Barbarians need a lot of combat help

General Discussion PC
1

I, surprisingly, didn’t see a topic on this. I know this was a beta and there is a lot we did not see about the game. I really liked the time I played barbarian in the game. I think the feel animations and look are great and look forward to seeing more. However, looking at the skills and class performance overall it is very lacking compared to the other classes in the beta. It kills significantly slower, and strangely takes more damage. I am not sure what the fix is but here are some things I find extremely strange about the current skill tree:

  • Core skills are very expensive and seem to have comparatively low damage
  • Skill duration across the board is far too low.
    ** Most effects have a one to two second duration, most attacks take longer than a second meaning they will last for 0-1 attack
  • Few skills have charges
  • Overpower is a thing, but there is only one way in the whole tree to cause the effect
  • There is little reason to weapon swap
  • Most skills are single target or have a tiny AoE
  • Some animations are crazy long, sorcerers and rogues can clear the screen before the animation completes :slight_smile: Also typically NPCs move out the AoE before the skill lands.

Overall it is a fun class and the flow seems right. But I think the concept of how the class operates in battle needs to be revisited. I would like to see more reasons to use multiple weapons, increased durations, larger AoEs.

Also fewer ground effects and enemies that run away would be nice.

What does everyone else think?

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I’ve seen here and there on these forums which mention that barb is basically the worst class of the 3 we can play right now. I have not played barb yet myself.

I can confirm Sorcerer is way better than rogue after having played 22 rogue and 25 sorcerer, entire experience was better on sorcerer, faster, better skills to choose from, better damage, better survival skills, better AoE, even single-boss DPS is better.

Playing Rogue honestly made me want to refund it was so slow, sorcerer is just that much better than the others.

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You must have been doing something wrong if you think rogue is bad or worse than sorc. My buddy and I have played all 3 classes together and multiple playthroughs.

1-Rogue
2-Sorc

Rogues damage is absolutely incredible with both melee and ranged builds. Their aoe isnt as good as sorc but their single target damage is on another level. It does require a lot more “skill” or effort to put out the numbers than the sorcs 1/2 button gameplay

Barb (absolute trash)

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4

you are saying barb is trash based on a level 25 beta lol, maybe wait until endgame before calling it trash, you dont even have 20% of what a endgame barb is supposed to have.
Rogue is also not that much harder to play, you just use 2 cooldowns every 9 sec and right click :slight_smile:

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I wouldn’t say it’s trash but it’s definitely not balanced. Bleed seems to be best build for him, and thorns are broken and let you just stand in place doing nothing, killing everything even butcher if you have enough thorns and health.

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6

Correct Barb need alot off bufs, tornado more movement speed and other skills too, faster regenerate fury and more skill aoe not only single target.

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Barbarian starts off kind of rough but I disagree heavily with your statements here. By lvl 15 I had enough fortify going to survive any fight. Double shout build that brings fortify to each. Also the build I created I was doing 2.5k non crit Upheavals… 5k was my highest crit and that is aoe…learn to build better. In the core talents just grab the increase fury when basic attack with 2h… Helps out the early game a lot and by the time I was level 20 I could get rid of that passive and go 5 points upheaval. I had an effective health pool of 1200hps with fortify constantly up.

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8

I think most people don’t realize this is how D3 works as well. At low levels, without specialized items, nearly all of the skills are useless and every class is forced to follow the same cookie cutter leveling build.

All of your power in the game is going to come from items. Nothing else really matters compared to that fact.

Barbarian likely doesn’t need any help. It will scale insanely well with end game items. It’s terrible game design but that’s what they did in d3 and that’s how it works once again in d4.

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I would say that the barbs damage modifiers seem low compared to the other classes, especially on the core skills, whirlwind hits like a wet noodle unless you get legendaries to buffer it.

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I find the buff duration of shouts rather pathetic… 8 seconds for yourself, 4 for Allies? Make them a minute long at least… yeeesh.

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11

stop trying to buff a class based on 1-25 experience

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I think Barb is fine. I played Barb on the beta as my main class and by the end I was killing dungeon endbosses in under 10 seconds, as in the full high health bosses that drop health potions every 25% health or so.

While levelling they are like huge boss fights where it took me 2-3 tries sometimes to beat bosses as I learned to avoid all mechanics so my potions could last until the next potion… By the time I was level 25 I was killing them with ease, and then after playing some more and optimising my gear I was killing them in seconds.

I played

Lunging Strike
Upheaval
Rally Cry
War Cry
Ground Stomp
Death Blow

Stacked attack speed and basic skill damage, lunging strike for single target, upheaval for AOE, Death Blow to proc Berserk and high single hit damage. Normal mobs all got 1 shot, standard elites died in 2 hits (usually from the bleed), big bosses I would just stand and facetank and hold down left click until they died, usually in under 10 seconds.

It’s a level 25 cap, Barb seems to scale quite well, I am not worried. The damage barb can do at 25 with some optimisation and the right legendaries is already crazy.

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13

I played a barb to begin then switched at level 20 to try a Rogue as my barb was having a hard time killing the bosses solo. The Rogue was flying through areas that my barb struggled with. I didn’t get a chance to try out sorc, but if it is even better than Rogue then I would say the Barb needs a lot of adjustment.

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Barbarian is the only class I was planning to play, not because I like it, but because there is no paladin AGAIN and after seeing sorc killing end dungeon boss under five seconds I got really sad about barb. Yes it is 25lvl experience, but shouldn’t classes be of similar power? At lvl 50 I’d expect just a huge increase of this gap.
Barb has a lot of issues and there’s nothing to compensate for that.

First of, you must always be in melee to do most if not all of your damage. So others can melee you back, like for example butcher meleeing me to death. This gave me strong choregast vibes btw. You are also vulnerable to all mechanics and god forbid why is there CC mechanics at all? Like these stabby boys? You must be in melee, you can’t heal during this and often times I get overwhelemd and killed in the process. You can learn to look out for it but when there’s two or three stabby boys and plenty of other enemies it’s easy to miss it and ability isn’t visibly telegraphed at all… Other classes don’t have this problems because in range they automatically skip most of the mechanics.

Secondly, build no diversity and skill refund. Yes, you can refund your skills and it wasn’t too expensive, but that’s just at lvl 25. I wasn’t struggling in my playthrough but there were times or bosses that just wiped me (butcher with just melee and he was one lvl below me), and I have a strong feeling that there will be only one right way to play the class (D3 vibes). Devs said that later respec will be so expensive that it’s better to start over so why bother trying your own build? Experimenting if you will just waste your time? At lvl 25 there was significant amount of farming you’d have to do to upgrade your items, gems, remove legendary powers, so there’s a lot of places to put your gold into. To sum it up in one sentence. If there is such a commitment behind your skills why not make them work whatever you choose to go with?

Third one is resource and it’s generation. At the start of fight you are at zero fury and just have to melee your way to just do anything. It feels underwhelming when a group of 10/20 mobs just charges at you :D. Other classes can just wipe it in an instant with a single cast. I played with hammer of ancients, uppeval (or sth like that, not native speaker), stabby charge for my lack of mobility and ancients. Sooooo, the amount of swiping you have to do, to fully charge your fury is enough to do only two hammers which barely do any damge is straight up sad. And then you just swipe and swipe and swipe. Don’t get me wrong I was doing rather well “end game”, no issues clearing etc, but it felt that my abilities were deadly only to basic mobs. I did not feel powerful what so ever. Ancients summon just for like I don’t know five or ten seconds :smiley: ? It was my main burst ability, but the cooldown was soooooo long. My boss kills were around just this cooldown to do significant amount of damage because others barely did anything.

Bonus, one boss just stood out for me in negative way. Caster one that summons three mobs and you can’t kill them, they just “respawn” into the fight after some time. So the boss kites you, you don’t have the damage besides your ancients cooldown because you’re a wimp. Other dudes chase you all the time. It feels really chaotic. First attempt I decided to just burst the boss but boy was I a dum dum. At around boss 15%, my hp just started melting and in chaos i did not see what was happening. It appears he just casts a minigun skill that is not telegraphed at all (add a straight line maybe? maybe?), and the cast was sooooo long, it killed me and then he proceeded this cast for straight ten additional seconds. This problem doesn’t exist if you’re range because you can notice something flying your direction. In my case I did not see it, because I was eating it all instantly and did not see anything being cast or hitting me that hard. Seceond attempt I tried just steady dps and kill adds one by one, but guess what they respawn :smiley: . Feels bad man. It just boils down to range being easy mode, just like it was at the start of diablo 3. Are there bosses harder for ranged? Yes people expect challenge, but this felt rather unfair and punishing for playing weakest of the classes.

It’s just the beta, but there’s so little time left and not much can be changed. For me barbarian sucks big duck. What’s left then? Go with the flow and play op class to feel powerful? Don’t make people do that.

Bring back PALADINS!!!

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15

I played a barb level 25 and sorc level 25.

Before getting proper items my barb was much weaker than the sorc but as my build started coming together it wrecked.

I made a build around berserker aoe damage and extra 40% damage when barrier is up paired with barrier generation when attacking an elite. 4 gems with overpower damage % . And the 100% overpwer weapon swap affix. Always keeping vulnerable up for another 30% extra damage.

My barb at end of beta was much more powerful than my sorc. And honestly feels way better to play.

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The Barbs questline was locked behind Act 2, which we did not have access to, on game launch you can play any act in any order, so that’s where your probably going to start a barb and it will probably be like that for all the classes in different acts more preferable to their progression early game.

If someone ran Diablo 3 with a single class up until the Skeleton King, played 6 hours and had a character to 25% of its potential and proceeded to review the class and offered changes to be made they would be mocked.

This was a beta test with very very limited access to the progression and systems designed to test the online infrastructure under stress, yet almost every feedback post I’ve read is treating this like a press preview of the released game lol?

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I’ve checked Barb at the very end of pre-beta, when I read your topic.
I went to like 8-9 levels and granted it felt much harder at the beginning until I was able to get Ignore Pain with some heal, from there it was a smooth sailing with huge damage on big AOE attacks.
Might need a bit more skill because you do need to time your dodge better and get closer to enemies, prioritise more between enemy (vs. Sorceress where I was spamming AOE and everything just died or froze :D).
I personally liked the difference…
I just didn’t undertsand why my barb was swapping automatically between his weapons withouth I’m using different skills for those weapons, lol (but I’ll check it this weekend whats going on with that)

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I woudnt mind if blizzard adds a throwing weapon skill or an item that transform an existing skill into a range skill (i.e. throwing Hammer of the Ancient) would make barbs viable from distance which i think it was a big problem for barbarians as they have to block punches with their face and the boss mechanics didnt help that much

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i played a Bleed Barb with Leap with explosion on impact

Bleed skills on left and right click, Shout and iron skin and Leap with explosion on impact and i had a great time, once i got a few legendary powers on my Barb it felt Great , i had an amazing time with Barb

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There is an interview on Eurogamer i think about beta feedback with blizz and basically barb gets much better at lvl 40+

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