Barbarian - Ravager Changes

[Cetus]

Great feedback so far. Still dissecting all of it. Some notes:

~ We had a long discussion about whether we wanted to take the barbarian down the path of the "glass cannon" route and decided we didn't want an entire class that had no self sufficiency. We understand that some players expect a high damage glass cannon type design for barbarians but we don't feel that fits well with how DDO is currently played.

~ Of all the abilities in the barbarian trees we expect Blood Strength to take the most tweaking to get right. To players that are concerned it will be overpowered we hear you and will be doing internal playtests with it soon. Lamannia feedback will be particularly telling in this regard.

~ We will be discussing the damage type and the capstone balance.

Sev~

Lol

I just...don't know what else to say. Barbs should be DPS kings. Period.

[bbqzor]

We had a long discussion about whether we wanted to take the barbarian down the path of the "glass cannon" route and decided we didn't want an entire class that had no self sufficiency. We understand that some players expect a high damage glass cannon type design for barbarians but we don't feel that fits well with how DDO is currently played.

To truly address self sufficiency and avoid glass cannon, spamming max hp and amp as additives wont suffice. Those are hallmarks of glass cannon type design... they do nothing but inflate hp yoyo. I hope part of this decision plays out by actually acknowledging that the class mechanic of DR needs to fit well with how ddo is currently played, meaning prr. And that a single T5 heal in each tree (which may or may not actually, partially, or wholly cover a barbarians ability to be at all self sufficient with regards to healing) does nothing to address the huge loss of epic destiny abilities, items, and so on that rage also prevents.

My point is, and I agree with the thought that the current state of the game weighs heavy here, that to get from where barbs are, to wherever they are going to go with this new design, you cant just add max hp, amp, and one maybe-viable self healing T5 ability and call it a day. The game has become very broad in the sense that classes bring multiple abilities from many avenues together to hang in the upper end. Barbs, by their nature, get a very limited pool to draw from... and that likely cannot change for ddo (youd have to add something for casting while raged, which I doubt will/should ever happen thought it does exist in multiple places in pnp). Dont lose track of that in your balance work.

Of all the abilities in the barbarian trees we expect Blood Strength to take the most tweaking to get right. To players that are concerned it will be overpowered we hear you and will be doing internal playtests with it soon. Lamannia feedback will be particularly telling in this regard.

As has been mentioned by me and others, dont disregard temp hp as part of the solution (here, and in FB or OS etc). FB, especially, may be better served by a constant temp hp stream to mitigate frenzy, which is then easier to balance around since it cannot be shifted around by opting to turn frenzy off to heal "faster" than intended. Not that vampiric bond would work better there, only that some kind of "inured to pain" proc could make sense and work well, with less risk of balance while more directly focusing on the problem.

Barbarian trees are VERY in need of some potential shuffling. There was a great deal of outcry when they were designed citing poor ability placement and lack of logic... the prevailing design at the time was "we want it to be integrated to encourage people to spend in all trees". The paradigm has shifted now, to "we want each tree to stand alone and all be independently appealing, creating hard choices for spending AP". Extra rage into Ravager to work with the capstone in T1, as one example, though there are more all the way up all trees. This, too, should be part of the solution. Leaving barbarians in a state where they really *need* to put 10-15 pts in all the trees to grab "critical" features is less than ideal, relative to the standing of most everyone else, and is also compounding hurt on the class.

We will be discussing the damage type and the capstone balance.

Good... I hope this includes reevaluating the ability damage portions, the poison damage portions, the linking of those abilities and effects, and related stacking concerns as well. As Ive said previously, abilities which have poison components that render the whole ability blocked vs poison immune mobs can be helped a great deal by making sure the two parts land independently. Ability damage can become penalties. Damage can (and here, probably should) go untyped, its not like rogues where barbarians have a way to enable it to land; with no forethought those abilities become binary pass/fail and that leaves the class in a poor state to approach an ever changing landscape of content from.

All the trees need another look with the idea to ensure its not just "barely passable" now, but actually viable into the future. Barbarians need PRR and Melee Power to maintain the relevence of their core class abilities. They need a way to mitigate their self-damage and/or lack/limited ability to self heal, so that they can retain playability under normal healing conditions (rather than needing a heal every 3s resulting in babysitter syndrome). I understand you dont want to take their dps over the top... but I shouldnt be looking at Harper and FB and wondering which one is more dps. Or worse, which one is the only choice for dps since one option is too dangerous to actually play.

OS is more or less nice, and the others have some neat looking individual abilities or changes... but this "we are going to reevaluate" type post is good to see. It is definitely needed. I know this was a first draft and look forward to the second. I hope it has some larger changes now that there is a clarified direction to go, and that the changes are more conducive to making each tree stand on its own, with a unique flavor of barbarian in each, and all of them be legitimately viable in todays game. This probably means less "blanket hp/amp" and more "new/tuned abilities, and tree shuffling". I know thats more work, and I hope you find the time, because this class cant be helped by the paladin quick fix of new coat of paint and a few tweaks; which is where it is now. Hopefully helpful, cheers.

[Ovrad]

Nobody is asking for glass cannons, we are asking for barbs to be able to soak up the damage, with PRR/MRR, DR, temp hp, and a high hp pool, while dishing high DPS. Low self healing doesn't mean they are glass cannons.

Basically: slow to kill, slow to heal.

[Scrabbler]

I'll evaluate every enhancement, trying to give one line of critique and then one line of suggestion. Focusing more on the problems.

Cores in general:
Bad that the most specific effects are outweighed by hp + healamp (lacking choice variety).
Bad that the hp + healamp are same for all Barb trees.
Sug- Either move hp + healamp into Barb levels, or remove hp+healamp from some trees (for example, OS could get Dodge, Max Dex, Reflex, and Reflex%Reduce instead, lowering need to be healed)

cores
Furious Rage: Bad that it tends to be either close to 0 or close to max (6), but hardly in between.
Sug- Stack 1 is a bit longer, but each higher stack has less duration.

Pain Touch: Slightly bad when damage works on pain-immune creatures. Might be better to give stronger benefit to non-TWF builds?

Demoralizing Success: Non-scaling non-stat DC is bad.

Subsiding Fury: Very minor benefit, and obsoleted by t5 enhancement.
Sug- Also get +2 Fury cap and duration. When below 50% hp, Fury adds to PRR.

Visage of Terror: Spending Rage on an instant non-boss attack is bad. DC is too low.
Sug- Raise DC to 10+HD/2+Con, 0 Rage cost, 2x cooldown, dual Will+Fort saves. Add Fear+Pain Immunity, +Charisma.

t1
Ritual Scarring: PRR is always good. But it's weak compared to Bard's Rough and Ready.

Hate: On its own, boring nonfun. Aggro meaningless.
Sug- Attach to resource management alongside other Ravager attacks.

Do You Like Pain: Some people don't care about AC debuffs, but with a big penalty and passive proc it has value.

Barb Power Attack: Funny to see the -hit finally gone after all these years, whatever. AC tables are confusing, so fine to cut it out.

Hardy Rage:

t2
Fear Me: Does anyone use Intimidate? It'd be simpler to work off that same DC. Bosses are improperly immune to Shaken debuff.
Sug- Remove Shaken immunity from bosses (unless provided by creature type)

Mutilate: Anything doing stat damage is broken in epic.
Sug- lessen stat regen of epic monsters. Scale Mutilate's stat damage by your level (starting lower, eventually getting higher)

I Like Pain: Proc rate isn't listed in description.

Cruel Cut: Like Mutilate, stat damage is broken in epic.
Sug- fix epic stat dmg, scale Con dmg by level. Maybe less effect from offhand?

Action Boost Melee Power: Awkward name.

t3
Aura of Fear: Bosses improperly immune to the debuff. Debuff is pretty weak at high level.
Sug- Remove boss immunity, raise debuff by 1 per 5 more class levels. Ensure that monsters lower DC when stats go down.

Slaughter: Alright, a bit boring.
Sug- Double cooldown, give +1 range +1 mult, and Hate has a % chance to reset Slaughter cd.

Festering Wound: Damage pretty weak, healing debuff almost never useful.
Sug- Add poison vuln to stacks. You do 1dX poison damage when hitting someone under Festering Wound.

Con/Str: Adding Str is an interesting buff, compared to the other trees. Oh wait, FB gets Str too, nevermind.

t4
Laughter: Aside from meleepower, the +Fury is obsoleted by t5.
Sug- Fury gain also goes to nearby allies.

I Hit Back: Damage from a guard proc is minor at low lev and undetectable later.
Sug- Guard damage scales with your level. On proc, you get +5 damage/doublestrike on next single attack.

Dismember: Not exactly fun to click icon every 30s to keep a buff on, particularly since epic mobs are immune to Cruel Cut damage.
Sug- fix Cruel Cut (and change this damage type to the same used by Vorpal weapons)

Blood Strength: Debatable if Barbs deserve easy healing. Meleepower scaling questionable (offensive boosts become defensive too, Epic chars have much more meleepower- compare to eg Ranger healing)
Sug- Lower the healing below 1d4 if your Barb level is less than 18-20ish.
Sug- Double healing if your hp under 30%, half healing when over 60%. Over 90%, you do no healing and 1d4 Poison dmg to enemy.

Bully: Honestly, the +helpless damage effects are a bit overpowered, especially about tripping.
Sug- Change +helpless damage to rating.

Critical Fury: It makes Fury income trivial; may as well set Fury at 6 permanently.
Sug- You instead gain Fury on attack rolls of 1 or 20, and your Fury is added to critical damage (as well as to damage).

Critical Rage: Description is weird about how much range it actually gives.

[Qhualor]

Great feedback so far. Still dissecting all of it. Some notes:

~ We had a long discussion about whether we wanted to take the barbarian down the path of the "glass cannon" route and decided we didn't want an entire class that had no self sufficiency. We understand that some players expect a high damage glass cannon type design for barbarians but we don't feel that fits well with how DDO is currently played.

~ Of all the abilities in the barbarian trees we expect Blood Strength to take the most tweaking to get right. To players that are concerned it will be overpowered we hear you and will be doing internal playtests with it soon. Lamannia feedback will be particularly telling in this regard.

~ We will be discussing the damage type and the capstone balance.

Sev~

~ Agree, but FB than Ravager should have the highest sustainable DPS of all melee classes. With that plus decent self sufficiency would put them back on the map.

~ I kinda see why Blood Strength would be in Ravager, but it seems more fitting in FB.

~ Figure a barb is probably going to have as many as 9 rages. That's enough to get from shrine to shrine, but if its going to cost me 1 rage to maybe insta kill a mob, I might spend up to 3 rages. It all depends on the quest, how many shrines, the pace of the group, dying a lot, dismissing rages to raise or use clickies, etc. I'm going to use Visage of Terror most likely sparingly.

[dunklezhan]

None of these classes are cut off from activating self healing abilities by a major class feature.

Sev~

OK Ok I get that.

Why not just make all the extra 'survivability' effects only work while raging? The class feature no longer cuts them off completely when it is used. If you can't keep rage going all the time.... better find a shrine, a big stack of pots or make friends with a healer, sharpish. Would that not work?

Also, apologies if this has been directly addressed, I haven't had time to go through all the dev posts yet - I would also suggest as others have that the 'healing' be temp hit points of some kind. If the above suggestion was also used, then I'd go further and say they should last until used or until rage wears off.*

*Mostly I admit, this is because I am amused by the idea of a queue of soon to be very unhealthy-looking barbarians all hanging around the cleric at regular intervals because their temp HP won't carry through...

[Violith]

OK Ok I get that.

Why not just make all the extra 'survivability' effects only work while raging? Baboom, class feature no longer cuts them off completely when it is used. If you can't keep rage going all the time.... better find a shrine, a big stack of pots or make friends with a healer, sharpish.

Also, apologies if this has been directly addressed, I haven't had time to go through all the dev posts yet - I would also suggest as others have that the 'healing' be temp hit points of some kind.

problem with that is temp HP from the same sorce doesnt stack, and if it did, you'd be able to go get a weak weapon and attack a mob to gain thousands of temp HP before a boss, and be virtually indestructable, which while it could eventually wear it away, there could be some cases where your gain of temp hp Could far outclass the bosses total damage for the entire battle. not to mention that wouldnt solve the barbs problem of needing a babysitter. since the temp hp would have to outlast the DPS of the quests mobs to be sufficient for self suvival.

[dunklezhan]

problem with that is temp HP from the same sorce doesnt stack, and if it did, you'd be able to go get a weak weapon and attack a mob to gain thousands of temp HP before a boss, and be virtually indestructable, which while it could eventually wear it away, there could be some cases where your gain of temp hp Could far outclass the bosses total damage for the entire battle. not to mention that wouldnt solve the barbs problem of needing a babysitter. since the temp hp would have to outlast the DPS of the quests mobs to be sufficient for self suvival.

Are you sure they can't be made to stack? I thought it was just a question of putting a reasonable ceiling and proc rate on it. If not, then sure, I can see why that wouldn't work (and nor would my 'only last till rage wears off' thought either).

[Uska]

There is no way you can add enough selfhealing to the Barbarian class to compete with the paladin/bladeforged melee's. On top of that barbarians are looking to be much less dps than paladins.

Fine with me if you go through with this: makes it easier for me to autodecline any and all barbarian that i see, because they will be gimp by default. It'll be reduced to a flavor class.

And doubting you will revisit the barbarians in a major way in a future update after the next, they'll be gimp for a long long while.

Are you kidding barbs are going to be healing better than anyone else.

[Wulverine]

Are you kidding barbs are going to be healing better than anyone else.

With what exactly? CSW pots? Silver Flame pots?

The selfhealing through hitting mobs is part of the Ravager tree. If people go go that route, they'd be extremely hampering their dps.


Biggest issue right now in these trees, is that their dps sucks.

Sure, I'd prefer it if they would drop selfhealing and go more of an increased DR/PRR route.
But that's not happening because this game is a casual game now where every class you can play should have rediculous selfhealing to entertain the casuals playing their eTR cycle.. That's apparantly where the money is, sho i guess we should accept that. :/

[Qhualor]

Are you kidding barbs are going to be healing better than anyone else.

What Wulverine said plus a FB will still be chain chugging pots inflicting constant pain on himself.

[Uska]

With what exactly? CSW pots? Silver Flame pots?

The selfhealing through hitting mobs is part of the Ravager tree. If people go go that route, they'd be extremely hampering their dps.


Biggest issue right now in these trees, is that their dps sucks.

Sure, I'd prefer it if they would drop selfhealing and go more of an increased DR/PRR route.
But that's not happening because this game is a casual game now where every class you can play should have rediculous selfhealing to entertain the casuals playing their eTR cycle..

Heal per hit heal per kill baloney healing amp I am auto declining barbs starting now out of protest the entire idea needs scraping and starting over

[Uska]

What Wulverine said plus a FB will still be chain chugging pots inflicting constant pain on himself.

The trees are baloney and nothing to do with the origins of barbs. For me barbs no longer exist!

[Wulverine]

The trees are baloney and nothing to do with the origins of barbs. For me barbs no longer exist!

I agree with you Uska.

But reading what the Devs are posting, there's no chance to change their minds.

[CaptainSpacePony]

I was kinda afraid someone would look at it that way...

If the problem is that Cocoon is blocked by Rage, the easy solution is to edit Cocoon's description to say it can be used during Rage. (Do the same to Primal Scream while you're at it)

If the problem is that UMD scrolls are blocked by Rage, then stop and consider if UMD scrolls is really what you'd recommend for Fighters and Rangers to heal themselves.

I LOVE the idea that someone overwhelmed with a consuming rage that makes them most unreasoning. I mean how mad would you have to be to get +14STR? That is 7 sevent times as strong! You go from bench pressing 100Kg to 700Kg! That kind of adrenaline surge doesn't beget many activated abilities (and why barbs used to not even be able to drink potions).

I do recognize this is a HUGE liability, and the only toon I currently play with any barb lvls never rages.

I want to see more PRR and other forms of damage mitigation. I'm much less interested in self heals.

[Wulverine]

The way things are going now, all the classes and most popular builds will have avg dps, with avg selfhealing. No more roles, just every man for himself, grinding xp. There'll be less and less actual diversity between the classes, just in flavor.

That's where the last bit of money is. Apparantly.

[Uska]

I agree with you Uska.

But reading what the Devs are posting, there's no chance to change their minds.

If we scream loud enough and don't allow barbs in our groups maybe they will change them to something that makes sense both play and flavor wise.

[Monkey-Boy]

On top of that barbarians are looking to be much less dps than paladins.

That's the biggest issue. I've seen the numbers crunched on the guild forum and barbs are looking like a big bucket of weaksauce.

Less DPS than paladins is just plain dumb.

[PermaBanned]

~ We had a long discussion about whether we wanted to take the barbarian down the path of the "glass cannon" route and decided we didn't want an entire class that had no self sufficiency. We understand that some players expect a high damage glass cannon type design for barbarians but we don't feel that fits well with how DDO is currently played.

"Glass cannon?" That term should not at all be descriptive of Barbarians. Barb self sufficiency should be achieved more through "less need for healing" than "turning cure pots into heal pots" via Hamp. They should kill things through raw DPS before things can kill them, and they should be able to take a pounding like nobody else - because they're that dang tough, not because potions are more effective for them than anyone else.

Barbarians need a "Rocky Balboa" enhancement: the more you hit them, the more & harder they'll hit you. Ferocity & mitigation is the direction Barbs need to go in.

[Tilomere]

~ We had a long discussion about whether we wanted to take the barbarian down the path of the "glass cannon" route and decided we didn't want an entire class that had no self sufficiency. We understand that some players expect a high damage glass cannon type design for barbarians but we don't feel that fits well with how DDO is currently played.


Sev~

And you are right. If you make barbs "glass cannon" the player base will suddenly find existing ways of healing and keeping a barb alive acceptable, and you will only create the highest dps self-healing-tanky-dps in the game. I've played through a half dozen raged heroic and epic lives, and dps was never an issue. Mob fort and staying alive were.