How do you think barbarians will handle, tankiness wise, in S4 when they remove our inherent 10% DR?
Kind of scratching my head on this one; while HOTA barbs damage might have been out of control, our survivability, as the premier Tank class (alongside bear druids) seemed about right, especially since Bear druid survivability was pretty much left alone in S4.
DR is not all that important anymore. Barbarians don’t seem to have any problems surviving in the PTR with the change in place.
What worries me is many barbarian will take Challenging Shout for the damage reduction. Later on blizzard will see too many barbarian use that one particular skill then nerf it because of popularity.
Why worry over something out of your control. If the nerf happens, then adapt and do something else. Blizzard won’t nerf such things into oblivion and leave the players stranded not being able to play the game in one way or another.
Just use whatever your character needs and don’t worry about it.
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The issue is blizzard doesn’t nerf because something is good. They throw out nerf because that thing is popular regardless if it’s good or not.
Again, why care about it? Using your logic, nobody should use the skill so Blizzard can’t nerf it… so by that definition you’ve self nerfed yourself by not using it.
Just play the game and don’t worry about it.
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My logic is don’t nerf anything base on popularity. At the same time, don’t buff things because no one uses them.
I completely disagree.
For highest pit levels you really need DR at least as it stands for now, in the PTR.
You could say this might be an opportunity for us to test some new skills that were somehow ignored before (earthquakes for example).
I currently run both challenging shout and iron skin, besides iron blood, undying and juggernaut for comfy 199 pit farm.
And yeah, there are arguments that could be made that we could run lower levels pits for same mats, but it’s all about the challenge.
TLDR: all barbs might end up running all defense skills available to them, leading to boring builds. I did suggest in my own feedback bringing back DR affix at least for chest and pants.
They are tanky still. I got a selig on ptr. 
Removing the inherent dr means chall shout is even more necessary, yes.
even without a selig, barbs are pretty tanky. here’s a shot of my stats in combat on ptr
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ox9f5hXmJGFwBG4hn1vwtJc6AXV6WSbH/view
as you can see, we have got 65k life, 20k+ armor and I dont have it open, but max resists too.
Max Armor and Resists are a given for any and all Classes. DR is the best and only method to reduce damage on top of the Soft Caps. HP is worth more the more DR you have.
In S4, unless there is some problem with DR not appearing in Tempering Recipes (which it should), even though you are gaining Max HP, you cannot think of it like gaining that same amount in S3. Your EHP at 35K HP currently is worth WAY more than 55-65K on PTR.
While you have numerous ways of getting DR in Skill Tree and Paragon, players were ALREADY taking those sources for the most part on top of DR Affixes. For whatever reason, Poison Pools and Ranged enemies specifically seem to almost entirely bypass your Resists, Armor, and DR. It is so amazingly out of whack it isn’t even funny.
Shouts suck with how they are designed because of how much investment you need to make into Shouts for them to be and feel good. When you make that investment, you might as well take all 3.
Personally, I think the Shout system needs to be reworked entirely and replace our current Weapon Technique system. Expertise can stay, but Technique is not interesting. Being able to pick a Shout that acts as a Passive Ability with proc chances and to extend to allies is a better system since all Shouts are not active or reactive abilities really. You just pop them constantly which feels bad when half your Skill bar is basically greyed out.
Challenging Shout will almost absolutely have to be taken now. Iron Skin pales in comparison even with Iron Warrior which requires a coveted Defensive Aspect to work properly.
*I had a thought, but they could actually fix some issues if they allowed both Armor and Elemental Resistances to contribute past tge Soft Cap but with increasing diminishing returns. No need for much DR at all anywhere if you simplified the formula.
Season 3 toon I can run challenging shout with no cool down.
My chest plate and amulet +7 on iron skin and challenging shout