Barbarian Paragon nodes are a joke

I feel this needed its own topic, and needs massive attention. I wasn’t aware of how powerful the other classes’ legendary paragon nodes are in comparison to Barb’s. In particular, Druid. Holy balls, you guys.

Barb:

  • 10% chance to grant berserk (5 secs) on killing a bleeding enemy
  • stun and fortify on overpower (3% chance) with a particular weapon
  • up to 10% attack speed (5 secs)
  • 10% chance on lucky hit (so 1.5-10%) to inflict vulnerable for 2 secs
  • up to 5% crit chance (weapon specific)
  • 15% damage after 3 secs of bleeding
  • 25% of life as fortify
  • fury gen on weapon swap

Tiny situational (double RNG-based) buffs for a few seconds here and there, nothing build changing or defining, and most are terribly insignificant or barely effective. No substantial damage buffs, and everything lasts 2-4 seconds. Straight garbage.

Druid on the other hand:

  • 30% damage
  • 120% poison damage
  • 30% damage (again)
  • 45% damage
  • 30% resource reduction
  • non-situational (not double rng) resource gen
  • 50% damage
  • 30% crit damage

What in the everloving eff. How is this balanced? I had no clue, boys.

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maybe in season 4 when they finally nerfed hota, ww completly to the ground theyll buff legendary paragon nodes in comparison.

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This explains why my 88 ww barb only crits for 600k. Im missing the 195% damage and 30% crit damage that i should have but instead i get all this other weak bs

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I’m not suggesting that Barb should have exactly the same numbers as Druid, but holy balls, man. There is an astronomical difference in power between these paragon choices. It’s close to the same discrepency with the other classes too. None of them are as insignificant or petty as Barb’s.

Hot dirty garbage.

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They probably thought they need to nerf barb somewhere because we have more weapon slots. Well, all this means is you can get more glyphs and defensive nodes.

How wack is that to have to skip the class legendary nodes because they provide no significant or usable increase? The rare nodes are more powerful.

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Yup, since there isn’t much content out regarding HC builds compared to regular I’ve been previewing the paragon boards trying to pick out my route and then it dawned on me…

They’re booty.

Some boards I’m looking for the closest adjacent exits where I can grab 2 mediocre rares and and simply move boards. We’ve got legendary nodes like Hemorrhage, where after 3 seconds bleeding enemies will start to take 15% more damage. Meanwhile druid has rare nodes Prime: 20% Damage and 4% Maxlife; and Impel: 20% Damage. That’s not even considering that after the first 3 seconds of barb combat their vulnerable from exploit is now gone, so we get that measly legendary 15% after our damage phase…

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You have two more weapons with stats, and minimum always +1 2h-weapon more than a druid, with a +100% legendary effect.

Example, thorns during berserkin +1.000, on a 2h weapon is +2.000, and more, than all your jewels on head, breast, trousers can even give you.

Your power is on the gear, not in skills or paragon.

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Duh.

We have 3 stat sticks. Not a hard concept to stack the stats on your sticks.

Do you even stat stick bro?

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No doubt blizzard is looking at the data. If barbarian don’t pick enough of a certain node, blizzard will change it. On the other hand, if too much people pick one paragon board, blizzard will nerf it. Stupid popular focus balancing.

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I went into survival nodes I basically never die while I’m building bleed and rupture they all die

I agree having two more weapons makes a huge difference in power

Really? Because I sure don’t. Most of the uniques are two handed weapons. Forcing barbarians to give up that boosted aspect slot.

That’s great it means they’ll buff all our legendary nodes except for the Fortify per rage spent one (only really decent and reliable one imo). And the real reason to pick this one isn’t even because it’s op but because it allows us to place more utility and offense aspects on gear (or at higher NMDs stack even more defense).

Ofc that’s after QA etc… they can’t buff without going through QA first. But nerfs ? No that doesn’t need QA, it just comes straight out the gate with BIG hit like 50% decrease to CDR/damge/crit chance.

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It seems like Barbarian legendary paragon nodes isn’t suppose to do much. Design choice by blizzard. They’re very generic in function. Able to fit into every and any playstyle. Rather than build defining. I prefer it this way. It just means I can change gear without ever changing paragon boards.

Barbarians get 2 more 1 handed weapons and 1 more 2 handed weapon over druids.

I mean that is :
140% more Vulnerable
137% more Crit damage
around 140% more Close/Core/Slowed/Stunned etc (pick 2)
4 more gem slots for 48% Crit damage to Vulnerable
2 more Aspects at standard value
1 more Aspect at double value.

I think in the grand scheme of things, Barbs might have boring Paragons but we certainly get it made up elsewhere compared to Druids.

And I say this as a level 96 Barbarian, level 70 Druid.

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Honestly I was ok not knowing that other classes had better legendary nodes. I also barely touch my paragon board when swapping specs (mainly because most of our viable specs right now are the same in term of playstyle ? xD).

It just annoying that they look so underwhelming and so far into most boards that you wouldn’t even bother anyway. Also I don’t believe blizzard intent is a factor here, whatever their intention for barb was, it very obviously didn’t work out since we’ve been hit with nerf after nerf (and not the small kind but the -50% damage/crit/cdr kind).

Barring Barbarian possibly being fine just because of the extra weapon slots over most other classes, the Legendary nodes are definitely just too weak compared to even the Rare nodes around them, thus they end up being really boring, and seem really lame when compared to what other classes can choose from.

Blood Rage seems relatively okay. I think the only reason it isn’t higher is because you could take it with something like Furious Whirlwind to easily apply bleeds to every single enemy you face. I don’t know that just buffing the 10% chance is the answer because of that, but it could definitely be something like a higher chance for Rend to trigger it, or higher chance based in some way on how much bleed damage they took. Though it would be nice to see another component on this node that doesn’t depend on killing bleeding enemies, so it still has value before things die. Something like,

Blood Rage
Critical Strikes and Overpowers against Bleeding enemies instantly deal bonus damage equal to 20% of their Total Bleeding Amount. This damage is not consumed by this effect.

Killing a Bleeding enemy has a 10% chance to grant to Berserking for 5 seconds, or 20% if they were affected by Rend.

Bone Breaker is definitely pretty screwed because while we get some decent sources of Fortify, we don’t really get enough to properly build around Fortify and Overpower to make Overpowers actually reliable. The only way I ever seem to get many Overpowers is with the Earthstriker’s Aspect, which wouldn’t even be reliable for combining with Bone Breaker because Bone Breaker requires specifically two-hand bludgeoning. Even without the specific weapon requirement this wouldn’t be good, so at the very least the weapon type requirement could easily be removed without a second thought. But really, the easiest thing to do would be to flip the design around: instead of only doing anything when we overpower by other means, make this node about triggering the overpower effect more often, while keeping the bonus from triggering overpower. Something like:

You have a 5% increased chance to Overpower, doubled when Fortified or when using a mace. Overpowers Stun enemies for 1 second and grant you 20% of your Maximum Life as Fortify.

This plus Earthstriker requiring fewer weapon swaps would actually be pretty compelling.

Carnage might be one of the few legendary nodes that actually seems fairly good, though the effect is probably like half of what it should be. I don’t think there’s really a lot that needs to change here, it’s just weak.

In a world without Exploit, Decimator may have a place. As things stand now, there is basically no reason to ever even care about it. The current effect could be massively increased and it still wouldn’t matter because we’re just going to get Vulnerable from more reliable sources. The most obvious solution would be to add some slightly specific way of dealing extra damage to Vulnerable targets or some interesting way of interacting with Vulnerable that is sort of unique to Barbarian, while also increasing the current effect because why not:

You have a 5% increased chance to Critical Strike against Vulnerable targets. Your Bleeding damage on Vulnerable targets has a 3% chance to make your next ability guaranteed to Overpower.

Lucky Hit: Your attacks have up to a 15% chance to make targets Vulnerable, doubled if using a Two-Handed weapon.

Flawless Technique doesn’t seem like all that bad of an idea, it just doesn’t do enough or last long enough. I’m fine with it encouraging you to use dual-wield weapons to stack up the Crit bonus. I just think it should be more like:

Damaging enemies with One-Handed Weapons increases your Critical Strike chance by 3% for 4 seconds, up to 15%. This can only happen once per Skill cast, or twice per second while channeling Whirlwind.

The most obvious, glaring problem with Hemorrhage is that it has a delay for no reason, so either that must go, or the wait needs a drastically larger payoff. I say 3 seconds is a long time in a game like this so we remove the wait. It should also play even more into doing bigger damage based on how much Bleeding damage is stacked on the target, as opposed to simply doing more damage to Bleeding targets:

Enemies that have been affected by your Bleeding take 10% - 30% increased damage from you, increasing based on their Total Bleeding Amount.

All of your attacks instantly deal additional damage equal to 5% of the target’s Total Bleeding Amount, tripled for Critical Strikes or Overpowers. The damage is not consumed by this effect.

Warbinger might be one of the only legitimately good legendary powers we have, which feels bad because it’s purely defensive. I would make it more consistent instead of coming in chunks after spending a large amount of Fury, and I would play into Fortify being a source of passive Fury income, to make it even more appealing for people wanting to make “Tank” builds:

For every 6 Fury you spend, gain 1% of your Maximum Life as Fortify.

For every 1% of your Maximum Life you take as Fortify damage, gain 1 Fury.

I’m not really certain how to change Weapon Master without just increasing the Fury given, or stepping on the toes of Walking Arsenal too much, but I’m taking a shot at something that lets you sort of play around which bonuses you care about maintaining:

Swapping weapons grants you 3 fury and a bonus depending on the weapon category for 5 seconds :
Two-hand Bludgeoning: 5% Overpower Chance and 20% Overpower Damage
Two-hand Slashing: 5% Critical Strike Chance and 10% Critical Damage
Dual Wield: 10% Attack Speed and 10% Lucky Hit Chance

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Nice break down, and although I did post previously about our extra weapon slots. I 100% agree with what you and others are saying, I just checked and I do not have any Legendary nodes taken yet on my build, which is kinda sad.

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Okay barbs have extra stat sticks that provide more vulnerability damage, is there a class that has a worse path to vulnerability trigger than barb? Until you get to t3 and get exploit glyph (yahoo, 3 seconds of vuln every 20 seconds) barbs have what, 3 skill points invested in a passive that procs vulnerability on 30% of lucky hits? And don’t get me started on lucky hit, where sorc has passives that just gives huge bump straight to lucky hit chance.

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