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

[Flameborn]

While that sounds cool Mord, it also sounds like a lot of coding and scripting. Simply changing the damage type of biteback to magic and giving 2-3x as much vamp regen would fix the issues here.

[Shadowy Reality]

Make the rage a command, its probably the most important change. I've had my Barbarian fight plenty of WMs and other melee types over the past months. The biggest issue is that when your rage goes off, it's no longer relevant.

PvP is very fast paced in Arelith, if you can't react from the first instant you're not going to catch up.

[Flameborn]

Oh yes.

So, a -rage command.

Biteback damage to magic, to avoid all the rediculous DR

and 2x as much vamp regen?

[Shadowy Reality]

A few more:

Temporary HP given fo each Barbarian level, not Total HP (big hit on Barbarian dips).
No casting during rage.
Some perk for people going over 20 Barbarian (rage doesn't progress further, you only need 16 levels of Barbarian for Epic Rage feats)

[Flameborn]

I'd say 15 temp hp per barb level would be fair. So people who only put 3 levels in get only 45 hp instead of 300.

No casting.

Perhaps rage level naturally increasing by +1 every 3 levels in epic? 21/24/27/30. Would make a pure barbarian with all the feats have a 14 rage level.

-rage command

Biteback damage to magic, to avoid all the ridiculous DR

and 2x as much vamp regen.

[Shadowy Reality]

You can do the math for the Temporary HP.

It's (12+Con Mod)*barbarian levels worth of Temporary HP.

[Ferret Roll]

Perhaps rage level naturally increasing by +1 every 3 levels in epic? 21/24/27/30. Would make a pure barbarian with all the feats have a 14 rage level. . .

The above combined with the below...

. . .and 2x as much vamp regen.

Could lead to some serious shenanigans. Getting like 28 hp back per swing, with 4 APR (when VR works), would be 112 hp returned per round. With the massive temp hp block barbarians get, that would lead to their real health pool filling up before their temporary one could be depleted in many cases.

If there has to be a pure-class bonus, I'd say maybe have their rage 'cooldown' reduced by their CON mod or by the number of seconds equal to their levels in barbarian.

With the AC debuff being one or two minutes long? Someone with all 30 levels in barbarian, dedicated to their rage, would have 30 seconds knocked off the cooldown.

[Nitro]

Could lead to some serious shenanigans. Getting like 28 hp back per swing, with 4 APR (when VR works), would be 112 hp returned per round. With the massive temp hp block barbarians get, that would lead to their real health pool filling up before their temporary one could be depleted in many cases.

Sadly, it's not nearly that reliable. I've tried doing some testing with vampiric regeneration but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it.

In the first test with 1APR, 500 attacks total, it triggered 207 times, indicating a roughly 2 in 5 rate of procs.

In the second test with the same setup, it triggered 288 times, a fairly major difference but sure. It can be chalked up to RNG.

In the third test, same setup, it triggered 220 times, so it seems to be somewhat predictable in the rough area of percentage for triggering with 1 APR.

When you start taking several attacks per round into account and dual wielding it starts getting weird though.

While dual wielding with 1APR on main/offhand, my three tests of 500 strikes gave a trend of: 331, 271 and 350. Significantly higher than a single weapon.

With a singe/twohand weapon with 2APR, still doing 500 attacks, the number changed drastically, giving only 100, 89 and 160 triggers per test. At first glance this seems to indicate that the change to have vampiric regeneration trigger is based around the first attack made each round from each weapon.

This trend continues with 3APR, dropping the vampiric triggers down to 88, 70 and 74.

Then, when we hit 4APR, we get a resurgence in amounts of vampiric triggers, up to 150, 133 and 189. This seems to indicate that vampiric regeneration has a greater chance or only triggers on the attacks made in the first flurry of combat.

However this doesn't explain the fact that an offhand weapon increases the amount of procs that you get as with a base 1 APR, the offhand attack is made in the second flurry, my current hypothesis is that the vampiric regeneration procs separately for mainhand/offhand weapons for the first/second flurries respectively.

I haven't tested higher APR's yet, nor higher APR's with offhand weapons, improved two-weapon, haste, flurry of blows ETC as the tests are somewhat time consuming. I'll post further information when I've completed it.

(All tests were made ingame in a standard leveling module (No haks or overrides, standard singleplayer settings) by giving a character a vampiric weapon and letting them hit a target for a while and then collecting the data from the log files.)

[RockandRollOutlaw]

I think if barbarians were to gain immunity to critical hits while in rage they would be just fine.

[Scurvy Cur]

I think a few of these suggestions are going overboard:

15 temp HP per barb level is a move in the wrong direction: while it somewhat fixes the scaling issue, it takes the strongest rage mechanic and makes it even stronger than it is currently likely to be. I would favor, instead of increasing temp HP, applying something like 5% physical damage immunity per 5 levels in barbarian while raging -and- 25% of max HP as temp HP for characters with at least half their levels in the class. This actually buffs the feature a tiny bit for main-class barbarians once they stack up 15+ class levels, and removes its main utility for adding 300 fake HP to a warlock or weaponmaster.

Likewise, I don't favor changing the biteback to magical damage, or really any other buff to biteback until the HP boost and Move Speed boost get reworked/nerfed/rescaled/whatever. As explained before, while the biteback mechanic isn't all that great, it doesn't need to be. Barbarian is actually a really good class as is right now, its main problem is that you get both good features at level 1, and they are hugely applicable to a variety of other builds. Buffing biteback without fixing the infinite HP available to a careful rage user is probably a mistake.

Regarding crit immunity for barbs while raging: I really hope you're joking on that one. All this would do, unless very tightly controlled, would make it even better for the builds that dip 3 barb to have infinite access to free HP. It might not be too bad if you restricted it to pure class barbarians though.

Edit: Any time I read a suggestion that sounds like "let's super buff this thing, because it's buggy in NWN, or because the AI is going to perform suboptimally", my gut reaction is that this is a bad idea. Instead of multiplying the buggy function, maybe just add a feature that isn't buggy.

Additionally, I don't think this needs to be made a command, unless we want to go through the list of abilities that ought to be a free action, but which NWN has assigned an activation time to anyway. Rage is far from the only one, and it's still a fairly quick activation, compared to some abilities that have been kludged into the system as spells, when they ought to be free actions.

[Flameborn]

The biteback damage and temp hp are both needed in such a low ac class. Neither of them works well without the other.

And the movement speed is the same as drinking a haste potion, but with only half the benefits, I absolutely do not see it needing to be nerfed at all.

We need ways to push the class that don't rely on building AC or multiclassing!

The bitebacks nearly useless in any pve at level 15+, and can be almost totally negated with just a shadow shield scroll.

And that huge pool of temp hp is nothing when you can't even achieve more then 30 ac without huge penalties or multiclassing. You'll be hit every time, thats what barbs do!


Now, you could do straight regen while raging, but it would have to be ~significant~ to make any difference in a fight. Considering at level 8 at places like driders, trogs, and stingers, im losing 100, sometimes 200 hp against 2-3 of these enemies, while the vamp regen gains me like...25 hp back. Its so tiny its not even noticable, and most times I have to run away and kite for 10 rounds to rage again and finish them off. Thats NOT fun, by anyones standards, and it absolutely devours healing kits.

So if we go the regen route, it needs to be like 20 regen a round, because im taking at least 100 a round. I can't even imagine what later game will look like. Duergar, cloakers, giants, all have DR, huge health pools, and massive damage.

[HurinWillSmite]

I dont see a big problem with "barbarian dippers". If you're afraid that people will take 3 lvls to their fighter/rogue/wm then remember they can only take 3 different classes. So they have to either give up rogue or wm.
Remember that the current " barbarian dip"™ isnt as bad as when you could get +12 to str for being drunk (?!).

I also have in the same post: A suggestion! To encourage more lvls into the barbarian class perhaps make it possible to rage while in a rage. A frenzy in a way. What the boni for that (rage inside a rage) could be I dont know. Double the bite back? Vanilla rage? Something else? What i DO think though is that a frenzy would consume a rage for that rest. Maybe even consume more than one. What do you guys think about that?

[Shadowy Reality]

The issue with a Barbarian dip is that betweeb Fighter/WM/Barb3 and a Barbarian30, the first gets pretty much all of the good stuff right away:

Huge amount of HP pretty much the sameas the Barbarian 30
He gets less 6 or 7 biteback damage
He gets speed
He gets the will save increase

What I'm trying to argue is that, since Barbarian was changed to make it competitive and fun, we might as well make it actually competitive and fun. That means a Barbarian 30 should have tools to be on par with other melee builds, it isn't, and the other melee builds can now take a dip into Barbarian and get pretty much everything the Barbarian30 has, along with what they already did.

[Flameborn]

So we just need its abilities to up themselves in 15+levels to give a low AC alternative to the fighter .meta.

And a small fix to the current biteback and vamp regen.

[DestroyerOTN]

Some people are forgetting that the best Barb builds at the moment do have mostly barb, level wise. Terrifying rage is 100% worth the 51% Barbarian levels, and the extra 2 HP for every barbarian level is the equivalent of a free CON modifier boost at that point.

Making its goodies solely pure class in an environment where multi class is tough to give up is less likely to get people with more Barb levels any more than the current number, and just a bit more likely to alter the usefulness of the update as a whole. The same is true for changing how the temp HP interacts with/scales with said multi classing; and is exemplified for the idea of removing it. Thus, I'd personally advise against either.

In its present form, it's no more multi class fodder than the fighter, really. Go 16 Barb/4 Fighter/10 Rogue for crippling strike, go Barb with Palemaster for instant lols. Those that are putting it in a Weaponmaster build are giving up considerable defensive capacity for minimal boons to their HP; and indeed, cutting out the vital part of the Weaponmaster strategy that is "Timestop, Haste potion, Word of Faith, kill". That's not something to overlook for one with menial strategic prowess.

It's currently a much needed filler of the HP tank niche, and giving 3 levels that could literally be 3 feats if they were fighter ones is a huuuuge tradeoff. Personally, I'd argue that the problem is solely what Flameborn pointed out: it's offensive boosts are pretty laughable in PvP, and almost nonexistent in PvM - where things have DR.

I'd trade the Vampric Regeneration for straight +1 damage boosts/1d4 rolls of damage/1d6 massive crits; make the bite back based on some algorithm that successfully bypasses sources of natural DR as Mord proposed, or just go straight for magic damage as Flameborn suggests.

[Arelith_Rocks]

Not saying Barbarians don't need a buff, but some classes are ideal for 'dipping' or cross classing regardless of how weak or strong they are.

I don't think anyone should frown on a person who dips 3 levels of a class, unless it's something dull like 27 Sorcerer/3 Paladin. Even then I wouldn't necessarily care about the 3 Paladin levels so long as you are responsible and intelligent with that character.

Barbarian, Rogue, Fighter, Monk.. All of these classes are ideal for dipping in and out of.

There have been a few examples of Epic Barbarians on Arelith who were genuinely terrifying. It had little to do with mechanics though, and more to do with the roleplay and that particular player's skill with Neverwinter Nights in general.

If you're a Barbarian who spends most of his life running the dungeons of Arelith.. I think you should be dipping into Rogue levels at some point, honestly. I don't really feel like Barbarian is a class that you are meant to take 30 levels of. I feel the same way about alot of other classes, too.

Not saying that you can't or shouldn't do a pure Barbarian - just that I don't think the class is built for that.

[DestroyerOTN]

I don't really feel like Barbarian is a class that you are meant to take 30 levels of. I feel the same way about alot of other classes, too.

Someone on the Arelith forums endorsing appropriate use of the mechanics

[Arelith_Rocks]

I think a Ranger/Barbarian would be very interesting from a roleplay standpoint.

Right now I have a Barbarian/CoT who will eventually be a Barbarian/CoT/WM. It's a pretty weak build but it's different. She has bad AC, and bad AB because I wanted intelligence and she doesn't get any perks from the modern Barbarian changes on Arelith since I made her years ago. No subrace, and no gifts I don't think. She also has like 12 charisma I think, completely useless.

She will probably never be able to solo anything and will probably always get her Snuggybear kicked, but it's whatever. At least she has taunt and intimidate.

It's not like you're ever going to be able to really solo much as a mundane melee class anyway so you may aswell make one that you enjoy roleplaying.

[Scurvy Cur]

It's not like you're ever going to be able to really solo much as a mundane melee class anyway so you may aswell make one that you enjoy roleplaying.

I actually want to comment on this.

This has actually changed a fair bit since the last time you played regularly. Mundane classes are actually fairly excellent at soloing right now. Dispelling gives most caster or hybrid classes some issues soloing unless they cast infinite spells, and several kinds of mundane class can solo basically indefinitely:

Anything heavy in fighter will have the AC and a number of powerful undispellable buffs to solo for days, so long as you remember to take feats that boost saving throws. Fighter20/WM7/3 Tumble Dip gets a special mention for walking over basically everything on the server by itself.

Anything with 3 or more barb levels and a decent bit of AC can clear spawns without ever using their real HP pool, due to raging once per fight with no need to rest.

A well built monk/rogue/fighter or monk/rogue/CoT that covers class weaknesses with saving throw feats will also have a lot of solo success.

I'd even say most of these pure mundanes solo way, way better than anything that isn't a FvS, Warlock, Weavemaster, or True Flame.

Glad to see you around some lately, A_R, btw.

[Flameborn]

We just want Barbarian to be able to survive where a half dozen classes already excel.

Im writing this while I wait for my rage cooldown, since I need 1-2 rages to get through one spawn without dying.

[Scurvy Cur]

I think the problem is that Barbarian has been billed as something that can wade into combat with next to no AC and thrive on it, when the abilities are best suited to buffering a class that already has the AC to survive in melee very well. So people that build a barbarian with a big ol' 2-hander and wade into combat expecting the weaker mechanics of the class (biteback and vamp regen) to carry the day are in for a bad time, while those that are built around exploiting the HP buffer to the maximum effect do super well.

I'm all in favor of changing this, because it feels like the design missed the mark, but there's a world of difference between a class being strong for all the wrong reasons, and a class being weak. So some of the straight buffs I see suggested feel like they run the risk of turning the sword and shield AC barb into too much of a monster in the course of making the 2-handed weapon barbarian weaker.

As a potential solution: Perhaps include stronger rage features for barbarians who are using a 2-hander? 2 handed weapons are pretty underwhelming on NWN in general and Arelith in particular as it is, so it would be appropriate, imo, to give the 2-hander barbarian some buffs.

[Shadowy Reality]

I am currently in th epics with my Barbarian and thus far I have not had problems with PvE. I'm using a 2-handed, no AC barbarian. And I've explored quite a lot of places, in both surface and underdark.

Where I feel most gimped is in PvP confrontations. You are either outperformed (WMs) or your mechanics entiely bypassed (ranged attacks). The extra HP goes down really fast due to having no AC, all attacks will be hits.

[DestroyerOTN]

So some of the straight buffs I see suggested feel like they run the risk of turning the sword and shield AC barb into too much of a monster in the course of making the 2-handed weapon barbarian weaker.

As a potential solution: Perhaps include stronger rage features for barbarians who are using a 2-hander? 2 handed weapons are pretty underwhelming on NWN in general and Arelith in particular as it is, so it would be appropriate, imo, to give the 2-hander barbarian some buffs.

To be fair, two-handed combat outside of GSword/Scythe Weaponmasters has always been a suboptimal choice. They're weapons clearly designed with the ideal of numbers above all, and there are smaller weapons that do their job better while not cutting your AC (Scimitars, Rapiers, Kukris, Dual Katanas)

As an additive, trying to deal heavy damage on a Barbarian is also missing the mark. Its features from the get-go are primarily for HP tanking.

[Arelith_Rocks]

As a potential solution: Perhaps include stronger rage features for barbarians who are using a 2-hander? 2 handed weapons are pretty underwhelming on NWN in general and Arelith in particular as it is, so it would be appropriate, imo, to give the 2-hander barbarian some buffs.

I think this is prolly the smartest way to approach solving problems with the Barbarian.

I used to play on a action server that gave a flat AC bonus to anyone who used two handed weapons, but that had it's own problems. They argued that a two handed weapon should be able to 'deflect' attacks as well as perform attacks. I'm not suggesting that for Arelith, but I do think it's a good idea to look more closely at the weapons of the Barbarian rather than his health or defense.

I'd like to know which character has the most HP on Arelith right now before we begin talking about who should get regeneration, DR, crit immunity and stuff, lol.

I secretly miss being able to metagame everybody's level from the playerlist.

I'd even say most of these pure mundanes solo way, way better than anything that isn't a FvS, Warlock, Weavemaster, or True Flame.

Glad to see you around some lately, A_R, btw.

Thanks, man! I'll always be around in some form or another. Just because you don't see me doesn't mean I don't think about this community, or that I don't dream of playing.

I don't think I can ever quit Arelith completely, ha. I've never revisited a game or a community as often as I have NWN and Arelith. I'm gonna make a Fighter or something eventually, man - though the new true weave sorc and the favored soul Bard are so addicting for their quality of life.

[Flameborn]

Give two handed barbs the same enchancement that fighters get to their weapon!