Sekhmet's Barbarian new player guide
This is a page for the Barbarian specific page for the Newbie Help Guide. Whenever possible, overlap with the general guide should be minimized.
For details, rules, and the other pages involved, see Category:Newbie Guide Contest.
Barbarians
So you want to be a barbarian ey? Are you ready for the awesome power that is a weapon prime guild? Can you handle the unholy berserking madness? Are you ready to learn how to become a master of every weapon in all of elanthia? Next time you get invited to a wedding and they ask you to check all weapons at the door, are they going to have to cut your hands off?
Getting Started
Before we go any further, take a moment and ask yourself.
A. Do you like smashing and breaking things?
2. Do you like crushing and stomping things?
m. Do you like chopping things off things?
r. Do you like to stick pointy things in things?
If you answered yes to any of the above please continue reading. If you answered no, directions from the crossing Barbarian guild to the Empath guild are as follows; Out, North, Go door.
First you are going to need to name your character and pick a race. When you log in you will be prompted on how to create your character.
Any race has potential to make a great barbarian. However, when picking a barbarian's race, its generally easiest to play a race with a strength and/or stamina bonus. Many of our abilities rely on a FEAR contest which leans heavily on Charisma, and Strength. Discipline is also an important ability to consider when picking a race. If you are very new to the game a Gor'Tog, Human, Kaldar, Dwarf or S'kra Mur will probably be the easiest barbarian out of the gate.
Generally speaking its best to choose the CROSSING as your starting city. There are generally more people in the CROSSING and its a bit more new player friendly than RIVERHAVEN.
Getting to the guild
Now that you've picked your race its time to go talk a barbarian guild leader and ask him to JOIN the guild.
If you are feeling lost remember you can type DIR BARBARIAN and it will begin to give you directions. I'd also recommend taking a look at a map of the Crossing or Riverhaven (if you didn't listen to me and started there), and possibly printing it out for reference.
Back to the Guildleader
Agonar (or Mo if you started in Riverhaven) may say certain STATs are lacking when you try to join the guild. If you want Agonar can train these stats for you (it is slightly more expensive to take this route). For now lets just accept Agonar or Mo's training and listen to their words of wisdom.
I'll wait here while you learn what it means to be a barbarian.
Picking your 1st Ability and what is Inner Fire?
All set?
Great so now we get to pick our first barbarian ability! So many choices.... where to start?
Lets first talk a little bit about Inner Fire. Inner fire is our power, its what fuels all our abilities. It is also a trainable skill. Our four main supernatural abilities that we can train are Warding, Augmentation, Debilitation, and Inner Fire. Inner fire replenishes very slowly over time and will never entirely fill in a passive state. In order to get more inner fire barbarians need to fight and kill stuff. Enough about inner fire for now. Lets get back to making this barbarian a skull crushing machine.
Back to picking our first barbarian ability.....
At the start it is best to choose a Berserk or a Form, because this will allow us to train TWO of our four supernatural abilities. The first couple circles (we call levels circles) will go fast and we will be able to choose a roar soon, don't worry.
One of my favorite starting choices is Berserk Avalanche it helps you not get so tired when you are swinging away crushing face. In order to choose berserk Avalanche try to type STUDY AGONAR (or MO if you chose Riverhaven as a starting point).
Did you figure it out?
if no... try typing CHOOSE AVALANCHE.
So we have now JOINED the GUILD and we've picked a barbarian ability! Great work!
Lets power that baby up. Try typing BERSERK AVALANCHE or just bers ava if you are into brevity.
Woa what happened! As long as that berserk is running you will periodically see some messaging to the effect. Also type EXP, look at that! Two supernatural abilities are being learned. Be careful though, running abilities will eat up our precious Inner Fire. The good news is we can get more Inner Fire doing what barbarians do best, and that is killing stuff!
Gear up Young MASTER OF ARMS!
Depending on your race choice you have probably have a mishmash of gear and potentially a funny looking hat. Time to start looking like a proper adventurer.
If you're following the General Newbie Guide, Gear and Preparation Walkthrough you will understand how to exchange gear at the Veteran or Robyn, and what pieces you need to fill the gaps left by free armor.
There are four types of trainable armor, you can look them up in more detail in other areas of the website. The four armors are LIGHT, CHAIN, BRIGANDINE, and PLATE
Generally speaking newer barbarians should consider starting in lighter armor. I'd recommend a few chain pieces and a few leather pieces from good old Tembeg if you started in the crossing. Lets go to the armor shop now. DIR ARMOR, or you can look at that map you printed out earlier.
Lets type INV ARMOR, interesting, this shows what types of armor you are currently wearing. Lets buy enough armor to protect our head, arms, legs, torso, and hands. Now Tembeg doesn't have the largest supply, but what he does have will easily get us by for now. Stick to a chain and leather or a chain leather combo unless you are a more experienced player and want to train Plate and Brigandine. Lets also by a SMALL SHIELD, the target shield should do fine. Now while holding the shield in your right hand type ADJUST SHIELD. Perfect, feels good on your arm no? WEAR your shield. There we go. This allows us to still use the shield in combat but it frees up our left hand. Speaking of combat lets go get tools of the trades, WEAPONS.
Check your map, and find the weapons shop, its right outside the armor shop, and one east. Find it? DIR WEAPON if you get lost.
When you ask a barbarian what weapon to train he might just slap you in the face. The answer is all of them. If you are very new to the game, however I'd recommend picking a nice trusty broadsword and maybe a small edged weapon to start. TYPE EXP WEAPON 0. You see there are quite a few weapon options available, early on we are required to train at least two different types of weapons. Remember WEAPONS are our PRIMARY skill-set this means you learn weapons faster than any other guild in the game. Take advantage and train em. Its also fun to try new things out from time to time. OK time to train our stats.
What Stats do I train?
I know you are itching to slaughter your enemies and some of your friends. Lets first get your stats rounded out. TYPE INFO. Those are your stats. See that part that says TDPs? That stands for Time Developement Points. You should go research all the various attributes and think about how you want your barbarian to train. However, its really important early on to get some decent strength and stamina. Barbarians hunt, and they hunt a lot. This makes for lots of owies, and lots of owie dishing. Stamina protects the intrepid barbarian from receiving owies. Strength helps the barbarian hold and weild owie making items, as well as making the owies hurt more. This is very RACE dependent, however, generally speaking I would try to get your strength and stamina both to 20. Do this first. Gor'Togs may even go to 24 in each. Early on I generally recommend neglecting Charisma as a Barbarian. Charisma is a very important skill later on for our roars and most importantly PvP, but if you had to pick a stat to neglect for the first couple circles Charisma is a good one to skimp on early.
The way I tend to train my characters is I train whats cheapest first. If you are a Gor'Tog you train Strength and Stamina. Set milestones, such as all skills to 30. Bring your cheapest ones there first, followed by your middle ones, followed by your most expensive. An entire guide could be spent on how to spend your TDPs, for now just pump some Strength and Stamina so you can kill stuff.
Thoughts on early ability choices
I hope you had fun slaughtering rats and what have you. Eventually in between the carnage and bloodshed, you will want to map out some type of plan for your barbarian. Many of our abilities are really really nice, unfortunately we will never be able to choose all of our abilities so tough decisions have to be made!
Early on we have some good choices, this is the order I generally choose my skills. Sooner or later later you are going to need to select a roar so you can train your Debilitation skill. Also you need to work towards getting a skill that trains Warding. Personally I don't love the first Warding skill available, famine, so I tend to skip that one and gun for either Swan or Flashflood. Its cheaper to go towards Flashflood (you can get there using less ability slots) and the skills leading up to it are very valuable even at the end game. (Furthermore, many people at endgame have little use for swan.)
1. Berserk Avalanche - Pulsing fatigue regeneration.
2. Everild's Rage - an easy early roar choice, debuffs opponants defense.
3. Berserk Tornado - Shield skill and Stamina bonus.
4. Form Eagle - Bonuses held bow, crossbow, or throwing weapon.
5. Berserk Flashflood - an anti stun berserk, but most importantly a good warding trainer.
After this point the Skill Trees are wide open for you to do what you want. There are other areas on this site that list everything out with nifty flow charts. Using my starting points; you have a debilitaation Trainer in Everild's Rage, you have a Warding/Inner Fire trainer in Berserk Flashflood, all the other skills train Augmentation/Inner Fire.
We need to have an expert convo bout expertise for reals
Barbarians have a unique skill called EXPERTISE, you can see it by typing exp expertise. We need to train this skill as a circle requirement
There are two ways to train expertise, ANALYZE and MANEUVERS
Barbarians have a unique set of tactical combat using the ANALYZE verb. You can look up a list of these moves in other areas of this site. The one you want to start with is Analyze flame.
Lets go to shiprats and try it out. If you haven't found the shiprats in the crossing they are a little SW of the temple, you have to go through the gate to get in there. I'll wait till you get there.
Found it? Great. Ok now while holding the broadsword we bought earlier type ANALYZE FLAME. What happened? You need to land each of the moves in that order, after you complete the moves you will get a nice chunk of expertise learning.
Another way to train Expertise is to use Maneuvers. You can look up what weapon type uses what maneuver later. For now lets try CLEAVE. Still holding the broadsword, type MANEUVER CLEAVE. Woa! pretty cool right. Keep smashing.
THE FIGHT!
A couple thoughts on our favorite thing in the whole wide world of Elanthia, fighting!
Since we are currently in ship rats, lets stay here and play with them a bit. By now you probably have your armor experience ticking up, Evasion, Shield, Parry. All good stuff. There is a whole bunch of ways to fight in dragonrealms and this guide isn't meant to cover those details. Here are a few tips however that will have you top barbarianing in no time.
A. Early on always keep up at least one berserk or form. Preferably two, one that is Augmentation, and one that is Warding.
2. As soon as you get your first Roar, use it! Use it every couple of minutes. Personally I like to ROAR QUIET RAGE every 3 minutes or so. Roar quiet means it hits the room. Its important to train debilitation and this is the best way/only way to do it.
d. Maneuver often! Also use the analyze verb to keep that expertise pumping.
j. Play with your stances a bit, you should make sure shield, parry and evasion are training roughly equally. Type STANCE. You can shift the numbers around, Try to start with Evasion 100, Shield 40, and Parry 40. To do this simply type Stance Evasion 100, Stance Shield 40, Stance Parry 40. There is a maximum amount of points you can allow, and you may have to lower one to get your stance in another one set. Now lets save that stance as our custom stance. Type STANCE CUSTOM SAVE. Great! Now if we want to play around we can always just get back to our 100/40/40 stance by typing stance custom.
I like to plan for the future; endgame ideas
OHI you metagamer you. You look cute in that shirt. So here is what I think is a pretty solid late game build
From the path of the Horde you know the Masteries: Titan and Strategos. From the path of the Flame you know the Masteries: Powermonger and Templar. From the path of the Predator you know the Masteries: Tribalist.
You have not been trained in any Berserks from the path of the Horde. From the path of the Flame you know the Berserks: Cyclone. From the path of the Predator you know the Berserks: Tornado and Flashflood.
From the path of the Horde you know the Roars: Anger the Earth, Death's Embrace, Serpent's Hiss and Wail of Torment. From the path of the Flame you know the Roars: Death's Shriek. From the path of the Predator you know the Roars: Everild's Rage and Kuniyo's Strike.
From the path of the Horde you know the Forms: Dragon and Python. From the path of the Flame you know the Forms: Monkey, Bear and Turtle. From the path of the Predator you know the Forms: Piranha, Eagle, Owl and Panther.
From the path of the Horde you know the Meditations: Tenacity. From the path of the Flame you know the Meditations: Flame, Power and Contemplation. You have not been trained in any Meditations from the path of the Predator.
This build leaves a point free... add it to dervish mastery or warstomp or something else. Hey the world is your oyster.