>Ranks basically at this point mostly just help everyone to hit. You have to grossly outclass to see some serious bump in damage, otherwise. I think a simple solution to balance things out would be make weapon primaries hit hardest with weapons in a way that is in line with how hard the best MUs can hit with magic, secondaries hit lower with weapons than primaries, and terts lower than secondaries.


I would opt for a more active way of dealing extra damage. Have Barb combo's end with a huge damaging attack is my current favorite concept.

>Let everyone increase their offensive stance to 110% at the cost of reducing defensive points. May be tied to weapon skills some how like defensive stance points are tied to the defense skill. Barbarians get 110%. Secondaries get 105%. This would be a nice perk to paladins too. Defensive skills can go up to 110%. Armor secondaries can go to 105%.

Great idea! Although I'm partial to it being barbarian only and tie it to Expertise skill for barbs to max up to 120%.

Rhadyn da Dwarb - Blood for fire!

Barbarian Guild Suggestions
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h4L5hAxR1-VLDegDNZBIhGdo5bMgnCtm84Icm2E0utU/edit#gid=0

SQUANTO's idea about weapon primaries, or just Barbarians, dealing a straight up increased flat damage is probably the most frugal and effective idea. The extension of allowing Barbarians to go above 100% in attack stance, perhaps up to 120% and in lieu of defense of course, is a good one as well.

The more meaty,time consuming, but more flashy ideas might be a double strike attack, an automatic counterattack, or dare I say it a roar that does room damage.

My suggestion of allowing barbs to gain offensive points up to 120% tied to Expertise ranks was not based on trading defense for offense (just in case there is any misunderstanding). I believe this should be on top of gaining defensive points from Defending for us. This would give the bonus to weapons that Squanto suggested as well.

As for the OP, I've ONLY ever played Barbarians (I know, silly huh?). I've never been one to compare myself to others when hunting. Now in PVP...different story. In hunting I could care less if finger wagglers can out kill me. However, my IG wife, an Empath is amazed at how fast I killed as a Barbarian compared to others she hunts with. Also, circle chasing tends to skew the results a ton hence why I've never done it on any of my characters. But that's a personal preference and there's nothing wrong with circle chasing.

Rhadyn da Dwarb - Blood for fire!

Barbarian Guild Suggestions
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h4L5hAxR1-VLDegDNZBIhGdo5bMgnCtm84Icm2E0utU/edit#gid=0

> If you have to nerf your defenses to increase your weapon damage,

Mages do. All magic primes have armor tert (defending + shield), and they have at least two defenses at tert (evasion + shield x 2, shield + parry x1) This means they will all suffer decreased learning rates, have their offensive magics lag due to their tertiary defenses, and they will have fewer defensive stance points at equal skill levels. Then there's the defensive ranks missing from SOI which affects all magic primes other than WMs.

> That said, being able to buff attack stance at the cost of defense stance is not appealing to me

A barbarian's weapon abilities can already be buffed. All of the suggestions are effectively ways to bump up the global cap on damage for a barbarian as a means of dealing with single damage sources (rather than magic + physical weapons); however, this feels like it's quickly devolving into a wishlist on how to make barbarians the undisputed masters of combat. They'd be invincible in PvP scenarios, at level, and they would effectively be given the ability to train all weapons wide in PvE without the damage penalty (as opposed to keeping a few weapons locked at all times). I think barbarians have room to improve, but let's go for balance... not a complete swing on the power pendulum.

> If you have to nerf your defenses to increase your weapon damage, it would be an impractical decision for barbs to truly do that.

2DUMBARSE said it best, "If that stacks with barb magic wards, you may as well ask for invincibility in PvP, which is boring for you and opponents."

Derium, most of these guys are right though, Barbs are currently terrible in terms of combat. Sorry but it's true. I actually came into the game wanting to be Barb but found them very lacking and really just felt like a commoner with a few tricks. There's currently nothing in the Barb toolbox that makes them truly unique or special in any area, nothing in there wants me to try out a Barb especially after BMR was nerfed into the ground.

> Derium, most of these guys are right though, Barbs are currently terrible in terms of combat. Sorry but it's true.

Except they aren't. You can't compare one character to another in this game. If you're talking about PvP, then sure. They can be terrible in a trial fight. Why? Because trial fights are based off creatures you hunt. Even if you assume the skill range is close (it's not at the upper ends), you also have non-barbarians spending a lot of time training skills out of combat. They have to in order to level. This translates into higher stats, and since you've normalized base skills, stats and the number of abilities are all that matters.

> ...nothing in there wants me to try out a Barb...

Don't have you have a barbarian? If this isn't personal experience, then at least show your work in how you're reaching these conclusions.

> especially after BMR was nerfed into the ground

You mean for those without toad, badger, turtle, or serenity. You have to admit that the old BMR was fun but incredibly broken for structured PvP. It basically shut down all mages and put it as a contest of skill point vs skill point, which barbarians learn faster and easier. That would make barbarians the kings and queens of PvP, sure, but it wouldn't solve the underlying problem. It would just move the discussion to a different part of the boards.

Honestly, this thread feels all over the place based on individual wants.

* Some want to rule PvP.

* Some want to feel more barbarian.

* Some want a higher kill rate.

* Some want to rule PvE.

* Some want more ability usage.

* Some want to exceed global caps.

I'm not sure there's a solution that will work for everyone's goals (at least not without making other guilds complain in turn), and having people generically talk about a "problem" doesn't seem to help the conversation. We're talking past each other. I recommend everyone specify exactly what they're trying to solve in the post where they piss on or offer up ideas. It may help.

Lanival:

The biggest issue with that is that a barb with 10k hours and a WM with 10k hours should not be hunting the same thing. Based on skillsets, the barb should be further up the hunting ladder, unless they have made a mistake somewhere along the way in how they train.

Derium:

The biggest issue I see is that young barbs struggle with buffs in a way that magic guilds (and thieves) do not. IF management is hellish until you have multiple masteries, which essentially means being 100th+. I don't really have any good ideas for fixing this, other than re-arranging the expertise analyze options such that you can do analyze rage/calm earlier in your life to assist with some of the setup costs.

You do need multiple of those forms/meditations to get close to old BMR, but with swan+turtle stacked, your resistance vs all magic is fairly comparable, and you can add some of the other stuff, like serenity, or turtle vs elemental damage, etc. Presumably this will get changed during the barrier review, though ETA on that is unclear.

Given the general mission of barbarians, it does feel strange that they are middling at best at killing. Yes, you're right that barbs have the best skillset setup for combat. However, it does suck, to Lanival's point, that you kill at a significantly slower rate than other guilds, due to cyclic damage options.

Having said that, I kill about 100 mobs per 2 hours, a rate just under 1 per minute and it doesn't feel particularly offensive to me as I spend probably 50% of that time doing non-killing things (i.e. hunt, skin, changing a form, stealths when changing stealth, analyze / BCM). Of course, if I were a WM/bard/etc, I'd have a cyclic doing damage down that time. This impacts farming capacity, but not really training speed or capacity.

<<The biggest issue I see is that young barbs struggle with buffs in a way that magic guilds (and thieves) do not. IF management is hellish until you have multiple masteries, which essentially means being 100th+.

Thieves have the same issues that barbs have until around at least circle 80 or so, since discipline and concentration are such a completely limiting factor until you have 350 or so in it. My circle 40 thief with 32 dis, 29 int, and 20 sta to give 159 concentration can maintain 2 low tier khri without running out of concentration. He can only maintain higher tier khri if paired with a low tier khri. Also, a short duration khri like prowess means he can only maintain that single khri without running out of concentration due to frequent start up costs. He can only do 3 khri if I'm okay with running out of concentration in less than 10 minutes if they're not all first tier. Even if they're all first tier it still takes about 10-15 minutes to run out of concentration. Add to that if you want to stop a khri early to switch to another then there's a significant cooldown period before being able to restart it, so simply turning khri off and on as needed isn't an option to get around limited simultaneous khri. And if you run out of concentration, the same cooldown timer kicks in for all the maintained khri on top of not having any concentration to start other khri.

Not trying to say that Barbs don't have it rough with buffing at low circles, but just pointing out that you're not the only ones with those issues which is what a lot of the tone of this thread comes across as saying. The quoted sentence quite literally.

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Because they are all part of the same. For instance, traders suck at killing things but they are traders and have a ton of non combat things to make up for their lack of killing effectiveness. Barbs, in a purely combat perspective which includes BMR, have been slowly getting whittled away like a woodcarver turning that perfectly fine carved statue into a wooden stub. This is what people are trying to point out, that the class lost a lot of things and really don't excel anymore in the one thing they should kinda excel or be close to the top at, which is killing things.

It's like saying, since I can't kill as fast as a warmage and since warmages get cool familiars then as Barbs we should get a dragon familiar to make up for our lack of hunting prowess compared to warmages. But in reality we're bad at hunting and don't get any familiars whatsoever! In fact, if you really look at it as a rough sum total our abilities are just pluses to our combat abilities. But who cares? in the end we still can't compete even with all our pluses tacked on. So, why have all these animalistic sounding abilities since none of them really do anything? Especially something fun. What I'm saying is, what's even the point of a Barb anymore? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

>1) To kills things at relatively similar speeds to other combat oriented guilds. It does not mean Barbarian's need to "rule PvE", it means that when fighting 'at level' creatures, they should be keeping up with other guilds. Ideally, the Barbarian should outpace other guilds under some conditions, and fall short under other conditions. I don't care if I kill ten creatures in five minutes and a Warrior Mage kills twelve, but I do care if I kill six and they kill twelve.

I know this is approaching broken record territory, but the difference should not be that significant unless you chose suboptimal weapons (e.g. large edged, large blunt, etc.), or maybe you're very heavily melee-focused which means you're at a disadvantage before factoring extra damage sources and stuff. (I mean, Wolverine is still meh, right, or was it improved?)

I kill even slower than a barb on my paladin and I don't kill that much slower than a WM in a typical hunt unless I'm overhunting. I'm not calling you out; just don't want you to wind up leaving the game over something like this if it's avoidable by changing your setup and/or backtraining a little bit, which can actually be pretty fun.

Wanting cool stuff is totally different and totally valid.

My suggestion to anyone kinda cringing about the oomph of our guild right now is this: just keep on chugging. Changes are frequent in this game and you never know what's around the corner. There is a google doc that Rhadyn has out there for anyone who wants to contribute to it (regarding suggestions). I am sure he'd be more than happy to link it for us. #Newpcnofavorites

"Brace yourselves, Squanto is going to bleh blah fart fart bleh.." -the player of the character formerly known as Pureblade

Oh, and one of the first things mentioned when I through these issues up years ago was the point that others had already brought it up before me... DERIUM, believe me, these are real issues that have been discussed at length by people with far more experience than you or I.

>Warrior Mages are basically specialized machines that produce burst damage

Eh, I don't think that's the issue. Warmies have plenty of consistent damage output damage. And if burst damage is vastly more effective for killing stuff, then that's a balance issue that needs to be addressed.

>But Barbarians are versitile and robust in combat in ways that Warmages are not, because of a Barb's skillset placement and the Barb abilities.

Eh, I don't think this is true either. I think the issue is barbs are NOT versatile and robust - they do weapon damage, and beyond buffing/debuffing, weapon skill, and weapon damage, are still limited to 'weapon damage'. That's not versatility, and indeed, compared to any MU, that's less versatility.

Well, more ranks = more OF = more damage. You will do more damage with Dragon/Eagle up. Even a little bit of testing will show that it's noticeable, both from a 'critters killed per unit of time' perspective, and a 'average damage level per unit of time' perspective.

At the end of the day, all buffing/debuffing in this game boils down to '+offense' or '+defense'. Barbs have a lot of both, but can't use them simultaneously, and because they don't have access to TM, they don't have access to an entire avenue of damage that almost everyone else does. With respect to buffing, no other guild has access to as much as Barbs do, but lots of guilds can buff a lot of things simultaneously, leaving Barbs in a position of not being particularly overly impressive with respect to offensive or defensive buffing.

>>Warrior Mages are basically specialized machines that produce burst damage. That is the major focus of the guild. Comparing your DPS with a Warrior Mage's DPS, you're always going to fall a bit short.

You're conflating burst damage with DPS. DPS is a measure of damage per second, generally over a long period of time. Like, say, a 6 hour hunting session. Burst damage (or burst DPS) is how much damage you can crank if you hit all your buttons at the same time to do maximum short term damage (i.e. precasting DB/BG, cyclic, emptying all that + swings + pathway on + tm).

The issue is that barbs underperform on both metrics. Barbs have no special burst damage -- the only 'special' attack we really have is dual load, shared with rangers. We don't have snipe/backstab/pre-cast tm spells for alpha strike burst damage.

We also don't have the sustained damage that many of the magic heavy classes do in the form of cyclic t/m, or just mixing spells with attacks (which only adds a 1s rt every cast, for significant additional damage).

>>But Barbarians are versitile and robust in combat in ways that Warmages are not, because of a Barb's skillset placement and the Barb abilities.

According to Kodius, barbs do in fact have the widest possible buffset, but this is balanced by the restrictions on how many of those buffs can be active at a time (and IIRC being one of the few classes with more abilities than slots).

Offhand, I don't really think that skillset placement is a good justification for the weapon primary class to have both poor burst damage and poor sustained DPS. Ultimately, barbs have no real class-buffs that give them an advantage over other classes in those two areas. The buffs they have, focusing largely on weapon buffs/etc, do improve their sustained DPS, but they do it less than alternate damage sources do. I'd say that a barb has higher sustained DPS than a thief that isn't backstabbing. The issue is that thieves have better burst via backstab, and better sustained damage via backstab as well since they can't just repeat it. Rank-based advantages don't scale as hard as alternative damage sources like cyclic tm.

I would agree that it's not an issue for barbs to not be the #1 guild at those things, but it is somewhat more problematic for barbs, the guild described as masters of combat, to be middling at best at them. It's not much of a practical issue from a training standpoint; I would not expect something to speed up training by a meaningful amount.

>If Warrior Mages are objectively killing only slightly faster than Barbarians, then no concern here. I'm basing this off other people's posts, and my own experiences albeit at low levels. My Warrior Mage seems to kill x2 faster using 2HE. I open up with Ice Patch on my primary target, then cast Fireballs as mana permits. Electrostatic Eddy is running. The combination of fighting a stunned/extremely unbalanced target, who also has severe+ nerve damage, and fireball keeps my damage well above anything my Barbarian can do even with more ranks in weapons.

Lower ranks definitely skew things. At low ranks, there's little difference between even primary and tertiary skills and you'll have less access to your buffs than a mage (thief problem, too). It gets better with time, however, as long as you have the desire to stick with it. DR is a game of patience, more than most.

Bear in mind, though, there's only so much more damage you can do by crippling something. For instance, if I'm hunting drakes with 1200 in a weapon, I'm already at or very near max success in the offense v. defense contest which determines how much damage I'm going to do with the weapon. If I debilitate the crap out of it, I'm not going to notice any difference in how hard I'm hitting my target or how fast I'm killing with the weapon. That's probably also why a special attack like smite doesn't feel any stronger than a slice.

Now... Admittedly, that's partially ignoring a real problem. Damage you can apply concurrently with weapons without at least an aim time and cast RT, like cyclic TM, skews things. You can offset some of that with special attacks and huge weapons, but I'm not sure how much. It shouldn't equate to a WM killing twice as fast unless you're overhunting and your partner is underhunting. And, that's just the state of the game right now. Either cyclic TM may see a nerf again or you'll get another special attack, some combination of the two, or who knows what else will happen. I prefer that development err on the side of adding damage for guilds rather than nerfing stuff because damage is still a little low, but that may just be me.

>My suggestion to anyone kinda cringing about the oomph of our guild right now is this: just keep on chugging. Changes are frequent in this game and you never know what's around the corner. There is a google doc that Rhadyn has out there for anyone who wants to contribute to it (regarding suggestions). I am sure he'd be more than happy to link it for us. #Newpcnofavorites

It's the link in my signature. Just search for one of my recent posts using my name "RCHIGHT" in the filter box or use the link in this one below.

Rhadyn da Dwarb - Blood for fire!

Barbarian Guild Suggestions
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h4L5hAxR1-VLDegDNZBIhGdo5bMgnCtm84Icm2E0utU/edit#gid=0

What I am hunting still trains. I just don't hit any harder regardless of what I do.

Sidenote: whirlwind damage is lol. Just putting that out there.

"Brace yourselves, Squanto is going to bleh blah fart fart bleh.." -the player of the character formerly known as Pureblade

>>At what point do you hit the cap then for Dragon/Eagle being useful? Maybe I'm not understanding something - I thought roughly speaking, damage was OF-DF, and anything that increased OF would increase damage?<<

That's how it used to work, more or less.

Now that roll caps with regard to adding damage. You (roughly speaking) score a 100% "hit" and the OF you generate over what is needed to do that does nothing for you until you hit the overkill range.


Mazrian