Barbarian Feedback

PC General Discussion
1

after having played barbarian and sorcerer, i would like to discuss and hopefully it lead to a better class. all gameplay was at tier 2.

tldr: barbarian can be frustrating due to high cooldowns, time spent repeatedly dodging and kiting melee range abilities and traps with limited mobility and the resulting low dps before legendary items and skill points come online. core(fury) skills are underwhelming.

barbarian was my first class, it was a mix between fun high tension combat and a slow kiting slog. appreciated the bigger challenge during the very early low levels and was having fun, but around level 10 it sometimes became frustration.

you had to avoid going in melee while waiting for cooldowns to come up against tougher opponents. boss fights in particular forced you to respec into certain slower and lower dps options just to survive, killing them is so slow it at this point in the game it approached boredom and repetition.

in lol terms it felt like I was playing rammus more than olaf with the reliance on Dots, thorns and kiting for defensive cd. this breaks alot of the appeal of choosing barbarian in the first place. i did not want to play as a lower damage high cd dot tank while leveling up when choosing barbarian, i want to be in their face popping huge damage skills.

at 25 it was very different as i could spam 1.8k executes with nearly 4k crits, but that took alot of time to get the right equipment to pull off, and it wasn’t that fun or reliable either. barely missing an execute because you kited backwards feels so bad.

survivability/low dps problems can be eased with more starting hp, enabling more offensive skills and spending time in melee. give them another 40 starting hp and balance from there. another charge of evasion as base also helps fight bosses in melee.

cooldowns are also way too high. why is Leap cd so much longer than Teleport? is a world where Leap and Steel Grasp having base cd of 10 seconds one that would be acceptable? or having Iron Maelstrom at 25?

alot of the time spent kiting bosses and tougher mobs is waiting for defensive cd to come online. the more uptime skills such as Iron Skin and Taunt have, the more time as a barbarian I can be fighting in melee range dishing out damage. this alone would be a huge qol benefit for barbarians while leveling.

some skills just feel very bad such as Wrath Of The Berserker. against dangerous melee mobs with multiple boss clones such as a 6 Shatterhorn pack or tough boss fights this doesn’t feel usable, and against mobs the other options clear faster. fury skills such as whirlwind feel so bad that I use the legendary that gives bonus damage for not using fury, and I don’t feel as if I’m actually having a trade off or losing anything of value.

6 Likes
2

This was the first time I’ve ever played a Diablo game, and I went with a Barbarian and found him… less than stellar. I only got to level 18, and by that point I had found enough decent items that I could wade through trash mobs easily, but the boss fights, as you say, took FOREVER (the ones that I didn’t give up on because I couldn’t keep health up).

I tend to go with Cleric/Paladin type characters in these types of games, so part of it is probably due to my lack of experience with a full-melee type of character, but from what I’ve read elsewhere it seems to be a common theme about the Barbarian in this Beta. Hopefully they’ll do some tweaking to… maybe make him a little more mobile at the least?

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yeah the trash mobs are fine if a bit slow, but the bosses are a test of patience, managing potions and timing cd/boss attacks.

when I met den mother I died 3 times before being forced into a respec. went with the thorns taunt and iron skin along with upheaval and it took forever. had to kite the boss for the cd to come up, go in for some damage after dodging his burst and then leap away and spend the fury from range while waiting for cd rotation again. even then I had to carefully time the health potions with my hp and the iron skin shield to maximize barrier and survivability.

the sorcerer felt like it took 1/5th the time to kill without dying once or changing skills. used 1 potion because I accidently teleported directly on top of the boss. night and day difference.

4

What? That’s the fun part.
The limited mobility is in part, indirectly solved if players had 7 skill slots in stead of 6. Currently you have barbs running 3-4 shout skills (berserker being the 4th shout else they dont even take ult). This gets boring fast. Having to trade fun for meta is not good. Solved to a large extent by having a 7th slot.
Anyways, there are workarounds for all your objections. If anything should change to enhance the levelling experience, IMO, Blizzard should take the few aspects that only specifically modify single skills and put them in the skill tree. Rest of aspects can stay in the items

5

one thing i noticed while leveling as a barbarian is a lot of the item systems don’t feel tuned correctly for the leveling up such as upgrading items. it is far too expensive to upgrade items while leveling currently, they are outdated very quickly and the cost gets absurdly high. selling/salvaging the item also doesn’t refund the resources spent.

adding/removing/rerolling item aspects/gems/traits are also way too expensive. it makes it that I didn’t want to engage with these systems at all until I reached the beta level cap, and even then the price was too high.

6

Barb is fine. Don’t buff it don’t nerf it. #Barbmasterrace

2 Likes
7

Yeah the problem is you’re not going to get that gear while leveling in retail so how will the barb be? How will the other classes be? You basically have to level a class without any legendaries because we’re probably not going to see many of those while leveling.

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That’s why i played the Beta and only used yellow gear on my Barb and killed everything with ease. On launch it will be even better because I have a Rogue player on my side and i will use him untill he get’s oneshot. Then i chuckle and start playing the game ^^.

9

Interesting before the server shut down I spent a few hours leveling a new barb from 1-25. For some reason I felt strong from early on until around level 15. This is when I started to feel weak again and it start creeping on into the early 20’s. Then I got my ultimate and things started dying again. I was a bit surprised because the experience was better than my first barb. Played it quite differently(ie skipping bosses).

I ran into the the butcher one time and hit him a few times and nope’d out. He was kind enough to let me run away. Seems he has a reset range of about two or so screens where he just despawns. Forgot to add you can actually glitch him out in corners because blizzard know what they’re doing. I didn’t bother because it would have taken me several minutes to beat him down with my current dps I had.

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Can confirm I got a barb to 25 on hc and he was fine in terms of dps and boss fights

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There are even build guides on YT how you can create an immortal barb on lvl 17 ^^. Just sayin.

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Until Paladin and Monk come out, sure

13

New classes will always be tested buuuuuttttt “Barbarian was my first loooove and it will be my laaaast barbarians of the future and barbariaaaans of the paaaaast!”.

14

I quit playing the barbarian at level 12. Boss battles became frustrating. I threw my controller and deleted the demo. Not gonna buy the game. I’ll wait to retry it when it comes to gamepass after the acquisition.

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My impressions of using Barbarian (In ServerSlam)

Overall

  • 6 skill assignments is not enough. please utilize L3/R3 to allow for more than 6 skills.
  • Wish to improve effect time for cumulative type buffs such as Frenzy. (Buffs are easily removed when dealing with boss gimmicks, etc.)
  • For Barbarians, the backsteps and escapes of some monsters were quite off-putting.

Basic skill

  • Wish to improve the amount of fury generation in the basic skill, taking into account that it is a melee attack.

Shouting skills

  • The effect time of 6 seconds is too short. Improvement of extending the effect time is desired.
  • Instead of reducing the effect time of the skill itself, I would like to see an adjustment to revisit the recast shortening effect of Legendary.

Kick, Steel Grasp

  • Attractive skills, but not enough skill slots.
  • It would be difficult to introduce because it would not be compatible with the Walking Arsenal passive.
16

I do think barb tends to be about burst windows and less about being in the middle of everything and spam one button do kill all (at least in early game).
“Shout buffs should last longer, berserker is too short, I find myself at 100 fury too much” - I do think they intended the barb to be like this.
The way barb is now require you to align cool-downs to do huge bursts and kill everything, than kite if anything survived( situation I didn’t find myself too much tbh).
I played 3 different builds for barb: rend ( bleeding), upheaval and HOTA, with 2 shouts: challenging and war cry and used LS (best basic skill for gap closing and bleeding or berserk IMO), Flay and Frenzy and all seemed good to me. I got used to stack up as much fury as I could by using basic skills and than pop off all my CDs (shouts and everything) and go in for the huge burst while I was fortified and got dmg reduction and everything.
Also speced into getting berserker while using war cry or generate fury with 3rd shout to get fury easyer and everything went p smooth, didn’t feel boring tho sometimes, on bigger bosses I needed some bursts to kill them but on elites or pack it felt more than enjoyable.
In LoL terms: When u play Olaf, u kite with ur q, get the target lower than pop ur ult and w to go in. U don’t fight all day long cuz u kill get kited by range or out-dueled by better duelers like Jax who can block most of ur dmg.
So I do think you would feel more like Olaf if u would’ve changed ur mindset a little bit

17

Well let’s start this shall we? All input is given from a LvL 20 barb without legos and 22 skillpoints. I can only compare the server slam to the last Betas because I intentionally leveled a Barb without legendaries.

Lunging Strike: Good for movement but meh in everything else

Bash: Good dmg for a basic skill meh modifications

Frenzy: Good old Frenzy nothing outstanding or innovative here meh dmg

Flay: Good skill if you are into bleeding/thorns meh dmg

WW: Base Fury cost is to high in the beginning, that nerf was unwarrented from my point of view and the dmg/ressource was nerfed even after the pseudo buffs to the skill modificators and addons. Only realy useable with enough ressourse cost reduction and all the possible dmg and WW aspects. Might be a late bloomer but it’s crap in the early game. Awefull dmg.

HotA: Where has all the damage gone? The Aoe area without the aspect that increases it is to little. Not fun without legos.

Upheavel: If they ever need a “How to castrate a skill 101!” picture you’ll find a pic of upheavel in that manual. Meh dmg, slow and sluggish skill and realy awefull without legos.

Double Swing: To be honest I tested this only once, loled about the bad dmg7ressource spent and never touched it again. Anyone else got ome input on the skill and if it’s better now after everything else was nerfed/drasticly nerfed?

Ground Stomp: Solid and working as intended. Nothing to complain here.

Rallying Cry: With the ressource hungry Barb the nerfs to this shout (and all others and the passive mods) hurts a lot. The nerf to this skill is like taking 20% overal ressource generation away from the class. Imagine think for a second on the class you play while having skills that cost a ton of ressources. Almost mandatory but very bad skill it’s a shame.

Iron Skin: never needed this skill and never tested it but on paper it looks like it does the intended job.

Challanging Shout: Blizz told us to go F ourselfs without telling us to go F ourselfs with the nerfs on this one. The reduction in possible thorn damage makes the Necro minion nerf looks like a mild summer breeze. All the reduction in thorn damage translates to a 50% overal nerf and if you add the verfed jewels in it’s even worse. the Dmg reduction is still nice but the fury gain is worthless because the shout seems to be an interrupt and somethimes enemys don’t even attack us while the shout is up and running.

(All the buff nerfs were a heavy kick to the ballz and unwarrented given level 1-20/25)

Kick: Well might get intresting with CDr actualy it’s a bad skill compared to other options and i won’t ever touch it again.

War Cry: Auffers as well from the shout nerfs but is agood source for dmg and berserking on demand.

Charge: I think the charge interaction is fun and I always tried to push enemys into terrain. Sometimes I took a huge beating just to be able to finaly push my intended enemy into a wall. Non the less I think the skill is terrible and there are better movement/dmg/cc options.

Leap: What a fun skill to use, jump up some ledges, jump down some ledges, make group members eat dirt and slag behind because they aren’t able to jump at all ^^. Good mobility and fury gain in one skill with some CC and dmg… nice one.

Rupture: I personaly dislike it but it is a good skill. I rather keep up my bleeds then using Rupture outside of bossfights.

Steel Grasp: Realy nice on paper rather useless ingame outside of building for groupsupport.

CotA: Does it’s job nothing outstanding here.

Iron Maelstrom: Well if it’s still kind of buggy we’ll be in for a treat if it does what it should it’s most likely the worst option of all ultimate skills.

WotB: Bread and Butter for every zerking maniac out there who want to turn enemys into a bleeding gooey mess. Very straight forward but powerfull ultimate option.

I don’t go over all the passives they are self explaining but the nerfs to them have been heavy handed. I would always treade the 10% useless DR back for my shouts and passive points and sane ressource costs rather then having 10% DR that make almost 0 difference and are weaker then the stuff that was taken away.

Overall I played a lot of bleed barb because every other option seemed to be on gutter trash levels compared to it even when I not enjoyed it at all. Sadly this is the build I start with at release untill Blizz is nerfing it what most likely will happen.
I’m a bit upset about the changes and I can’t think of any reason why this changes happened given the level range we were able to play. I think Barb went from “It’ll be outstandingly strong later on even when the start is trash tier!” to “The start is equaly trash as the biggest part of the game untill it gets fun”.

This is for sure just my observation and with no legos equiped and non minmaxed gear like a frozen state of freshly hitting level 20. I surly added some gear over time but I did it after making up my mind how I liked the performence of the barb to the former Betas and compared to other classes. it’s a Sh*tshow and the needed nerfs are applied heavy handed it makes them look unreasonable.

Then again what do you fellow Barbs think about the Server Slam and what builds have you played?

1 Like
18

I couldn’t get my barbarian passed whatsherface’s mom in the mines. I died so many times using the HotA build from the previous betas that I left and didn’t go back.

I will not main barbarian at launch.

19

I did it on level 20 and it wasn’t an issue. It involves a lot of dancing arround and if you don’t use a bleed build you are most likely fubar but it’s managable. No thorns involved btw. On the other hand doing her as HotA/Upheavel/WW barb gives me the creeps.

20

I played barbarian in both betas, since it’s my favourite class aside from paladin/crusader which as we know is not in the game yet. My overall feeling is that barbs lack a heavy-hitting single target core skill, everything seems to be DoT or AoE. While this is fine against mobs, it becomes an issue when facing bosses, since there is no way to do enough dps on single targets. And yes, the cooldowns seem a tad too long, but I suppose those can be reduced with passives, legendary traits, and maybe even paragon points.