Shattered Kingdoms

Have you tested this hypothesis? I understand that you have thousands of hours of gameplay and have developed your intuition about the game based on that, but have you confirmed for sure that your hypothesis is true?

I unfortunately don't have the luxury of time rolling up a test barbarian to GM and comparing him to a GM merc.

I've only played one barbarian, a human barb named Braxis. I maxed out my HP trains and he was a good tank. That was, however, before the dodge penalty to berserk, before bash knocked you out of prone, and he had a 10 HP train advantage over a barb that would be played now.

Even then, from my anecdotal recollections I'm pretty sure that Pilnor, my gnome merc in the hammer, tanked better than Braxis. And no, I don't just mean because of <redacted>, which made him nigh unkillable because of spam quaffing healing potions: I mean I recall Pilnor taking less damage, percentage-wise, when on mood defensive, and I don't think that Pilnor maxed his HP trains. That is potentially up for debate, because I'm a little fuzzy on those details.

At any rate, from my experiences I've always held the position that while barbarians aren't bad tanks, they're simply sub-par to mercenaries: Enhanced parry and the added accuracy from specialize are just really effective. Also, in my experience barbarians almost -always- lose to mercenaries when on even footing, although that's a hard measurement to accurately prove now... because there's no barbarians.

Since the dodge penalty to berserk, I don't actually remember the last time that a barbarian tanked for me, because I don't even remember the last time that I saw a barbarian who wasn't MR. The few MR barbarians that have tanked for me were obviously abysmal tanks compared to a merc, but that's to be expected because they're unbuffed. The only thing that I might say that would make it so that barbarians haven't been -only- nerfed in the physical department is that barbarians probably benefitted from berserk now adding to accuracy instead of to-hit, so their parry chance is hopefully better now: But that still doesn't change the fact that eparry is still absent from their kit, so they're just always going to innately take more damage.


I do agree that right now, barbarians are basically the "noob friendly" melee class: I just wish that they had something that could make them more competitive with mercs in the melee department, because right now I really feel like they're subpar. Thematically it makes sense that berserk actually gives MP now instead of lowering it, but in my eyes gaining MP by losing AC is not a favorable trade-off at all.

Protip: Dulrik is extremely hard to convince about anything, which I don't think is a big secret around here. But, he is more likely to respond to fact and data than to conjecture, no matter how experienced the source of the conjecture.

If you ever do want to test it, I think you'll be surprised by the results. My own observations, which as the Outer Planes KD consist mostly of watching outer planes PvE, are contrary to your own. The reasons are all right there on the barbarian skill list. For PvP, we have things like the Duelist's Guild and Happy Hour in place that should make testing one-on-one melee combat easy to do in a legitimate IC fashion, without getting bogged down by fatigue.

I will grant you that mercenaries have a lot more options and, in the hands of expert players, enjoy a lot of advantages that barbarians don't, but I really don't think HP or tanking ability are among those advantages.