Yeah I just never thought the barb was very well designed. Most of it’s abilities are about as interesting as a potato peeler if you ask me. It’s like they tried to make a tank… that can’t block… that doesn’t do damage… in a game about killing speed. Lol.
I’ve considered making a grim totem/throw barb… but honestly… I think I’d just get bored.
I think if they just removed the darned synergy for DS and injected that scaling directly into the skill, it’d give some proper damage scaling when +skills are involved, and be better at keeping up. I’m still a Zeal/Fana Pally as my fave class. and would love to see that synergy as well removed and directly added to the skill. A little push, and melee would be fine. It won’t clear like a Hammerdin or Sorc, but that’s ok. They gave the physical Bowazon a bigger push than I imagined, and I’m thankful for it.
I found the bowazon buff kind of weird tbh. The bowazon already outcleared melee by a wide margin. It’s weird to me that they buffed Zon/Elemental Druid/Pally/Sorc… then barely touched melee.
They buffed the 3 most popular classes the most lul.
It actually plays quite well. Before, Bowa had to go full Dex to really get anywhere fast, and was limited in scope to what weapons would be effective. Now she feels quite balanced. I actually wasn’t a huge fan of adding more synergies to achieve this when I first read the PTR notes, especially with Multishot as MS vs Strafe was a choice before. However, once I played it, it feels very smooth, especially with the quick cast (one of my favorite additions so far to D2R). But anyways, enough about Zon, else someone might burst a vein for the off topic.
I don’t have an issue in general with updating certain aspects of the Barb beyond the points I mentioned, as long as they don’t get too crazy.
No, paladin is not more tanky. Paladin gets extra resists from the shield that he has to find… barb gets the same resist bonuses just from a couple of skill points passively.
paladin has holy shield that lets him get a great block chance with high life… but barb has 4 life per vitality and battle orders and ends up with much higher life value than paladin with max block.
Barb has better crowd control options with leap, howl, grim ward, taunt, war cry, stun; whereas paladin has only smite and conversion (which is actually a sleeper btw)
Battle Cry is one the hell of a skill that paladin just cannot match in terms of a tanky character. I literally am not afraid of blunderbores and death lords with it.
And finally, barb has much stronger healing potions.
I disagree. It slows monster so you can hit them quite reliabliy with leap attack and whirlwind. You can also STUN the monsters with Stun or War Cry to prevent them from running away. And there are plenty of ways to cheese with grim ward when monsters stand up against a wall and you just beat them up in the back. And finally, you kinda don’t have to kill every single monster, it’s sometimes good for them to run away. For example, I wouldn’t bother fighting a whole mana burn pack on a barb, but I sure want to get the boss down. And it’s bloody amazing for ubers, no need for spamming howl anymore (except for mephisto).
The only downside of the grim ward is - you can’t make it out of non-fleshy monsters. And I’m not sure i want this change gone. It’s a fun quirk that IMO adds to the game rather than take away.
Taunting grim ward - how do you see it, grim ward having a certain amount of life? IDK, giving a minion for the barb to tank things sounds too much, as he is the tank.
man you need to work on your writing, but I presume I understood what you meant.
I still stand with the fact that Whrilwind was an overall buff, DESPITE my favorite IK barb getting nerfed. That is because way higher number of weapons became stronger with whirlwind than weaker. Then there’s the early-mid game damage buff which made the uplayable skill actually great.
As for slow debuffs, sure it’s sort of a nerf. But IMO it makes the game more fun, since you have to dodge baal’s decrepify rather than ignoring it. More dynamic gameplay - more fun.
What kind of argument is that? If you erase teleport, sorc population will drop by 50%. Same with corpse explosion and lightning fury.
I would also like a buff to Stun. A skill that nobody actually ever uses, except act 5 mercs. It’s not crap, actually, but the starting duration is a bit too low, compared with the hit rate. I wouldn’t mind seeing some attack rating and baseline stun duration increase on it.
Leap attack though, is not crap. It was mainly crap before, because you had to run back to do it again. Now though, it’s quite great. It carries you through normal and nightmare easily, honestly feels like playing a caster with all the benefits of a barb. After that it deals a lot of single target damage and a small AoE damage which, even with the tankier monsters still ends up doing something.
An advantage that you gloss over, is that barb also is a class that can just kill everything, literally the least immunity issues of all, because of physical damage + berserk. And the overpowered casters you mention are kept in check by immunities.
I just don’t understand, if you don’t like barbs, why do you write all this? They’re clearly not for you, play your sorcs and zons man. The game is not “about killing speed”, it’s just about killing AND surviving. To me it’s more enjoyable when killing is not so fast. If you like killing speed, there are plenty of games where that is executed better.
Do you actually want to play double swing in hell specifically, not frenzy? Sounds odd to me, it’s like playing a cold arrow amazon. That’s not a hell difficulty skill, that’s a prerequisite for the main skill, freezing arrow. Same with double swing\frenzy.
Same old crap from seskalibre not gonna read it.
I don’t think there is a rule that says you can’t add points to other masteries.
This is a cool idea. By the way anyone know what unique dagger is really good to use on sword (dagger barb) I have a Sword/blade barb but just use some runeword and a Balrog Flame Bellow (forgot the name)
I guess Barbs already are very food with polearms that do a lot of reach for whirlwind already though but a spear axe skill would be cool.
Lots a people praise the merits of Fleshripper
It’s indeed filled with great assets
Ideally, if they adopt the reworked Unique upgrade mechanic plenty more unique daggers could become interesting endgame choices
Especially since some of them have Barb oriented affixes like heart carver
You know what makes you REALLY good at surviving? Never being in range of a mob. 
Or 75% Block.
I haven’t ripped a single time in the past 6months
The trick is having purists be an aggressive vocal minority that prevents blizzard from improving the game to become fun again which then ultimately lead to people not playing in months… therefor not ripping
Nothing is perfect in D2, everything can be improved
The proof… blizzard note released 10 patches and was working on a sequel with improved mechanics
I don’t think that “purists” have anything to do with your current ordeal. You simply came to the game with unreasonable expectations, and were disappointed when they didn’t get fulfilled.
From the start, one of the main intents, clearly stated by Blizzard, was to remain faithful to Diablo 2, and one of the points to make that very clear was that they literally implemented their changes on top of the existing game, rather than remaking it from scratch.
And that’s where you are having an issue with the game : you expected it to hybridize with more modern ARPGs, rather than remain very close to its source content.
Or at least, that’s what many of your suggestions come out as.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of things I don’t like in the game either, but I try to understand what is within a reasonable scope for the game, and what is outside of that.
For example, when, in this thread, you suggest that masteries are reduced from 6 different masteries to 4, it means that you’ve removed 2 of the 10 barbarian mastery skills, so you need to put 2 new ones to replace them and have 10 just like every other skill type. And this starts a headache that is way out of a reasonable scope of changes for the game, as this means that you have 2 skills that are supposed to be relevant that are going to affect all barbarian builds.
Another example is when you advocate in another thread for an expansion for the game. I just cannot understand how you believe that to be a reasonable expectation for the game. I mean, story-wise, the game already ends at the best point you can imagine, with the strongest enemies available having been vanquished, and no other foe being available. Even if you forget about that, adding an extra act, or an extra difficulty, would completely alter monster balance, and thus how the game is played at endgame. The only thing they could put in an “expansion”, if I stretch reasonable expectations, is extra classes, and even that would be a significantly larger amount of work than I expect them to be able to put in the game.
So, when we see you write :
I don’t think it’s unreasonable of us to read that you simply don’t want to play D2, but rather another game that uses D2 as a basis to do something completely different, which is clearly not what most of us expected when we acquired D2R.
But then, that is starting with the premise that you are actually trying to get changes into the game, rather than just trying to gather attention through spamming suggestions in the forums, which isn’t an unreasonable deduction, seeing as you seem to not care about preexisting threads before posting yours, completely dismiss any criticism, and plug-in others of your threads whenever you can.
Now, don’t get me wrong, many of your suggestions can be very interesting, but usually not within the scope of the game updated by Blizzard, but rather within the scope of user-made mods, where you can expand the game without having to worry about taking away from the existing flavor.
I agree with the sentiment
But your solution only half fixes the issue
What if you invested in dual and find an epic shield
I think a better solution would just be weapon masteries that aren’t tied to any weapon type or play style
But rather just be a huge passive stat+ Small drawback
For example:
crushing mastery: + to crushing blow - to attack speed
precision mastery: + to deadly strike , - to attack rating
range mastery: +pierce, - weapons range
slashing mastery: + chance of open wound, + open wound damage, - hit damage
This kind of system works for every weapon type and playstyle
I understand the idea , but those examples are huge nerfs 
.
Barbs struggle with Ar (melee un general) having anithing less is noticeable.
Attack speed is a core aspect of the barbarian. Now much more after the horrible Ww changes. Less attack speed means less damage overall Even worse for ww uses.
Less hit damage is just terribad.
Have you at least paid attention to the second part of this topic
You know the one where having higher combat skill level actually grants really stronger melee skills rather than just mediocre %dmg that’s totally dependant on the weapon damage
We are also talking about open wounds… a dot
And my suggestion increases it’s odds and damage lol so you could build a barb that just cuts every monsters 1 by 1 and they would bleed to death
Also, a part people have a hard time understanding
Ok ok . Yet i feel dots are not suited for action arpgs like diablo where things just pop left and right in 0.1 sec. Dots are meaninful in games where monsters HP is large and encounters last for long (like wow) (not taking into consideración PVP)
Well, not everybody is a top player, for a majority of players, the monsters we encounter are actually hard and long to kill, lespecially on a barb
This could be a super handy mechanic to have on leap attack since it’s aoe and would apply it to multiple target at once
And you have to consider that if blizzard intend to prevent D2R from dying within a year of the launch, they will release endgame content/challenge/mechanic which most likely be harder content
Also, having better open wounds create another valuable Boss killing affix other than just CRushing blow dispensers
If I don’t know which weapon I will end up using, i usually only get 1 point in a mastery. There’s plenty of places to spend skill points elsewhere on the barb.
For example on my last barb I started with mace mastery, then found a good axe → got 1pt axe mastery; then found a good sword → got 1pt sword mastery. Then I found the Fleshrender, finished nightmare with it; understood that it’s going to be really hard to beat → I proceeded to max mace mastery. And if I find something better I can just respec.
Sadly most of the time I make a barb, the weapon type is irrelevant
It’s Grief PB or hoto
This archetype really needs to have flat damage to reduce the weigth of the weapon choice on the build