Patch 1.0.4 Class Preview: The Barbarian

Here it is folks, the first class preview for patch 1.0.4. Blizzard just announced the upcoming changes for the Barbarian and they look promising. As stated before, the game developer will try to balance the classes in such a way that all skills will become equally popular. For Barbarians, there are a few skills that are dominant in almost all the builds.

The developer blog post talk about the lack of Fury spending builds due to lack of interest caused by low damaging skills. This is also a direct consequence of the low Fury generating skill selection. Prior to patch 1.0.4, players did not have much to work with. Almost all builds included Frenzy as the main Fury generating skill because the other two ones seem to deal less damage. Bash and Cleave are rarely used. To make the other skills more attractive, Blizz decided to approach a more proactive attitude and boost their damage instead of nerfing the ones more popular. Here is a quick breakdown of the changes:

• Bash damage increased from 150% to 165% and Fury generated from 6 to 8.
• Cleave damage will get boosted to compensate for the single target damage loss, making it just as appealing as Bash and Frenzy
• Hammer of the Ancients will have its base damage increased from 200% to 325%, the Rolling Thunder goes from 155% to 275% and Smash goes to 406% instead of 270%.
• Rend will have its base damage increased to 700% over 5 seconds instead of 210% over 3 seconds, Larcerate goes up to 903% damage over 5 seconds instead of 271% damage over 3 seconds and Bloodbath gets boosted to 100% damage over 5 seconds instead of 60% over 3 seconds.

The rest of the Fury spenders will remain as they are. Sprint and Battle Rage, some very popular skills for the Double Tornado build will still be viable since they are perfect as they are. These changes are the first to be announced. There are still four classes left that will be covered soon.

• Dev post can be found here