Lets talk about hiw to fix the design of the d4 barb.
Barb are supose to be raging barbarian running at high speed due to they agility and strengh, ferocious and when in heat of battle are in a frenzy of rage and blood. They are brute with amazing strength.
I dont feel that in d4, dont get me wrong, i do like the barb with the arsenal system. But i think that they emphasis too much on it. They should go more into the frenetic beast hungry to battle. And the design right now push you to take the 3 shout cause they are toooooooo stupidly strong to not take, and wirlwind. All because the 3 shout take half of the skills bar. And most of the core skills need two other compliment to be useful. So you are now at 7… doesnt work.
They are slow, they can hit hard yeah, but not so often. They should be able to overpower move. The system witch overpwer with the arsenal is weak, 10 times switchs… that slow.
So heres my two cents how to make the barb more fun and using more builds
-give barb ability to use Berserker more often and use a mecanic with different state of berserk. Like state 1, +10 move speed, + 10% damage, and so on
-Barb been able to do 1 free overpower after 5-8 seconds in berserk
-Nerfs the shouts to be less stupidly needed
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or instead of nerfing shouts, compress them into 1 or 2 shouts instead of 3
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making ways to overpower from damages received
-could think of more, but im done here
So im the end, i really like the barb, but the design mecanics are weak. Imagine a barb that can just run fast and use frenzy fast double slash with overpower, berserking leaping into battle like an animal and deathblowing like an madman.
I’m going to casually suggest the lot of you don’t go around “deathblowing” everything.
It’s too late to ask the Devs to change anything right now, because they 're already baked all the new stuff into SEason 1 and ready to launch it in couple weeks. Barb is in a really bad state right now and we all know it, but there’s nothing that we can do right now besides just suffering for couple more weeks and see how Season 1 will be.
I know it’s sad but it’s the truth
To fix barbs you’ll have to go back in time to before blizzard repeatedly laid off the dev teams and design leads throughout the games development cycle.
The reason barb is the way it is can be broken down to the simple fact that the current dev teams have no idea of the algorithms or interactions between barb class traits, the various uniques, aspects, paragon boards and barb skills.
That’s why the patch notes are what they were. Blizzard has a technical debt, they have no idea how to fix the class. Time to move on, druids in a good place atm.
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Crap, inhave a level 100 druid that cant get the dang tempest roar and was gona make a barbarian and now i see all these horrible posts. I dont want to play a necro, sorc or rogue. This sucks.
Shouts aren’t exactly OP. It’s because our fury generation is sh*t that the shouts are “almost” mandatory for “meta” builds.
Some builds don’t require all 3 and can function for specific things. Like Walking Arsenal on lilith or for farming anything under Tier 80 NMDs.
Too many effects require us to build and dump fury at very high rates, and shouts are the best way to build fury very fast and steadily without having to hit mobs for hours with basics or without having to hit mobs at all actually (better to have big packs around for CDR though ofc).
Shouts allows us to start a fight with full fury without setup, like a mage would start full mana. The fact that our idle state is at 0 fury makes our basics almost useless since you can’t be afk hitting a mob until you can actually start doing something. On high level content you’d die within the first few seconds.
Shouts solve both fury and survival issues with relative ease compared to any other option in the barbarians kit. Even after the multiple nerfs (and this shows just how bad the rest of our options are since even after nerf the shouts outperform them).
So fixing fury generation and survivability would make most other setups if not viable at least smoother.
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Yeah, exactly this, thats why i was trying to focus on the Berserker state, since when berserking fury doesnt drop
It’s hard to think about solutions without proposing adding new and interesting skills. It feels like Barb is missing some core functions needed to make it more interesting. But, if I were to propose changes to the existing makeup:
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Make thorns damage multiply by attack speed. This gives options. You can go a high AS frenzy build to max raw thorn damage, maybe go with a two hand build and sacrifice some thorns dmg for HOTA, or maybe you go for more mobility with a polearm that makes charge apply thorns. This also helps thorns scale better at higher levels.
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Make Flay give +% thorns instead of +thorns. Just more in line with point one.
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General buff for Leapquake.
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COTA needs to scale better, and the ancients need to have significantly more uptime. My proposal would be have them stay up for a 4-6 second minimum and drain fury/sec while in combat after, automatically disappearing post combat maybe. Makes them more meaningful while also requiring management to keep them up.
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The strength of Vulnerability and Crit makes the Expertise system way less interesting than it could be. There are several ways to address it, but every weapon combo should be appealing.
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