|
| 9 people marked this as a favorite. |
Raise your hand if you've seen this (pre-remaster):
Combat starts. The barbarian rages, moves to an enemy and strikes, and then someone asks "what about drawing a weapon?" Okay, rewind, no rage then?
Someone says, "I'm the tank because I'm the barbarian" and then someone says "well actually you need that extra HP because your AC is bad..."
---
What makes a person turn barbarian? Lust for gold? Power? Or did you just want to play a simple buff warrior and not have to think too much about circumstantial modifiers?
So in the remaster, there's a couple of changes that I would say hang together reeeally nicely:
- You can rage as a free action at the start of combat. You can always draw, stride, strike at least once. If you're lucky more than once. But no more dud round ones.
- You don't take an AC penalty from rage anymore. Giant barbarians with giant weapons still take that penalty, but that's pretty much constant all the time. It doesn't go on and off.
- You don't get Deny Advantage anymore. Being flanked is always bad, not just some of the time.
That last one is also clever. Barbarians ought to like axes. Axes do more cool stuff if enemies are adjacent to each other. (Sweep, critical spec, Swipe feat, ..) Enemies are NOT adjacent to each other if you're being flanked. So removing Deny Advantage to "pay" for removing the AC penalty from rage, simplifies your playstyle. There's no more signal saying "it's okay to be flanked... by some enemies..."; no, being flanked is just bad.
---
You can still make your barbarian complex, if you want to. I've seen one that multiclassed Wizard and used Jump spells a lot (doesn't have Concentrate, so can be cast while raging) to be more mobile. But the minimum complexity of the class was reduced, and that's really good quality of life for people who want to play a super-simple smash class. (These people may in their daily life actually be wizard/detectives who like to play a barbarian to unwind...)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Unfortunately, I'm not so euphoric because the Barbarian archetype retains -1 AC and the Fast Movement Feat has been removed as it has been converted to a Class Feat. This is devastating for the Barbarian archetype.
Agreed. Not getting a higher damage bonus, Quick-Tempered and Furious Footfalls seems like a perfectly fine balance point for the archetype to have a weaker version of Rage. The AC penalty is too much. And the archetype was already on the wek side.
It would have been nice if the new Class Features had been offered as Archetypes Feat, so that you could at least purchase them: Quick-Tempered and Furious Footfalls
I think Quick-Tempered would be too much for the archetype, even if it costs an extra feat. But Furious Footfalls as an archetype feat wouldn't really be much different from what other archetypes like monk, swashbuckler or scout can get you. So it's omission is a bit baffling.
Yeah Barbarians got a lot of "lets make this more fun to play" improvements out of this. The folks I know playing one are pretty happy. :)
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Unfortunately, I'm not so euphoric because the Barbarian archetype retains -1 AC and the Fast Movement Feat has been removed as it has been converted to a Class Feat. This is devastating for the Barbarian archetype.
It would have been nice if the new Class Features had been offered as Archetypes Feat, so that you could at least purchase them: Quick-Tempered and Furious Footfalls
One trend with Player Core 2 is the apparently belief that some of the multiclass archetypes were overtuned. See also the monk archetype's flurry having a d4 round cooldown and the champion dedication only giving heavy armor proficiency if you already had medium armor proficiency.
The Swashbuckler archetype also lost the movement/skill bonus from the dedication, but that might be an oversight since "you can gain panache at level 2, but literally cannot get any benefit from it until level 4" is weird.
They tamped down on the archetypes pretty hard.
They tamped down on the archetypes pretty hard.
Some archetypes.
I can assure you Pyschic, Oracle and Sorcerer are going to be very popular. Monk and Barbarian less so. Champion will drop a little.
Sorcerers dipping oracle for Foretell Harm and Vision of Weakness will be getting some real juicy blast damage, yeah. And every caster will want the OP imperial bloodline spell.
and the champion dedication only giving heavy armor proficiency if you already had medium armor proficiency.
It also now scales that proficiency innately, which is kind of a huge deal. Feels hard to call that nerf.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The -1 is the only ‘nerf’ to the Barbarian multiclass and it already effectively worked that way for them premaster. The rest are incidental causalities of Barbarians getting buffed so they can fill their niche better, and since Paizo seems to think class niches were generally being encroached upon far too often by multiclasses premaster I’d say this is a pretty mild and fair change to those ends.