I couldn’t agree more.
I’d say the barb community deserves an apology from MicroRNA. Multiple people have proven him wrong multiple times over. I don’t know why he has an unwarranted vendetta against barbs, but at the very least, he could apologize for trying construe a narrative that barb needed any type of nerf at all.
As of late, 3 people come to mind that are so misinformed about barbs. I read a study awhile ago showing that once people get their first impression and believe something, they are over 90% more likely to believe their first impression, even if new and factual data is presented to them afterwards. It’s something in the brain that makes people defensive when they hear things that don’t coincide with their first belief of the subject.
The reaction to nerf barbs is a symptom of how lackluster barb currently is. Yes, we made WW work in T16, but it wasn’t able to push GR’s. What people are seeing and feeling, is a gr80-90 build all of a sudden able to do 140.
Yes, it was a 50 tier buff, and that sounds extreme and “op”, but when you look at where barb started, and look around at what other classes are doing, you soon find out that it isn’t op at all. It’s just under what I personally would call balance.
Being able to do 140 at 10.5k paragon is still less power than 4 out of the 7 total classes including us. That means, if the lamentation belt was at 200%, barb would equal strength to current live sader and stronger than current live monk. Take into consideration, both of these classes just got buffed. Even with lamentation at 200%, barb may very well be, the weakest class.