. It may seem a little cheesy, but it's basically an acknowledgement that a barbarian gets two super strong features at level 1, and further levels in barbarian only go to (very slowly) strengthening Rage's two weakest features.

3) Rage is currently less suited to use as a "Get mad and smash things" option than it is to use as a "get mad and run away" option. Most of the use I've seen of it in high-risk PvP situations are strictly defensive, rather than offensive. They're used to create a buffer of HP and a +50% move speed bonus to soak attacks as the barbarian books it for the nearest transition. PvE is a little different, because you prep for an offensive maneuver by raging for the free HP, knowing that the spawns will wait for you to get your rage ready, and that you can probably finish them before you run out of it, but this is still essentially a defensive ability. You aren't triggering rage to kill foes faster, you're triggering it to protect your pool of "real HP" by pulling up a pool of temp HP to soak for it. It's not a whole lot different than protecting your HP pool by casting divine shield or stoneskin. This feels thematically inappropriate to me.

4) This implies that the cooldown between rages is too short. If I always have a huge stack of pretend-HP for every PvE fight, to the point it feels like I am playing an infinite-HP character that is always free to rage for every fight, then this ability is off cooldown far too often.

Suggestions

Make rage a more suitable offensive tool that scales with Barbarian level, while reducing its utility as a defensive tool. Reduce the HP buffer and the speed, beef the biteback up a little, and replace the vamp regen with a damage effect. Increase the cooldown on rage, and make it impossible to purge the fatigue.

Actually shut down the use of spells and umd items, but make sure that the rage is strong enough to compensate for it. I think this, or at least parts of it, are supposed to be there, but currently they aren't working right.

Rescale all of the final rage features so that getting useful versions of them requires lots of barb levels, but make them actually scary when a character invests those barb levels. I'd rather not see the most mechanically powerful ragers be the ones who dipped 3 barb on an already-strong set of other classes.

Side note: It's pretty telling where things stand that, when challenged to make the most potent melee barbarian I could, I made a weaponmaster. With 3 barbarian levels.

[Recite the Sins]

I am fairly sure that the reason vampiric regen triggers so little is that it only restores HP when you are below your maximum HP level, so the +50% temp HP boost basically murders the utility of the vamp regen: When you have the vamp regen, you probably have a surplus of HP, and thus don't need it.

Having used a Vamp Regen weapon pretty often lately, I can confirm that it straight doesn't trigger 80% of the time, even if I'm at injured or whatever. It definitely isn't that. For it to be useful it needs to be at +5 or something.

[Flameborn]

So it sounds like the temp hp needs to be only for people who go 50% or more of their total levels into barbarian. Taking the best feature for 3 levels is horrible.

[Scurvy Cur]

I'm definitely not saying that it's not the unreliable triggering: that doesn't help. But you also don't regenerate while you're running on your bonus HP buffer, which you should always be relying on as much as you can. It's a case where the two mechanics actively do not synergize at all. One mechanic wants you to be missing a small amount of HP, but taking very little damage, such that HP recovery paces damage received, while the other mechanic makes you want to be so well supplied with bonus HP that you don't care about taking damage.

[Scurvy Cur]

So it sounds like the temp hp needs to be only for people who go 50% or more of their total levels into barbarian. Taking the best feature for 3 levels is horrible.

I would definitely support this measure.

I would also support dropping the movement speed to +20%, replacing the vampiric regen with a +1 damage per 3 to 5 barbarian levels bonus, doubled for two handed weapons, and extending the rage cooldown (but not the AC penalty) to something like 4 minutes, making rage a far more potent offensive tool for hitting things with.

[Flameborn]

So it sounds like the temp hp needs to be only for people who go 50% or more of their total levels into barbarian. Taking the best feature for 3 levels is horrible.

I would definitely support this measure.

I would also support dropping the movement speed to +20%, replacing the vampiric regen with a +1 damage per 3 to 5 barbarian levels bonus, doubled for two handed weapons, and extending the rage cooldown (but not the AC penalty) to something like 4 minutes, making rage a far more potent offensive tool for hitting things with.

I would rather see a +10% per 5 barbarian levels to the movement speed, to further push people to go pure rather then filthy multiclasses.

Also, why not make the vamp regen effect the barb at all times like the fighters enhancements? Just a natural +2 per rage level or something.

[Lorkas]

I am fairly sure that the reason vampiric regen triggers so little is that it only restores HP when you are below your maximum HP level

It triggers at max HP, but when it tries to heal you it says "Healed 0 hit points".

It can't heal temp HP though, but even then it should be able to heal any regular HP damage you had before raging or that you take after the temp HP are used up during rage.

Example: A barb with 400/500 HP enters rage and should immediately jump up to 650/500 HP. However, the game still knows that the base HP is 400/500, and healing spells or kits would allow you to heal up to 100 HP and get up to 750/500 before taking any damage. Vampiric regen should also allow you to regain up to a maximum of 100 HP.

On the other hand, if you start at 500/500 HP, rage up to 750 HP, then take 100 HP worth of damage to get to 650/500, vampiric regen will do nothing, as the 100 HP you lost were temporary HP.

[Scurvy Cur]

Even with damage, it doesn't seem to be working that way.

I just let my barb take about 30 HP worth of damage, raged, killed everything, and when he came out of rage, he still had those 30 HP still missing. Vamp seemed to be triggering about as correctly as it ever does (ie, about half the time I hit something), but didn't seem to be putting those HP back.

[Lorkas]

Curious. Did it give the "Healed X hit points" message? Also, do healing kits work while raged?

[Nitro]

Healing kits do indeed work while raged, the current barbarian last resort is to rage up and chainheal while waiting for things without DR to die trying to hit you. They won't do anything until your temp HP has been shaved away and you're regular hurt though.

[Flameborn]

Healing kits do indeed work while raged, the current barbarian last resort is to rage up and chainheal while waiting for things without DR to die trying to hit you. They won't do anything until your temp HP has been shaved away and you're regular hurt though.

This is unfortunately the issue with many spawns. If they have DR, i've found I can't fight them at all, because without any AC they eat me alive.

Its also not very fun just chugging kits over and over while things slap you. Barbs need either some serious offence, or harder defense.

[Morderon]

Have yet to play barbarian in any meaningful way.

But as things stand if I were to build one it would be an AC tank using the temp hp as a buffer for those rare times you are hit. Which I doubt is what Arelith is going for.

[Flameborn]

Have yet to play barbarian in any meaningful way.

But as things stand if I were to build one it would be an AC tank using the temp hp as a buffer for those rare times you are hit. Which I doubt is what Arelith is going for.

If you want an AC tank, theres a half dozen other ways to go. Barbarians supposed to be its own low ac brawler!

[Scurvy Cur]

Mord is right though, with rage mechanics as they are, a barbarian is at its best when played as a high-AC, high DPS (read sword and board weaponmaster with good AC and epic damage reduction) that abuses the free HP buffer to never take real damage in a fight.

[Morderon]

My idea for a tweak:

1) Remove all current buffs except the movement speed.

2) Have better scaling with barbarian levels. This is going to be needed as the biteback is no longer going to be tied with low AC. Barbarians already do have lowish AC compared to other martial classes other then ranger (either temp or permanently) Alternatively, have the biteback damage scale somewhat with lower AC.

3) Create an aura, possibly based off the silence aura size. On heartbeat this aura damages all hostiles within. Magic damage is used as there's no way to use the weapon's enchantment modifier to bypass DR. Which means not only melee-attacking hostiles can be harmed.

The barbarian heals HP for each monster targeting him/her. This bonus is lost if the barbarian is -guarded, not attacking, or immobile (feared/paralyzed/knocked down). Which fits the theme of the vamperic regen.. but a bit more reliably.

What's lost: The low AC theme. But maybe a bigger AC penalty can be used. This will mean the barbarian doesn't outright suck when not in rage as it can use AC increasing items during those times without it harming their biteback potential when they do rage.