U24 - Ravager Update

[KookieKobold]

Post your feedback about the changes to the Ravager tree here!

[poltt48]

I actually do more damage spending all points in this tree then do on frenzied tree witch just stupid. Also why is everything con based? There is no choice for str or con anymore and all tacticals based on con. Makes half orc the worst barbs in game since they all str based. There only 1 ability in all 3 trees that gives you str now.

[mezzorco]

Also why is everything con based? Makes half orc the worst barbs in game since they all str based.

Half orcs will still have better average damage output thanks to more strength and damage focused enhancements, while dwarves/warforgeds will have an advantage on those abilities.

Going all STR for active abilities too will kill dwarven and warforged barbarians, in my opinion.

[maddong]

I think you have made Blood Strength pretty worthless with a 10% proc chance. Before it would at least top you off if you weren't at deaths door. Now it is super unreliable.

I am ok with Blood Strength doing less healing per hit than Occult Slayer gets since Ravager is more offensive.

How about every hit gives 2 base healing before healing amp/melee power but the proc chance is 4 * barbarian level.

So a 5 barbarian splash only gets a 20% proc chance but a 20 barbarian gets 80% of the healing that occult slayer gets.

I think that would be a lot more useful than the randomness that you are proposing.

But maybe I am underestimating the healing you get from every kill?

[Failedlegend]

Blood strength is cool but having it be "When you kill an enemy" instead of "When an enemy dies within 30ft" or something similar is going to cause ALOT of issues...nothing should ever rely on a specific characters getting "The last hit"

[Steelstar]

I think you have made Blood Strength pretty worthless with a 10% proc chance. Before it would at least top you off if you weren't at deaths door. Now it is super unreliable.

I am ok with Blood Strength doing less healing per hit than Occult Slayer gets since Ravager is more offensive.

How about every hit gives 2 base healing before healing amp/melee power but the proc chance is 4 * barbarian level.

So a 5 barbarian splash only gets a 20% proc chance but a 20 barbarian gets 80% of the healing that occult slayer gets.

I think that would be a lot more useful than the randomness that you are proposing.

But maybe I am underestimating the healing you get from every kill?

Interesting. Is your take on the reliability based on theory or trying it out on Lamannia?

One test we did internally involved a moderately-geared first-life 20Brb/8Epic running Epic Hard eNecro quests with no other forms of healing besides Blood Strength; she never went below 90% health. Different players' playstyles may give varying mileage, though, so I'd be interested to see what people think after giving it a test drive (especially on pure Barbs).

[btolson]

Interesting. Is your take on the reliability based on theory or trying it out on Lamannia?

One test we did internally involved a moderately-geared first-life 20Brb/8Epic running Epic Hard eNecro quests with no other forms of healing besides Blood Strength; she never went below 90% health. Different players' playstyles may give varying mileage, though, so I'd be interested to see what people think after giving it a test drive (especially on pure Barbs).

Solo EH is not a great benchmark. I haven't been able to test because Lam has been busted all weekend long, but I think I can offer a sound comparison.

Consider a comparison of a pure U24 barb against a U23 monk hamp build:
--Average Healing per Hit is the same
--The monk has more attacks per minute
--The U23 monk should have more healing amp if built correctly, due to multiplicative nature of U23 hamp

The overall result is that the U23 monk will have seriously more healing per minute, and yet, current U23 monks are not especially self-reliant in EE the way many other builds are. It is likewise guaranteed that U24 barbs are going to be even less self-reliant in EE.

I don't know how self-reliant you want barbs to be in EE, just thought I'd offer the comparison.



Additionally, I think it will be necessary to throw THF a bone for this ability, so that TWF does not become the only way to build a ravager (other features like pain touch already favor TWF as well). Perhaps check for the THF combat style feats, and give +10% healing for each (so, +30% healing if you have GTHF, +40% for PTHF).



Lastly, I'm not convinced that Blood Strength needs to scale linearly with barb level anymore. Initially everyone saw a great risk in 5-barb splash and I did too, but initially, it was going to offer 100% chance of 1d4 healing, scaled with MP, which was easily going to mean 10 healing per hit just from cores and destiny (and more like 30 with moderate building for it). Now that the MP multiplier is gone and the base healing has been cut by 60% such that it is evenly matched with a vampiric weapon which anyone can easily craft, I don't see as much risk anymore considering this is a t5 ability which will lock you out of t5's in any other tree; 0.25 base healing per hit is really punitive for a t5, even if the character is only a 5-level splash.

At a minimum, I think you can lessen the penalty to simply cut healing in half if the character's number of Barbarian levels is less than half its total class levels. Keeping proc and heal the same, then at cap this would mean a 10% chance to heal the character for 10 points if it has at least 10 barbarian levels. If it has between 5-9 barb levels at cap, then this would become 10% to heal for 5 points.

Divorcing the healing from barb level would also give you a lot of latitude/granularity to play with the healing per hit, because you can manipulate the proc and value to whatever you want, and then cut it in half if the character is less than half-barb. You can set the base rate to e.g., 50% for 1d4 healing (1.25 avg), 25% for 1d8 (1.125 avg), 30% for 1d6 (1.05 avg), etc; you can hit pretty much any average decimal healing per hit that you want, and you can do it with a proc rate that doesn't starve THF with the rng (THF doesn't like 10%, although TWF doesn't really have a problem there).

[Scrabbler]

Consider a comparison of a pure U24 barb against a U23 monk hamp build:
--Average Healing per Hit is the same
--The monk has more attacks per minute

How can the Monk get the same healing per hit, or hits per minute?

When the Monk runs up to 7 monsters and Cleaves them, how many of those count for healing? How many hits does the Monk get when spamming Supreme Cleave?

[Scrabbler]

One test we did internally involved a moderately-geared first-life 20Brb/8Epic

I haven't been able to test yet because the Lam build is badly incomplete, but one suspicion I have about 20Brb/8Epic characters is that they have too much healing because Meleepower adds to the healing. They get a lot of passive Meleepower from being epic, and then probably a ton of active Meleepower from LD (or FOTW too?).

My prediction is that Meleepower should not scale healing for that reason; other characters with healing sources from heroic enhancements don't get it boosted that much by becoming epic. They get a moderate continued increase to spellpower, and sometimes caster level, but spellpower and caster level had already been smoothly increasing throughout heroic. Unlike spellpower and level, Meleepower grows super-rapidly in epic progression.

[btolson]

As of Friday afternoon when I tested it briefly on dojo kobolds before the server crapped up, Blood Strength was a 10% chance to heal for half barb level (i.e., 10 at cap), for an average of 1 base healing per hit.

It also seemed that MP scaling had been removed, although thinking back I didn't test that very thoroughly to be fully certain (test toon was freshly rolled and only L20, so only MP I had was from FB cores). If it hasn't been removed yet, it really needs to be. Healing amp multiplication is exactly what this update was aiming to remove, and yet at the same time they (planned to?) introduce a new one for this ability via MP, which was going to create much too great a disparity between low hamp X low MP builds vs high hamp X high MP builds to ever balance it properly. Besides, it already scales with BAB, haste, and doublestrike, at least.

[maddong]

Interesting. Is your take on the reliability based on theory or trying it out on Lamannia?

One test we did internally involved a moderately-geared first-life 20Brb/8Epic running Epic Hard eNecro quests with no other forms of healing besides Blood Strength; she never went below 90% health. Different players' playstyles may give varying mileage, though, so I'd be interested to see what people think after giving it a test drive (especially on pure Barbs).

I was thinking if you are running a quest where the monsters are taking out large chunks of your health when they hit you (EE).... If you are relying on the random number generator to go off a lot of the timings of the healing will be off and your healer will be forced to intervene and potentially some of the healing will go to waste (did you get lucky with your 10% chance right when you needed it or after the heal came when you were close to full and you over healed). If you are getting constant healing then it will possibly directly add time to next heal if your amp and melee power are high enough.

Eh is the new en after the melee pass, right? So a lot of things will appear more useful on the easy difficulties (ec, en, eh).

[Failedlegend]

Interesting. Is your take on the reliability based on theory or trying it out on Lamannia?

One test we did internally involved a moderately-geared first-life 20Brb/8Epic running Epic Hard eNecro quests with no other forms of healing besides Blood Strength; she never went below 90% health. Different players' playstyles may give varying mileage, though, so I'd be interested to see what people think after giving it a test drive (especially on pure Barbs).

I think trying it in a group is key since a fair amount of the healing involves getting "the last hit" and you guys know how well thsat worked with the lat ability you put that requirement on, a simple change to "within x ft" instead of "when you kill" would make all the difference.

[phyrephoenix]

I TR'd my fighter to a human barb and at level 22 am getting 60 points of pos heal per tick of blood strength, which seems decent. However, it is not working on kills, only on the ~20% of attacks tick.

[Qhualor]

tested my TWF dwarf Ravager tonight. healing for 39 hp from Blood Strength and not getting the heals for killing enemies. if I was, I couldn't notice any difference. I think heals from CSW pots with full cores was topping out at 58ish hp. this is with Iron Mitts and Paladin past life x3. I need to get my SF favor for SF pots maybe this weekend when I have more time to invest to see how that goes with heals.

other than that, couldn't really take the time to do a more thorough testing with enhancements and dps after spending a lot of time TRing and not having a TR cache with gear that I have on Live. had several gear slots empty, but still did something easy in EE LOD. seems to be decent damage better than on Live, but kinda rough just using CSW pots. with almost 1900 hp, that's a lot of pots lol.

Demoralizing Success seemed to be proccing decently. I don't know, I feel like it should be proccing more but again I only ran LOD for now. some mobs just kept making saves.

Visage of Terror did not kill any enemies when I used it and my character is con based that has 54 unraged/64 raged.

again, don't have some of my gear from Live, but I spent a feat on Heavy Armor Proficiency. using fully upgraded black dragonscale armor, sitting at 80 PRR and 50 MRR. physical defense seems to be pretty good, in EE LOD anyways, but with 39 hp gained back per getting hit and 58 hp from CSW pots, you need reliable healing still. this means a Ravager with no caster blue bar has to rely on penalty SF pots. a better built Ravager than mine would be able to shrug off damage a little better, but either their dps needs to be moar or Blood Strength needs to heal for double. didn't see any crits go higher than 5200, but saw a lot of crits around 3k. I admit im out of practice as its been a long time since I have played this character.

[BigErkyKid]

Interesting. Is your take on the reliability based on theory or trying it out on Lamannia?

One test we did internally involved a moderately-geared first-life 20Brb/8Epic running Epic Hard eNecro quests with no other forms of healing besides Blood Strength; she never went below 90% health. Different players' playstyles may give varying mileage, though, so I'd be interested to see what people think after giving it a test drive (especially on pure Barbs).

Please teach me Kensei!

I always try out new builds in tharask arena EE. Healing strictly with blood strength I died before making it to the tough part of the quest.

Every proc gave me around 30 something HPs back, but it wasn't that frequent altogether. Mobs hit you every hit they land for 50-60 in that EE with over 100PRR. I used a lama geared barbarian lvl28.

So either I am very bad at it or you are setting a bad benchmark with eH necro.

All in all, the DPS is not incredibly better than that of a paladin and I find the healing extremely unreliable and insufficient for EEs.

I am very much against power creep, but given what you did to paladins and bards this barbarian pass seems very weak.

[Tilomere]

HP and HAMP changes are good and more thematic than giving barbs divine grace and plate PRR/MRR.

Visage of Terror DC is too low. At 80 con it will 55 on a pure barb.

Barb PA changes are good, at 2 cost it was too weak relative to other 1 damage/1 hit abilities.

Fear Me! looks usable.

Cruel Cut/Festering Wound/dismember seems too weak as heroic mobs die too fast, and EE mobs are immune to stat damage, and 3 tiers of abilities for 5% melee power is far weaker than any simple action boost.

Con/Strength change is great.

Blood Strength changes to remove multi-classing for newer players is ... sorta ew, but doesn't affect characters who can twist consecrate-sacred ground into any ED and make any character self healing.

Bully cost is better at 1, I normally didn't get it before at 2.

Overall ravagers will be stronger. As noted, strong enough for a pure barb to solo EH, which means enough to contribute in an EE group.

[Seikojin]

Before this devolves, I am bringing some focus to this.
https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...avager-Changes

Greetings,

Here are the proposed changes for the Barbarian's Ravager tree. The Ravager has been updated to focus on blood rage, and as such the tree gives blood related abilities including the top ability to heal as the Ravager attacks foes. We've also moved some of the bonus damage to be bane since there was no clear explanation or understanding of what creatures were affected by alignment based damage.


(If you see "---" that means text was removed; likely a penalty or condition.)


Core abilities

Furious Rage: (1 AP, Level 1) When you are raging and miss your attack by rolling 1, you gain Fury for 6 seconds. Fury: +1 Rage bonus to attack and damage. This effect stacks up to 6 times and one stack fades every 6 seconds.

Pain Touch: (1 AP, Level 3) Your melee attacks deal 1d6 extra damage. --- This damage scales with 100% Melee Power. Passive: You gain +10 healing amplification.

Demoralizing Success: (1 AP, Level 6) When you score a vorpal hit in melee, you inflict Crushing Despair on nearby enemies for 30 seconds on a failed DC 20 Will saving throw. You then inflict Vulnerable Will for 15 seconds, regardless of the Crushing Despair saving throw. Passive: You gain +30 hit points and +10 healing amplification.

Pain Touch: (1 AP, Level 12) Upgrades Pain Touch so your melee attacks deal 2d6 extra damage. This damage scales with 100% Melee Power. Passive: You gain +60 hit points and +20 healing amplification.

Subsiding Fury: (1 AP, Level 18) When you use Barbarian Rage, you gain 3 stacks of Fury. Passive: You gain +100 hit points and +20 healing amplification.

Visage of Terror: (1 AP, Level 20) Terrorize all enemies around you, killing them with fear if they fail a Will save vs 10 + Constitution modifier + half barbarian level. Enemies who make their saving throw are briefly paralyzed with fear instead. (Cost 1 Rage. Cooldown: 30 seconds. Passive: You gain +4 Constitution, +150 hit points and +40 healing amplification.


Tier One

Ritual Scarring: (1/1/1 AP) +[1/2/3] Intimidate, Haggle and Physical Resistance.

Hate: (1/1/1 AP) Melee Attack: Deals +(1/2/3)[W] damage and generate extra threat. (Cooldown: 15 seconds)

Do You Like Pain?: (1/1/1 AP) When you are hit: [20/40/60]% chance attacker loses 10 AC.

Barbarian Power Attack: (1/1/1 AP, Requires Power Attack) Your Power Attack feat does 1/2/3 additional point of bonus damage ---.

Hardy Rage: (1/1/1 AP) +[1/2/3] Constitution when raging.


Tier Two (Requires Barbarian Level 2, 5 APs spent in tree)

Fear me!: (2 AP, Requires: Ritual Scarring) When you intimidate, affected enemies are Shaken for 6 seconds. DC 10 + Strength Modifier + Barbarian Level (Note that the DC is currently 13)

Mutilate: (1/1/1 AP, Requires Hate) Hate additionally deals 1d4/1d6/1d8 Charisma damage and 1d4/1d6/1d8 bane damage. The bane damage scales with 200% Melee Power.

I Like Pain: (1/1/1 AP, Requires: Do You Like Pain?) When you are hit: Small chance to gain 50/100/150 Temporary HP. The gain scales with 100% melee power.

Cruel Cut: (1/1/1 AP) Melee Attack: Deals 1d6/2d6/3d6 extra constitution damage as long as you damage your target. (Cooldown: 30 seconds)

Action Boost: Melee Power: (1/1/1 AP) Activate this ability to receive a +[10/20/30] Action Boost bonus to Melee Power for 20 seconds. (Cooldown: 30 seconds)


Tier Three (Requires Barbarian Level 3, 10 APs spent in tree)

Aura of Fear: (1/1/1 AP, Requires: Fear Me!) Nearby enemies receive a -2 penalty to Strength and Charisma.
~ Rank 2: Nearby enemies receive a -2 penalty to Strength, Charisma, Dexterity and Wisdom.
~ Rank 3: Nearby enemies receive a -2 penalty to all ability scores.

Slaughter: (1/1/1 AP) Melee Attack: Deals +(5/7.5/10)[W] damage. (Cooldown: 30 seconds)

Festering Wound: (1/1/1 AP Requires: Cruel Cut) Cruel Cut additionally inflicts 1/2/3 5-seconds stacks of 1d6 Poison damage every 2 seconds and the target loses -50% healing amplification for 5/10/15 seconds. This poison damage scales with 200% Melee Power. Damage stacks fade one at a time.

Constitution/Strength: (2 AP) +1 Constitution or Strength


Tier Four (Requires Barbarian Level 4, 20 APs spent in tree)

Laughter: (2 AP, Requires: Slaughter) For many Ravagers, there's no Laughter without Slaughter.
When Slaughter damages an enemy, you gain 3 Fury. When Slaughter scores a critical hit on an enemy, you gain an additional 3 Fury and 10 Melee Power for 15 seconds.

I Hit Back!: (1/1/1 AP, Requires: I Like Pain) When you are hit: 20% chance to deal 2d8/4d8/6d8 bane damage to attacker. This damage scales with 100% Melee Power.

Dismember: (1/1/1 AP, Requires: Festering Wound) Cruel Cut increases Melee Power by 5 for 10 seconds. Cruel Cut additionalyl slows enemy movement speed, or slows attack speed, or deals 2d4/2d6/2d8 bane damage, or deals 6d4/6d6/6d8 bane damage. This bane damage scales with 200% Melee Power.

Constitution/Strength: (2 AP) +1 Constitution or Strength


Tier Five (Requires Barbarian Level 5, Character Level 12, 30 APs spent in tree)

Blood Strength: (2 AP) Each time you land a hit you are healed for 1d4 hit points. Each time you kill an opponent you are healed for 1d20 hit points. This healing scales with 100% Melee Power.

Bully: (1/1/1 AP, Requires: I Hit back!) You deal +[5/10/15]% damage to helpless enemies.
Requires: I Hit back!

Critical Fury: (2 AP) While raging, each hit also grants 1 stack of Fury.

Critical Rage: (2/2 AP) Increases your critical threat range by 1/2 when raging.


(Note that Critical Rage no longer requires the Cruel Cut line.)


~Sev

I think furious rage should not have a cutoff time limit. Make it build up stacks the same, but stays there until the rage dissipates or is dismissed.

Cruel cut should be a cleave and do +1/2/3{w}.

I hit backs chance should be 20/40/60%.

The capstone should also have a passive +1 crit multiplier while raging. Or make it tier 3 for Critical rage (since you can have the points).

The healing amp in this tree is fine.

[Scrabbler]

Post your feedback about the changes to the Ravager tree here!

These are brief, but I could elaborate. More-important stuff first:

• Furious Rage's buff description says the duration is 12, but it's really 6. (6 is more than enough)
• We already talked about the design problems with Furious Rage duration... still there.
  
  
• Barbarian Power Attack incorrectly has an active icon. Now that there's no penalty, it should be passive. (The active icon never worked right anyhow)
  
  
• Critical Rage is powerful enough, I guess. But the description is wrong... or rather, every other enhancement that boosts crit range has an incorrect description, because they benefit from Imp Crit without saying so. This one doesn't use Imp Crit, so it needs to say so. (Unlike some earlier versions, Critical Rage isn't now giving 1+2 = 3 crit range)
  
  
• Critical Fury is a waste of AP. Your Fury will be 4-6 most of the time anyway, and getting Critical Fury essentially pegs it at 6 permanently. That's equivalent to an intermittent 0-2 attack/damage bonus, which is weak for tier5. A passive +6 damage would be mediocre for a tier5 enhancement, and Critical Fury is much weaker than that. Within tier5 you don't have much room to waste points anymore...
  
  
• Contrary to the description, Blood Strength gives only 10 healing at Barb18 (should be 18). The heal amp from cores raises that to 17. The healing doesn't trigger upon killing things.
  
  
• Despite being weaker than the description, Blood Strength is strong enough. At some level ranges it is overpowered (although that's from the viewpoint that Swashbuckler is overpowered too). For example, compare a level 15 Fighter vs Barbarian... really unfair. It's funny, but in some dungeon layouts monsters are less dangerous when they have more hitpoints: that's because the healing they provide scales linearly with their hp, but the damage they do is also restricted by cooldown and animation speed.
  
  
• Some people call Blood Strength unreliable... that's not really true. Maybe it seems that way because their expectations are very high. For a class that never had self-healing before, and which was made to intentionally prevent several sources of healing, it doesn't need to be perfectly reliable. The chance of honestly running into a streak of non-healing hits is low, but very memorable when it happens.
• It's a little surprising Blood Strength works outside of Rage.
  
  
• The passive parts of Visage of Terror are strong, but boring, while the active part is weak (even if it worked like it says, spending 1 Rage to kill 1 monster is rarely smart)
  
  
• The healing amp and hitpoints in the cores are decently powerful, although non-fun. The important parts of a tree's core enhancements shouldn't be identical between different trees in the same class. That's why they're different trees.
  
  
• A static DC 20 on Demoralizing Success is bad; may as well make it a flat 5% chance.
• The non-repetitive part of Subsiding Fury is very weak.
  
  
• Ritual Scarring looks weak compared to Warchanter tier1, which has twice the PRR (and infinitely more AC) for the same AP.
  
  
• Hate is worthless aside from using the Mutilate charisma damage to maybe cause some kinds of monsters to go incap. But even a CR 11 Duergar has more than 12 Charisma, and Animals have incorrect immunity... so it's completely worthless. (+1 passive damage would be a better use of 6 AP). It might be a little better if monsters correctly lowered their save DCs according to Charisma. The 15 sec cooldown is questionable, especially alongside Cruel Cut and Slaughter.
  
  
• Mutilate and Cruel Cut are broken in epic, obviously.
• Animals are immune to Mutilate charisma damage. That is a bug; Animals are not mindless in any sense, and have no less Wisdom and Charisma than any other creature. Vermin are also incorrectly immune, although for them you could at least make a case.
  
  
• It's bad having a 30 second cooldown for Cruel Cut and Slaughter. I don't have to explain why, right? "Resource Management".
• Here's an easy suggestion to give Ravager some RM. Change Slaughter's cooldown to 150, and it resets the Cruel Cut cooldown. Hate has a 50% chance to reset Slaughter's cooldown.
• Pushing a button every 30 sec to get 10 sec of a moderate bonus (with no situationality value) isn't usually fun.
  
  
• There's almost no incentive to put more than 1 AP into Dismember (which in turn means only 1 in Festering Wound). Since clicks 2 and 3 don't improve the Meleepower buff, they should raise the damage by much more than linearly.
  
  
• Slaughter's damage isn't negligible, but the main reason to use it is for FOTW or trying for Laughter's Meleepower. The Fury income is barely relevant.
  
  
• The poison damage from Festering Wound is almost undetectable, even at 6 stacks. It'd be nicer if it at least gave poison vulnerability (like Ninja poison does). The anti-healing effect is theoretically useful, but almost no monsters have meaningful healing. I tried fighting Taeron Rimond (who casts Heal), and although I knew technically it helped, the benefit wasn't noticeable.
  
  
• Fear Me and Aura of Fear should work on (living, thinking) bosses. Fear Me should probably have no save (as long as the Intim worked).
  
  
• Action Boost Damage is missing the yellow plus graphic over your head.
• Action Boost Damage shows the wrong name. In the window it says "Action Boost Melee Power", while as a buff it says "Action Boost Ranged / Melee Power". It should say "Action Boost Damage" in all cases.

Alright, here's a summary of the Strong, Weak, and Medium enhancements in Ravager. I'm ignoring the heal amp and hitpoints in cores.

• Strong: Action Boost Damage, Blood Strength, Bully, Critical Rage.
• Medium: Furious Rage, You Like Pain, Hardy Rage, You Like Pain, I Like Pain, Slaughter, Laughter, Dismember.
• Weak: Demoralizing Success, Subsiding Fury, Visage of Fear, Hate, Fear Me, Mutilate, Cruel Cut, Aura of Fear, Festering Wound, Hit Back, Critical Fury.

[Leclaire1]

Please teach me Kensei!

I always try out new builds in tharask arena EE. Healing strictly with blood strength I died before making it to the tough part of the quest.

Every proc gave me around 30 something HPs back, but it wasn't that frequent altogether. Mobs hit you every hit they land for 50-60 in that EE with over 100PRR. I used a lama geared barbarian lvl28.

So either I am very bad at it or you are setting a bad benchmark with eH necro.

All in all, the DPS is not incredibly better than that of a paladin and I find the healing extremely unreliable and insufficient for EEs.

I am very much against power creep, but given what you did to paladins and bards this barbarian pass seems very weak.

I think this only confirms Steel's point. While there certainly are players and builds capable of soloing EE, this is not because the devs design builds with this in mind. EE was originally inspired by the old epics where the vast majority of players needed a group and solid team work to get through. The fact that some builds can solo EE if played properly is a result of the power creep you are against, and if a single barb ability was enough to solo heal a barb through a solo EE quest, then said ability would be far more than simple power creep. Abilities like this one give barbs significant mitigation for their squishiness, allowing for their significance DPS to make up the difference on EH content. It is reasonableness itself that in an EE mobfest they would be expected to be in a group with a healer, or to be in a competent group and also have other means of healing, such as sf pots and possibly a hireling at their disposal.

[BigErkyKid]

I think this only confirms Steel's point. While there certainly are players and builds capable of soloing EE, this is not because the devs design builds with this in mind. EE was originally inspired by the old epics where the vast majority of players needed a group and solid team work to get through. The fact that some builds can solo EE if played properly is a result of the power creep you are against, and if a single barb ability was enough to solo heal a barb through a solo EE quest, then said ability would be far more than simple power creep. Abilities like this one give barbs significant mitigation for their squishiness, allowing for their significance DPS to make up the difference on EH content. It is reasonableness itself that in an EE mobfest they would be expected to be in a group with a healer, or to be in a competent group and also have other means of healing, such as sf pots and possibly a hireling at their disposal.

My answer is strictly to his point that he could solo eH necro only with blood strength. I guess that he implied that it is good enough. But given that mobs die really fast in EH (which by most standards its the new EN) I am not sure this means much.

As long as other classes have so much more self healing and comparable DPS I really don't see how the barbarians are going to stand a chance. As far as I know, this pass was meant to balance the class wrt to what has been going on recently. In that sense, it is clearly insufficient.

As for this limitations being WAI, if they were why on earth are both paladins and bards superior in almost every aspect to barbarians and capable of soloing those EEs?

I am aware that any barbarian will be using SF pots, but they don't come for free and they are certainly the result of quite some grind...

Anyway, blood strength was not so powerful for me.