As things stand, basic skills are TERRIBLE. The goal of pretty much all players is “how do I NOT use these” instead of blizzard’s goal of having them figure into gameplay.
The reason for this is both their slowness and the unintuitive nature of spending seconds just standing their plinking away for little fury or damage, when what you WANT to do (And are BALANCED around doing) is breaking out your actual core skills.
A couple changes I’d propose:
A: make higher levels of the skill give more fury. Cannot stress this enough. As is, people generally go one level in a basic and then stop, as the damage is basically meaningless; Additionally, this helps to address the issue of having to rely on alternative methods of gaining Fury to feel “Smooth” due to how slow builders generate fury. Have a level 5 Flay build at least twice as much fury and we might be talking here.
B. Focus on giving them more “alternative” benefits that help with using your core spenders as well. Like have Frenzy’s attack speed buff last for 5 seconds (perhaps starting at 3 seconds and then building up at an additional .5 seconds per rank) so that you feel “Good” using that skill. Massively rework bash to generate fortify baseline, with a bonus amount if the target is already stunned. Ect. (With the fortify gen swapping places with its inherent stun chance, so that higher levels off bash generate more fortify)
Things that make you feel like keeping these skills “up” is worth it and putting points into them past rank one is helpful.
C. Or for the love of god, increase their damage a bit. Nobody is going to be tearing up dungeons with exclusively single target skills.
Baic skills are fine. They serve their purprose well. It’s a filler skill. Just something to do until we can hit the better buttons. It’s just the auto attack we have to manual press.
its a skill that all 99% of all guides and advice say to just put one single point into and ignore, with end game revolving around finding a way to avoid using it entirely outside of movement (Lunge) and instead rely on other passive ways to do its job (getting rage, instead relying on shouts or brawling skills).
I really don’t see how you can say that’s fine in any manner. That’s like having a knife to cut bread with, but instead try to finangle forks or spoons to do its job because of how bad it is.
Ignore the guides.
I skip right past core on both my barbarian builds. Does that mean core abilities suck? No they don’t.
Bash sets up an overpower every 4th crit for your next core or weapon master skill. With a 45 % crit chance I have that up allot. Kick burns all 100 of my fury, setting up my next weapon mastery skills to do 200% damage. Kick also sets me berserk and the enemy vulnerable. The next deathblow is going to hit, hard, thanks to berserk overpower, vulnerable, and almost 50% chance crit.
Frenzy with tranquility, properly built, will give you 3 attacks a second. Not to mention you will have a big defense boost, or make your core skills fire 25% faster. Upheaval, looking at you. You can run a basic build with frenzy/tranquility.
Have you ever stop and wonder why blizzard, the developers of the game, made certain skills give Fury? A way for players to not rely solely on Basic skills to generate resource? Imagine blizzard putting out a Unique that gives Basic skills +1000% damage but has a 6 second cooldown. Will you use Basic with the Uniqur or ignore it?
Basic skills should all be builders and not have a few of them have that as an option.
Basic skills shoud have a big part in gameplay. Generate resource without basic skills and spam one button for damage should be a low tier build with mediocre damage. But top build should use all Barb arsenal, each weapon and more than one damage skill.
I agree. They completely screwed up on basics, on barbs especially. They are so weak that most people that are optimizing do everything they can to avoid using them. There are viable basic attack builds on other classes, not so much for barb.
I like the idae of fury regen, but they’re going to need a lot of utility to make them viable alternatives to strategies that just avoid them. A solid damage buff feels necessary as well, IMO.
I’ve seen and tried a frenzy barb. It’s comically slow how you whittle away at content, even with a max rolled unique amulet and hundreds of + basic skill damage. It’s just terrible damage that is stuck on single target.