TLDR:
- Does Upheaval get better later on?
- Are Basic skills ever gonna be more than just generators?
- Will there be interesting things to do with skill points past lvl 25?
- Do you think that the dungeon layouts could be a bit more inspired?
So I’d like to give some quick feedback on the barbarian during the open beta. I got to play for a bit and leveled my barb to level 23 on PC, though when the game comes out I will most likely be playing on the PS5.
Positives
- The controller support even on PC is excellent the vibrations work well and the prompts switch seamlessly between mouse & keyboard and controller as soon as you touch one or the other.
- I really love the barb arsenal system. Having 4 weapons and the ability to have multiple types equipped at the same time is very fun.
- The ability effects and sounds are what I expected, well-crafted and satisfying.
Now, onto some things, I think still need work.
- The pack sizes are often very small and spread apart. While this is ok for some enemies in some areas I think a big part of the combat enjoyment is facing dense packs of enemies. This could be replaced by perhaps having enemies which come i multiple waves or similar, but in general, I think we need more enemies.
- The dungeons could be more inspired with more interesting layouts and fewer item fetch quests. Cellars are boring. They need more depth to them be it mechanical, story-based, or just physically larger.
- The skill tree is too basic in my opinion even when considering the ease of access for new players. By level 25 you will have almost entirely done everything you want which diminishes the joy of leveling. I hope more depth is planned on release. It doesn’t necessarily need to be more power in skills with each level but we could get skill modifications and passive variants that are equal in power but allow for more flavour with each level. Keeping players further along engaged but allowing starting players to keep up the pace power-wise.
- The respec system is no fun and does not benefit new players. Notes can be taken from Last Epoch.
Barbarian Specific Notes
- I think some skills, like Upheaval, are too weak. I love this ability for its flavour and look but it has a long cooldown, a high fury cost, and insufficient damage when compared to things like Rend and the bleed damage builds. Some aspects should just be straight-out buffed with more modification later on being available either through legendaries or in the skill tree.
- The dash should have a unique animation for each class or some unique trait but this is not as pressing as the points above.
General questions and concerns
- I hope that if set items make a comeback they are not similar to the D3 ones. Modifying an ability and also increasing its damage by like 20x times just funnels everyone into the same build. There should be more sets and unique items which modify abilities in creative ways whilst not necessarily making them more powerful. This would allow for more flavour and creativity in the builds.
- Will there be an option to turn off other players? Given the current, low monster density, it often leads to swathes of the map being picked clean by other players before one can even reach them.
It’s literally the strongest ability barb has
I’m planning to league start as barbarian, so I’d agree that barbarian is very weak and upheaval is verrrry weak!
pack size, later in the game you will see density like you never seen before in diablo that I can promise you. Density is absolutely crazy later game.
dungeons become more complicated as time goes, but more inspired in theme, not really.
skill tree is fairly basic but I also promise it will give you more choices and more headache what to decide on then diablo ever has before as the legendaries start to drop.
respec isn’t meant to be fun. You are meant to have to make difficult choices all the way through. Spend gold on mount, respec, or sockets, or upgrades?
Rend has been a staple early game skill since d3. It has the most dmg/fury but it takes longer to kill with it and you cant stack dmg from it. So it has its downsides. Later on rend needs many support items to make a decent build going. Upheaval though can absolutely own with just 1 good item, its not just a good early game skill. It was the same in d3, rend was best early game.
pack size, later in the game you will see density like you never seen before in diablo that I can promise you. Density is absolutely crazy later game.
dungeons become more complicated as time goes, but more inspired in theme, not really.
skill tree is fairly basic but I also promise it will give you more choices and more headache what to decide on then diablo ever has before as the legendaries start to drop.
respec isn’t meant to be fun. You are meant to have to make difficult choices all the way through. Spend gold on mount, respec, or sockets, or upgrades?
Rend has been a staple early game skill since d3. It has the most dmg/fury but it takes longer to kill with it and you cant stack dmg from it. So it has its downsides. Later on rend needs many support items to make a decent build going. Upheaval though can absolutely own with just 1 good item, its not just a good early game skill. It was the same in d3, rend was best early game.
also sry dual post but my edits are upp 
Another thing about upheaval that is not noticeable now and it is its biggest flaw, the ramp up time. It can be great with right gear during mid game but at one point that rampup time becomes a problem as you get silenced mid cast a lot. Doesn’t matter if it does 10billion dmg if you cant get it off
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I made some insane skillzz photoshop9000 picture of Rob2628’s barbarian crit, downgrading it from 359k to 9k, but cant post it here 
sadge 
That’s exactly what I was about to post. Upheaval is so good I would leave it alone and work on Barbarian’s god awful primary attacks.
Frenzy is the only cool looking primary IMO but it is single target and you have to stand still to even use it at full speed. Make one of the passives cleave all enemies in a cone, but it isn’t worth a damn as it is.
Lmao, 394k crit damage with Upheaval is not enough for you? This guy…
Compared to the 11 mill WW hits… not realy. Thankfully it’s only coming from bugs and with a tad bit of luck Blizz read about it and fixed it already ^^.
barb is fine as it is! If htere is one thing I wish for it is an even worse early game so less people without any clue how to play and skill don’t water down the only fun class in the game.
That’s just a snapshotting shouts bug, 100% not gonna be there on release.
So unless multipliers will be nerfed, barbed Upheaval damage will stay unchanged.
We’ll se about that there is a tad bit more to do then to simply click the skill to do such numbers. Yes Upheval is strong and it should be strong for the cost it has and the ultra slow animation that makes you a sitting duck for ~1sec.
Even without the bug, i think the snapshotting is still intended to give barbs a bit of interesting mechanical power and WW can still hit for like 2-5k crits on every tick with snapshotting with no bugs so its still good imo, easily the fastest farming build i played on the beta and i played every class
I wonder if you had levelled to 25 and actually invested a small amount would your opinion change?
While I dont disagree on barb base power, because obviously we’re all referencing the dmg you do after decking level 25 characters out in full legendaries which wont be the case on live especially since the drop rates wont be the same they were boosted for beta, I still wouldnt call skills like upheaval weak the barb sadly does have a bit of a tough time levelling but its an insane scaler and will likely be a top tier dmg dealer in the endgame
Im pretty sure D3 had the same snapshotting bug on release. Its funny how devs never look at past history of mistakes. Then again, you have devs that put things into the game without even testing one time that it works right. Like The Division devs, where half the skills were broken. Talk about F-tardery.
I intentionally played my barb only in yellow gear without farming the elites to make a relaistic build. 0 issues so far and the outlook on the possible scaling is yummy .
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What?
Using a skill calculator with the full 60 points we can get at 50 with all renown points still leaves things feeling short. You saw you can put multiple points into skills to make them stronger right?
I agree, when I started the beta, i started the barb and thought wow these first few levels are rough, but as I got further I really enjoyed it. And the general consensus seems to be Sorc and Necro OP and most people seem to wanna start live on those classes because the same people that complain about things being boring want to play whats meta or OP, but i personally found those classes so boring that i levelled them to max and then went back to my other fun classes.
Funnily enough, the two classes i enjoyed the most were the ones people called “the weakest” of the beta which were barb and druid and i invested most into my barb on the last day and will most likely start and main of these classes on live and have the other as my main alt.
Youre not wrong at all, i agree when you use the calcs and test out what a full build could look like there’s still skills that arent fully skilled and i assume those are the ones you would potentially maybe target with + to skills on gear like for defensives or just more points to core skills
But i’d LIKE to think that what this person is saying is that, aside from the key passives that we couldnt get to on beta, you’ve almost unlocked every area of the tree by 25, and then after that its just adding more points to things youve unlocked, so after 25, theres no novelty unlocks that add interesting flavour to the levelling process. Like imagine from 25 to 75 you have every skill you want and youre just skilling more points compared to hit 25, get a new skill hit 50 get an ultimate, hit 60 another new skill slot or tree or whatever that changes up what youve been doing this whole time, in a way where you cant really bottom out a full build til maybe the last 10-20 levels, that would potentially make the game and the levelling process more interesting.
