Every season, I created a Barb. I loved to get all different types of uniques to test different builds, so I treat my self a Barb expert. I feel like I have lots of dive deep insights of what’s going on.
Pain points
- Barbarian needs CDR. It’s a must. Nothing else competes. Why? Because we need shouts. Why we need shouts? Because all other skills sucks with long CDs. Not to mention damage, the resource generation is lacking, e.g. Ground stomp and leap have 16s CD. 3 Profilic Fury passive points only grant 18x resource generation and Rallying Cry itself grants 60x. War cry is the only damage multiplier. NO other skills have damage multiplier. And man, it has 25 seconds. If I pick it, I HAVE to get the CDR So all Barb’s builds are tied to Harlequin Crest, which is so broken. I tried so many builds without shout and CDR, they simply suck.
- Another minor thing is the damage reduction, which can be solved by the Iron Skin, which works to a certain extend. It’s not as good as Challenge shout but works.
- It’s been 5 seasons, and all Barb builds come with 3 shouts. There is no variance.
- Barb now relies on secondary skill effect damage to be A tier (not even S tier after Gushing Wounds nerf): Earthquake, Dust Devil. Even in S4, Dust Devil is the one gaining damage from Gushing Wounds. No Core skill damage. No Weapon Mastery damage. No Brawl damage. No Ultimate damage. All these skills nowadays are support skill to support those secondary skill effect. No matter how hard you try to stack anyone of them, the damage is so low. Especially CORE skills, it consumes fury but cause even less damage than Brawl skills. No one has been playing Unbridled Rage passive for 3 seasons, and Walking Arsenal passive for 5 seasons. Why are we not buffing them? If you cannot find a good mechanism to activate them, just buff the damage as of now to increase the variety.
- Legendary Node Capping. I like the idea of capping but this is clearly done in a wrong way. Some other classes can easily have 50x but Barb is only capping at 30x. 4 Weapons are supposed to elevate the numbers in different ways. I’d suggest to cap at least 100x to increase the variance. Like I can stack more Damage While Berserking to get more multiplier there. The cap has already been implicitly limited by the damage modifiers on the gears. Also like Vul damage multiplier on bleed, it should’ve been collborated Damage over time but I’m not sure why Gushing Wounds is scaling with critical strike damage instead. So now, Damage over time is useless on Barb.
Some skills really need help since S1
- Frenzy. Single target only. How about increase other skills attack speed cap to 50+?
- Upheaval. So clunky to use. (there are so many fire/burning damage aspects, that has no synergy at all. Upheaval might be a good candidate)
- Rend. Bugged now, good synergy with Brawl skills. once fixed, I’d say it’s a good mechanism. Ground Stomp brawl skill is a nice change but the damage is still so low. I managed to get it level 17 but can still only cause 300k damage…All damage comes from earthquake.
- Whirlwind. Damage is sooo low. 10 times Damage Multiplier with movement speed can save it a bit I guess.
- Leap. So clunky to use and does not scale with Attack speed. Also, it knocks away creeps!!! Why?? Can we have an aspect for leap to pull creeps instead?
- Charge. Long animation but little damage. Can easily miss the damage when against Boss or unstoppable elites. Because charge through them cause no damage. Damage only happens at the end of Charge…
- Steel Grasp. So clunky to use. Have to wait like 1 seconds after each use. No weapon associated
- All ultimate damage needs to be 10 times more at least. I tried stacking 1000+ ultimate damage before but they still suck. Also Iron Maelstorm has a CD bug. It cannot be cast seamlessly because of some internal CD? Call of Ancients actually can work well with the aspect if it does not have 5 seconds CD.
- Walking Arsenal related aspects are so bad. 0 synergy at all. It’s so hard nowadays to active 3 weapons and the bonus should’ve been a LOT. You know what, maybe it’s a good candidate to replace shouts by giving you all (huge damage multiplier, resource generation, damage reduction). Now you have to use get 2 aspects and 1 unique to achieve all of them and it’s not worth it.
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Agreed, good luck on your endeavor on getting Blizzard to make changes
I have come to accept that they will most likely leave us in the dirt until after spiritborn has had its moment/s in the sun.
As someone else on the forum told me, “go plant some trees”
I will recommend some to you once I have found some good ones worth planting.
-All the core skills sucks. They are simply useless.
-Everything was over-nerfed. (Dominate, BruteForce, Crusher, all the overpower items, Hota, Whirlwind, bleed,… list goes on)
-Lacks of AOE other than dust devils. Still not enough
-Poor levelling experience. Arguably the weakest class at the moment.
- New weapon throw skill does not seem strong too
Hopefully, they will come up with a proper balance. No viable build to complete endgame content for casual players.
I’d been using Leap as my fury generator since Season 2 when blizzard increase the Fury for Leap to 40. Hated the triple shout playstyle. It’s only recently in Season 4 did I switch to Rallying Cry + Yen’s Blessing. 90% Unstoppable uptime is so addicting. At the moment I’m using Andy’s Lifesteal with Starlight aspect for Fury generation. Been a dream of mine to finally get this combo to work.
Well, someone has found a way to do some deeps with WW and thorns, here’s hoping it stays in the game so that we can be competitive again 
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Yeah uhhhh, they probably shouldn’t let the infinite feedback loop go live, especially because god only know what that will do to servers if you have too many barbs on screen doing that at once.
Yeah, but it would be nice to have fun on Barb again…
Finally tried Barb on the PTR. Realize why I stopped playing Barb completely. It just doesn’t feel very fluid unless you play shouts. I want to play with brawling skills like Charge but it feels really bad. The new fire aspect they gave it to give 2 charges felt underwhelming to say the least.
I did like the updated to Ground Stomp, Third Blade for Deathblow and the Ugly bastard seemed interesting (although think needs to pulse that fire dmg entire duration of WoTB). Glyph choices seemed a bit underwhelming for what I was trying to build. Would be great to get a fire glyph added.
We need all of our bleed multipliers to be generic dot. This would make Andy’s viable, as well as any bleed converted to fire/burning.
Cut to the bone ranks are bugged in the opposite way to the thorns ranks…it does barely anything to bleed damage even at 29 ranks
Ugly helm is a end point. I can’t find anyway to use that Fire damage for something. It’s possible to use Sorcerer aspect to do something but there isn’t any for generic Fire damage. Can’t equip other class’s unique either.
Cooldowns are very easy to get now once you get rolling. On ptr i made leapquake with no attack powers. Just leap, stomp, 2 shouts, iron skin and wrath of the zerker which has a cooldown of 9 seconds lol
Pit 90 without gushing wounds. Boss damage is amazin
I mean it coverts all dmg to fire so just increasing your overall dmg seems fine, I just think the odd flat dmg fire aspects are way under tuned. Either give Fire Barb legit support or remove them. Charge should leave burning ground and explosion should be weapon dmg % or the flat needs to be 10x as much.
I don’t know why they made this a helm, it is competing with so many mythic helms, it never stood a chance.
I also think they forgot that barb does no damage, so converting a low damage number by 30% means nothing
Yeah that’s true. “Use this to deal more damage” isn’t interesting. Needs some other type of interaction.
It’s a theme they’re going for now. Kinda like how blizzard wanted to do something with Earthquake or dust devil. Season 6 is to get barbarians to do Fire damage.
We first need to do damage that can be converted to fire
Heir of perdition gives a 60x base, shako has giga utility and andariels gives huge dot and life on hit.
Unless barb or that helm multiplier is giga buffed, it’s still hopeless.
I want to be wrong, I have been wanting to play a fire barb since hellhammer existed, but they are going about making it possible in a very disappointing way.
Conceptually I like it and back in the day a 30x on a helm that assist with resource was pretty legit. I think the big problem is that the explosion is very lackluster. Make that pulse or be some kind of aoe burn…idk anything more interesting.
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They need to add a zero to the multiplier for it to compete with other hats, and they need to make sure it converts bleed to burn, then give us a way to scale generic dot damage.
They’re all over the place with elemental nonsense in this game.
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Burn and fire damage are different effects…I have no idea why…it’s all fire at the end of the day man, please just convert hellhammer to do fire damage