Shattered Kingdoms

I have a suggestion regarding the barbarian class. This suggestion is not based on gameplay or balancing concerns, so it is not a high priority. I am curious if people agree with me on the issue, though.

My problem is that barbarians, as I have conceptualized them, do not ride around in the shining plate mail of knights. Conan the barbarian isn't covered head-to-toe in steel armor. "Barbarians" from history were not heavily armored, either. In SK, the toughness skill means that a lightly-armored barbarian is much stronger than a lightly-armored merc, but it is still suicide to run around in anything less than a full kit of adamantite/diamond armor. This is inconsistent with how I picture barbarians.

My suggestion is to make barbarians a light-armor class. Give them a strong penalty for wearing heavy armor. You can leave their toughness ability just as it is or give it a slight buff. Also give them an enhanced dodge ability to compensate for their lack of heavy armor. The enhanced dodge ability would have to be considerable.

Obviously not a big deal, but I think this would be cool.

I always thought the same thing.

Dropping them to light armor would not be a wimp.

Surprised to hear anyone say that. How would it not objectively be a wimp?

How is mithril any less protective than adamantite? I'm pretty sure the only time I would have to worry about extra damage is when someone is trying to sodomize my light armor character with a sai.

I guess with the limits of mithril armor versus heavy armors it could be a wimp as they'd have to fight the current light armor classes for armor, that's the only way I could see it though, but then there is always skins.

Even if they were dropped down to clothing, barbarian would still be a fantastic class.

EDIT: I also object to the original poster's assertion that barbarians are heavily muscled men and women that thrive on combat and wear nothing but leather bikinis/loincloths. All barbarians are non-Greeks. This means that they do not partake in anal sex, and feasting on tzatzaki, which in the Greek world is craziness.

Ardith, you're an idiot.

I agree with the idea conceptually, although I am not sure if the game can support another mithril wearing class.

Um, it has lower AC and doesn't have the heavy armor bonus . . . I guess I'll ignore the rest of your post.


The way I was picturing this was that the toughness skill would be given a bit of a boost, so barbarians wouldn't feel the need to wear mithril, though maybe wearing mithril with lots of MP would be what the most l33t barbs did. As it is, toughness > mithril, but mithril + 2mp > toughness.

I was hoping this suggestion would end up making barbarians -less- eq dependent, and if it instead had the opposite effect, I'm not sure I would get behind it.

The heavy armor bonus is over rated. Yes, mithril has lower protection than adamantite, but it's only 1 point. Having played a swashbuckler, a rather successful one at that years ago, mithril is just fine as armor.

Just so everyone knows, this is an idea I stole from Blaupunk and presented to Baldric as my own. He then stole it and presented it as his own, copyright infringing sopa violating motherlover.

That does not mean however, that it's not an absolutely amazing idea, and should be implemented asap.

As it is right now, there are (I think, but I might have left some classes out when I thought this through) 5 heavy armor wearing classes: priests, paladins, hellions, mercs and barbs. And there are 4 light armor wearing classes: rogue, bard, scout and priest (again, I might have forgotten some). I can't see why it would break the EQ balance by making it 5 light armor classes and 4 heavy. And this would add some wonderful flavour to the whole merc/barb power-play, giving both classes more niche and flavor.

:edit: [REDACTED], I forgot swashie and shaman. Disregard the last part of the argument I suppose - or take it as an argument for the opposite or whatever. I'll leave it so everyone can laugh at my retardation.

My goal was to actually have this implemented. If I said "some pothead from Denmark came up with this idea," I'm not sure how much success I would have had. If the idea comes from the greatly respected Baldric, on the other hand . . .