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  1. #11
    Community Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
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    Default Barbarian: Where's the damage?

    It's natural that Barbarian would be at (or near) the top for melee DPS, as long as she's still alive and still Raging. But does Barbarian have the features to provide that kind of damage? I'm not seeing it.

    Melee damage can come from critical power, attack rate (doublestrike or animation speed), meleepower, mega special attacks, or a bag of passive d6s. What of those do Barbarians get?
    • Critical Power: Say about halfsies. Their Critical Rage is about half of what Paladins or Bards get: the +range without +mult... and since crit mult multiplies by crit range, that means more like 25% of the critical power. Focused Wrath is weaker than Crit Rage, and Oath of Destruction is weaker than that. Death Frenzy is similar to Oath of Destruction (although it can be stacked with Crit Rage if you spend mega AP)

    • Attack Speed: Aside from FB's chance for glancing blows, nothing. And I actually like them having no speed: It's a nice theme that Barbs are the melee class that doesn't work on swinging super-fast like everyone else. No designer lazily sprinkling Doublestrike everywhere. They just need to make up for it in other ways.

    • Meleepower: OS t4 has +10 temporary Meleepower. FB has 2 permanent in t3 and 3 temp in t4. Ravager has 10+5 temp in t4. Well, 2-17 Meleepower for 40-50% of the time isn't nothing. Although Paladins are over there with passive 5 Meleepower, alongside their incredible level 4 spells.

    • Passive dice: Well there's 1d6 + 1d6 in Ravager cores. That's not huge, but not nothing.

    • Special Attacks: Aside from Supreme Cleave for AOE crowd killing, nothing strong in that regard. And Supreme Cleave is nothing new (although it doesn't necessarily drain your hp anymore, something that had only bothered lowbies)
      Storm's Eye is somewhat very powerful, but it's late in your career, intentionally limited in usability, and for now it appears to be super-hard to maintain whenever the enemies aren't wimps.

    • Helplessness: Oh I forgot, Ravager Bully is some real DPS too,although it only works on things you can make helpless (which means they're the less dangerous kind of enemy) (For the record, bonus helpless damage should probably be changed to a rating to stack slower...)


    Summary: Moderate Crit power, low-medium Meleepower, zero speed bonus, low passive dice, no active attack except AOE. Barbarians aren't great at melee DPS. Maybe they earn Meleepower from every class level, and we just haven't heard about it yet?
    Last edited by Scrabbler; 10-25-2014 at 03:08 AM.

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