Barbarian - Frenzied Berserker Changes

[lyrecono]

not sure where you got 8k (barb lvl = 20), so 20x20 = 400. at 100% melee power scaling. so 800dmg with 100% melee power. even at 28 in FOTW with adrenaline, I dont see this being above 2k.

ugh, typo, sorry it was verry late
so 400 damage, add 200 melee power (not too hard to hit) = 800damage
so 400 damage, add 400 melee power =1600 damage?

indeed kinda meh definitly not helping much when chipping away EE mob hitpoints
so more base dps is needed to begin with, not some 5% chance of doing a minescule amount of damage
how about adding 0,5 str mod to 2hf at the lv 12 and 18 core enh
brings them back in line with swf but in barbarian style, big hits, slower attack speed

another points is, how to stay alive long enough to deliver the punch.
how about changing the dr/- into prr and mrr
to represent their harsh living conditions.
4 prr and mrr for each point of dr, ending up with 28 prr and mrr, closing the gap between barbarians and fighters/paladins
ensuring they will stay in the fight long enough to actualy delivering dps instead of having them hop around the battlefield drinking pots that hamper dps and their ability to survive in the first place.
this will add more then heal amp does. releying on 2 hour waits for a healer*1, pots that hurt you*2 and bend over backwards for self healing*3 is not a good idea.

*1 a real healer that is played as one instead of a blade barier/implosion spammer or a gimped tr life.
*2 silver flame pots take to much space, costs to much to get (favor and plat, yeah it's easy for tr's, not for newbies) and hurt yourself in movement speed and stats, no other class has or needs this.
*3 twisting in cocoon, being in divine crusader, stopping rage for scrolls, or multiclassing cleric/bard/sorc etc for healing is downright silly, what i expect out of a lv 20 frenzied berzer barbarian is a killing machine that can kill stuff before it kills him.
That means he needs dps and enough survivability to go in a random EE quest and get through there as easy/hard as a heroic elite quest (all at propper level ofc)
The apeal of having a wel build/geared/played dps barb(with a hire) in heroics is gone in epics that needs to return.
adding hitpoints and heal amp allone doesn't cut it
barbs need a way to live through a fight, they lack defences for EE
barbs need more dps then a 5% chance of adding 800-1600 damage, a mob gets more pain out of a paper cut then that.


please sev, create a capped frenzied berzer barb, gear him, slap on whatever pastlive you want and go solo goes up on EE, see where the barb goes wrong there. then evaluate these changes proposed here.
i like your work so far, but the fb need a lot more work

keep up the good work!

[CaptainSpacePony]

I don't get why you would make such a powerful ability a T5 instead of Core level 20. As seen with the replies, pretty much everyone agrees on 2 points:

1) No reason to stay pure barb at the moment.

I just wanted to be clear:

I think there is good reason to be a pure dwarf occult slayer on live atm and that will be even more so after these changes hit.

[btolson]

I'd like to suggest an alternative implementation of the cores, with the following goals:
1) increase FB dps in a unique and flavorful way
2) consolidate short-duration clickies


Frenzy: (1 AP, Barbarian Level 6). Activation Cost: 10 Hit Points. Cooldown: 30 seconds. Enter a frenzy, increasing your strength by +2 and adding Vicious to your melee weapons. You gain +30 hit points and +10 healing amplification. (unchanged, just for reference)

Death Frenzy: (1 AP, Barbarian Level 12). Your Frenzy ability becomes Death Frenzy. Activation Cost: 30 Hit Points. Cooldown: 30 seconds. Expend 30 hit points to enter a Death Frenzy for one minute. You gain 6 strength. You increase your crit multiplier by an additional 1 (on a roll of 19 or 20) when raging. Your melee weapons gain 'Supreme Vicious'.(+6d6 damage to your attacks while dealing 2d3 damage to yourself per attack.) You gain +60 hit points and +20 healing amplification.

Obliterating Frenzy: (1 AP, Barbarian Level 18). Your Death Frenzy ability becomes Obliterating Frenzy.Activation Cost: 50 Hit Points. Cooldown: 30 seconds. Expend 50 hit points to enter an Obliterating Frenzy for one minute. You gain 6 strength. You increase your crit multiplier by an additional 1 (on a roll of 19 or 20) when raging. Your melee weapons gain 'Supreme Vicious'.(+6d6 damage to your attacks while dealing 2d3 damage to yourself per attack.) You gain +20 damage to critical hits (before mulipliers). Passive: You gain +100 hit points and +20 healing amplification.



The idea here is that each new Frenzy completely replaces/overwrites the previous one, so you never need more than one on your bars, which is a more sane way of dealing with them. Granting FBs extra dps with Obliterating Frenzy through a large amount of seeker damage is not just unique (plenty of other prestiges offer modified crit profile or other bonuses, but none give this much seeker), but also totally appropriate to the flavor of the class.

Additionally, pushing Death Frenzy down to level 12 makes the class more interesting to play at mid levels, as the benefits of regular Frenzy become lackluster fairly quickly.

[Tesrali]

The vorpal ability is specifically designed to give a DPS alternative to the healing. We wouldn't want a barbarian, even pure, to get both.

The vorpal ability scales with barbarian level.

We'd rather work on the cores.

Sev~

Found a bug while testing:

4th core gives +1 critical multiplier only on 19-20, rather than +1 across the critical range. I think this core goes along way to address the paladin/barbarian damage relationship at the moment---since holy sword doesn't function on 19-20.

Had a buddy who did fun dps tests comparing a frenzied bersker/ravager mix and a paladin if you want to check it out: https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...vs-Paladin-DPS

Developments are lookin great! =)
Am super excited to play a barbarian.
Ty guys, etc

[Severlin]

We are considering changes based on player feedback:


~ The final core of Frenzied berserker would lose the Rage regeneration. Instead it would gain, in addition to the passive abilities and Storm's Eye, the ability:

"When Raging your melee attacks that roll a 20 do an extra 400 damage. This damage scales with 100% Melee Power."


~ The tier 5 Mutli-Selector would lose "The Perfect Rage" and gain the following as an alternate choice to Accelerated Metabolism.

"Raging Blows: While raging you gain +1[W] damage."

Sev~

[UurlockYgmeov]

We are considering changes based on player feedback:


~ The final core of Frenzied berserker would lose the Rage regeneration. Instead it would gain, in addition to the passive abilities and Storm's Eye, the ability:

"When Raging your melee attacks that roll a 20 do an extra 400 damage. This damage scales with 100% Melee Power."


~ The tier 5 Mutli-Selector would lose "The Perfect Rage" and gain the following as an alternate choice to Accelerated Metabolism.

"Raging Blows: While raging you gain +1[W] damage."

Sev~

me thinkee I likee

[CaptainSpacePony]

We are considering changes based on player feedback:


~ The final core of Frenzied berserker would lose the Rage regeneration. Instead it would gain, in addition to the passive abilities and Storm's Eye, the ability:

"When Raging your melee attacks that roll a 20 do an extra 400 damage. This damage scales with 100% Melee Power.."


Sev~

OFC everything requires testing, but the capstone sounds quite...
barbaric.

[Zurrander]

We are considering changes based on player feedback:


~ The final core of Frenzied berserker would lose the Rage regeneration. Instead it would gain, in addition to the passive abilities and Storm's Eye, the ability:

"When Raging your melee attacks that roll a 20 do an extra 400 damage. This damage scales with 100% Melee Power."


~ The tier 5 Mutli-Selector would lose "The Perfect Rage" and gain the following as an alternate choice to Accelerated Metabolism.

"Raging Blows: While raging you gain +1[W] damage."

Sev~

Excellent changes. Not sure if this would put Frenzied Berserkers one par with Pally's/Bard's but at least its something.

[Qhualor]

We are considering changes based on player feedback:


~ The final core of Frenzied berserker would lose the Rage regeneration. Instead it would gain, in addition to the passive abilities and Storm's Eye, the ability:

"When Raging your melee attacks that roll a 20 do an extra 400 damage. This damage scales with 100% Melee Power."


~ The tier 5 Mutli-Selector would lose "The Perfect Rage" and gain the following as an alternate choice to Accelerated Metabolism.

"Raging Blows: While raging you gain +1[W] damage."

Sev~

~ Now we are talking. Sadly though, rage regeneration would have been a nice perk in another tree.

~ Sure.

[Monkey-Boy]

We are considering changes based on player feedback:


~ The final core of Frenzied berserker would lose the Rage regeneration. Instead it would gain, in addition to the passive abilities and Storm's Eye, the ability:

"When Raging your melee attacks that roll a 20 do an extra 400 damage. This damage scales with 100% Melee Power."


~ The tier 5 Mutli-Selector would lose "The Perfect Rage" and gain the following as an alternate choice to Accelerated Metabolism.

"Raging Blows: While raging you gain +1[W] damage."

Sev~

is that 400 BEFORE crti-multipliers?

[btolson]

is that 400 BEFORE crti-multipliers?

Based on context it's magical damage, not subject to crit multipliers.

[Cetus]

We are considering changes based on player feedback:


~ The final core of Frenzied berserker would lose the Rage regeneration. Instead it would gain, in addition to the passive abilities and Storm's Eye, the ability:

"When Raging your melee attacks that roll a 20 do an extra 400 damage. This damage scales with 100% Melee Power."


~ The tier 5 Mutli-Selector would lose "The Perfect Rage" and gain the following as an alternate choice to Accelerated Metabolism.

"Raging Blows: While raging you gain +1[W] damage."

Sev~

Couple of things:

1. Rage regeneration? Did I miss this somewhere in the initial writeup? If so, why would this be lost - that would be an amazing upgrade.

2. I like the 400 on vorpal scaling with melee power, nice buff to capstone.

3. 1w isn't as powerful as healing every 4 seconds that would scale with melee power and all the healing amp barbs are getting. This needs to be far stronger than 1W, make this another multiplier or something to compete with the HOT.

Also - fix death frenzy - I don't think it is currently working.

[Violith]

just a thought, but is there a way to keep active while below 0 hp? would go well with the whole berseker lore. fighting past when your body would've otherwise given out.

and Die Harder should either have more of a boost or have a higher teired ability that boosts it more, -25hp isnt much different then -10 when things hit for as hard as they do, so perhaps getting it into the 50 or so range

[Scrabbler]

just a thought, but is there a way to keep active while below 0 hp? would go well with the whole berseker lore. fighting past when your body would've otherwise given out.

If they wanted that, they could simply add +25 to your hp max and reduce your incap survival threshold from -25 to 0. That'd be pointless.

and Die Harder should either have more of a boost or have a higher teired ability that boosts it more, -25hp isnt much different then -10 when things hit for as hard as they do, so perhaps getting it into the 50 or so range

Yes, it would be good to give Die Harder a boost, but first they'd have to fix the negative hp incap system. The mechanic is broken right now. Concisely: how it works now is that you almost never go incap, especially not for more than 1 second. How it should work: when your hp go under 0, you're helpless on the ground for about 40 seconds or until getting a Heal check, but you're not super-likely to die earlier from scattered enemy attack.

[bbqzor]

The final core of Frenzied berserker would lose the Rage regeneration. Instead it would gain, in addition to the passive abilities and Storm's Eye, the ability: "When Raging your melee attacks that roll a 20 do an extra 400 damage. This damage scales with 100% Melee Power."

After carefully re-reading your last few posts on this, I am forced to conclude this needs adjustment. You specify:

it will have a chance to proc on glancing blows like many on hit attacks. The idea is that will help even things out.

Not really sufficient. Suppose Im attacking at ~100/animations per minute, 2HD. Lets say 20% doublestrike and full 2hd line. And full FB of course.

That comes out to around 120 attacks per minute, with a 75% chance to glance, and a 25% chance for those glances to proc on-hit effects (9 feats, 6 angry arms/mad munitions, 10 focus wide). Which can be simplified into ~143 d20 rolls per minute which check for on-hit effects.

That compares poorly to SWF (about 154 d20/min with 20% ds) and TWF (about 220 d20/min with 20% ds). This ability is helping 2HD fighting the least. It should help 2HD the most, or in the very worst cases an equal amount.

Making it check on ALL glances, not just ones which "proc additional effects". If it was like frenzy dice, instead of like flaming burst, that would more or less solve things (~210 d20/min, very close to twf and ahead of swf). That small bit its behind is likely going to be made up in terms of area dps (the developer intended barb specialty) when the opportunity to glance multiple mobs comes up.

The attention to detail to get this right is critical... please carefully review the ability to be sure its done right.

The tier 5 Mutli-Selector would lose "The Perfect Rage" and gain the following as an alternate choice to Accelerated Metabolism. "Raging Blows: While raging you gain +1[W] damage."

Nice, but as mentioned this wont really compare to self healing. What about doing 1W on all hits, and an additional 1W on 19-20s. To complement Death Frenzy, Overwhelming Critical, and so on. Let FB get some really big eye candy on those 19s/20s. This isnt really that big an addition overall, but it does give them something flavorful which holds up a bit better vs healing when there are no other practical healing options available.

[Seikojin]

Couple of things:

1. Rage regeneration? Did I miss this somewhere in the initial writeup? If so, why would this be lost - that would be an amazing upgrade.

2. I like the 400 on vorpal scaling with melee power, nice buff to capstone.

3. 1w isn't as powerful as healing every 4 seconds that would scale with melee power and all the healing amp barbs are getting. This needs to be far stronger than 1W, make this another multiplier or something to compete with the HOT.

Also - fix death frenzy - I don't think it is currently working.

I am 100% with Cetus on this. I didn't see any rage regen and feel that would be a go to for any true barb. Also the 400 on vorp is a great boost and very capstone worthy. I also think a +1W is not as useful to a barb as some hp recovery in this tree.

[Severlin]

That comes out to around 120 attacks per minute, with a 75% chance to glance, and a 25% chance for those glances to proc on-hit effects (9 feats, 6 angry arms/mad munitions, 10 focus wide). Which can be simplified into ~143 d20 rolls per minute which check for on-hit effects.

Cleaves and +[W] are so favorable to two handed weapons that it's probably okay if the other styles catch up a bit with the vorpal ability.

Sev~

[bbqzor]

Cleaves and +[W] are so favorable to two handed weapons that it's probably okay if the other styles catch up a bit with the vorpal ability.

Cleaves I might buy due to glances and the fact that with sup cleave a barb can basically match other people in terms of cleave timers. But this is hardly 2HD specific... you JUST did vanguard, which can do the same thing with shield bashing on top. So ... yea. Not wrong, but not a strong selling point from a barbarian point of view.

A hybrid barb/fighter with 2hd, shield, vanguard bashes, and whirlwind and supreme cleave both is going to be formidable (granted they wont get the capstone, but just saying pure 20 barb isnt the king here they seem, they are merely one of the competitors for the crown). The hybrid also gets heavy armor and shield prr. So again, looking for something barb specific thats going to stay meaningful relative to other choices. It doesnt have to be the best, but it shouldnt be predictably worse.

How you get W favoring 2HD enough to account for 33% less "on 20" procs Im not sure. Even if the 2HD weapon had a d20 base vs another weapons d2, thats only 10 dmg per hit difference. Over 20 hits, 200 damage. Sure, a bit higher with crits or whatever. Be generous and say 300 over 20 swings. Then with glances, that might be another 100. Okay so that makes up one single 400 point proc (both scale 100% melee power). Its not anywhere close to closing the game from 7 procs per min (2hd) to 11 procs per min (twf). (And I realize the W isnt tied to the capstone, but since you mentioned them as a package when comparing weapon styles, I felt responding in kind was fair).

Again, I dont think the barbarian capstone should be something which is used most poorly by 2HD. A 2HD barb shouldnt lose ground relative to a similar build with a different style just by hitting 20. If you want the math to even out, I think it would be much better to examine other areas (like frenzy dice, which benefit twf the most also and werent mentioned here) as well. The capstone doesnt seem like the right place to make a concession... its the capstone!

If you want to make a case otherwise please, by all means. Thats not some kind of trap, Im serious, but please use some numbers. We (as player posters) can sit here and give examples, as I have, about why we are saying what we are saying. Then, right or wrong, you at least have the context to evaluate it. Statements like "+W favors 2HD" really dont convey much, especially when the general math here shows otherwise. Im totally willing to say Im wrong and check out other examples, but as this is the one I think of its difficult to speculate about what the other might be.

[Scrabbler]

Cleaves and +[W] are so favorable to two handed weapons

It's because of Cleave that +[W] is favorable to THF. +[W] on its own (without Cleave to reduce the speed benefits of TWF and SWF) would have a pretty neutral effect. Or it could even favor TWF and SWF because they have better crit power.

BTW, if it's an intentional design choice that Cleave actions ignore your offhand proc rate from TWF, but obey the glance rate from THF, then the Cleave description should say so.

[MeliCat]

I dislike the loss of rage regeneration. It penalises players who are slower and die more.

Like that horrible card game I can't think of the name of - when you start losing you are more likely to continue losing.

Why Sev why? That was THE biggest thing for me.