Shattered Kingdoms

Fanboy.

And my "point" is that they are less eq dependant than the mercenary, via their skillset, with the bonuses that they get.

I tested out the MP penalty with jennbo's dwarf barb, it's negligible at best. And I'm not sure how they take more damage from melee than a mercenary would.

And didn't Dulrik fix rescue while berserked to no longer take a penalty?

They'll take more damage than a merc on account of less parrying and lower accuracy on their weapon. I'm also not too convinced that berserk doesn't lower your AC or dodge chance on some level.

I wasn't aware of anything regarding Dulrik altering how rescue worked while berserk.

Might be less EQ dependent at a very low end of preparedness but seems about the same to me dependence-wise at the mid to high end, and there are plenty of "safe" specs with lots of available weapons for someone who is relatively newer and might not always have the perpetually hoarded diamond epees.

Put another way, a newbie barb does of course benefits from being able to pick up any diamond weapon he sees and contribute to a group fighting supernatural hides. However, an experienced player doesn't benefit from the fact that a barb can get fury bonuses with a spiked staff and toughness bonuses over his leather armor.

Overall, at the highest level of preparation, I think mercs are better from a pure, in-combat, power standpoint, mostly for reasons Edoras already went over. When I had to choose recently I chose to play a barb mainly for RP and because being semi-afk without worrying about backstab is just that good. I think they're pretty damn close in general and that's why I think if this should only be considered for a flavor "option" rather than strictly removing heavy armor from the class.

And so as not to take sides... I haven't really in all my time experienced a noticable difference between a good barb and a good merc. You are undeniably right with respect to game mechanics but a good, prepared player will do just great in the pve or pvp arena with either class. Even if we disagree as to which class is theoretically better, can we agree that we are talking about a percent or two and not something that's a huge deal?

That's kind of my point. They're pretty close, -but- merc does have the upper hand when you get down to it, hence why just up and removing heavy armor from barbs just because "their other skills are good lol" is pretty stupid. It would only shift the balance even more towards mercs.

As another side note: The general rule of thumb used to be more along the lines of merc > barb > swash > merc, but now with massive weaponry, swashies don't stand a chance.

For the record, is everyone aware that massive weapons were tweaked again less than a month ago?

Ok I agree with this.

And yes Dulrik, thus my question on the other thread as to whether anyone has really tried it out. I still stand by my suspicion that swashies could use a passive increase to dodge vs massive weapons, just to make them more awesome in general. Since your tweak, all I have heard of is an elf running around murdering unprepared guys with a massive weapon, but that doesn't prove much.

Well, I'm more thinking that if I were a barb, I would be much more likely to use a claymore against a swashie as opposed to say, claws, so I wouldn't have any more advantage over a swashie than a claymore specced merc in that case.

Not really a cry for balance, especially since I haven't tested them out, but unless claws are better than massive weapons when fighting against swashies, there's no way that I'd ever use them as a barbarian anymore since that was the only case they were useful anyway.

Claws should be equipped in the weapon slot, not the hand slot.

This is a no duh situation. Merc always beats barbarian. But I rolled a testbarb to see the skillset, and I'd be completely satisfied with my barbarian even if he wore light armor. There's also no real drop in ability if a mercenary were placed in the light armor category either, which one should do if they want to spec in a one-hander, and a reach weapon so that they can abuse bows for ranged combat. Both classes would be fine. But the argument of why mercenaries are better than barbarians doesn't come down to the type of armor they wear, it comes down to the skillset, and a few other things like frenzy.

Barbarians do have a ranged option in sling. Sure it has less range than bows/crossbows, but a barbarian can still sit in the 3rd rank and drop 5 ranged attacks a round on some unsuspecting spellcaster.

For me, it's not that the mercenary is better than the barbarian. Both classes are really spoiled, and I hardly see the issue of changing armor type down 1 notch as hurting the class at all.

The easiest change to bring mercenaries in line with barbarians is just to make frenzy cast self-only, but so far Dulrik hasn't been too keen on that idea. There was, of course, a time when mercenaries had the berserk skill too.