Barbarian new player guide

This is the guide for new and returning Barbarians. If you haven't familiarized yourself with the General new player guide, it is highly recommended.

Introduction

Weapon masters. Martial artists. Mage slayers. Masters of emotion, both rage and serenity. Barbarians are many things, though the two core philosophies they share are simple: sometimes magic fails since real strength is internal, and killing things is a practical talent.

Barbarians are a flexible roleplay guild, with little-to-no formal guidelines for philosophy or morality, allowing a broad range of personal expression.

Why Play a Barbarian?

Barbarians are a guild hyper-focused on combat performance. They cannot create magic portals. They cannot conjure a cloak of invisibility, summon icy weapons, raise the dead, heal themselves, or lead others into battle. They offer no buffs to other players in group situations.

Outside of a few token buffs to survival skills like Locksmithing or Outdoorsmanship, all of their abilities either make them better at killing or make them more difficult to kill. Their skillset and Expertise-based reduction on Advanced Combat Maneuvers (also known as ACMs) make them a premier damage guild, particularly at melee, and their War Stomp ability means they are among the best at actually closing to melee.

Their native suite of anti-magic and anti-debilitation wards are the strongest in the game, making them an annoying match-up for magic users.

Do you like killing, and prefer a sword to a fireball? Can you not be bothered to hide before trying to murder someone? Welcome to the Barbarians guild, you'll have a grand time!

Starting Out

Choosing Your Race

Since their strong native wards provide a layer of protection most guilds don't have, all races are viable as Barbarians, allowing some roleplay flexibility.

For player-versus-player engagements, Power (Strength/Discipline/Stamina) and Fear (Charisma/Strength/Discipline) contests are the heart of the Barbarian's suite of debilitation effects, with power attacks being the most popular - and most widely impactful - Barbarian effects. As such, Strength and Discipline are core stats.

As of the time of the writing of this guide, the current player-versus-player metagame allows for mental-focused Barbarians who use wands for effects like Ward Break and Huldah's Pall, but this requires heavy investment in microtransaction items and could be subject to change (as the PvP metagame is constantly shifting). Powerful Barbarians are a time-tested and proven strategy.

Outfitting Your Barbarian

Train all weapon classes, especially melee weapons. You will regret not training all weapons once you unlock Whirlwind. Remember to also train Offhand skill, which can be done by putting any non-two-handed weapon in your left hand and using an attack command like DRAW LEFT or ATTACK LEFT.

Train all armor skills. Barbarians have a relatively simple time "clown-suiting" (wearing all five armor classes at once) given their skillset and their early access to impactful defense buffs. If you do choose to clown-suit, I would recommend keeping plate and brigandine confined to the neck/head/arms/hands to minimize armor hindrance.

Stat Training

Barbarians benefit from all stats to some capacity. The physical stats are necessary for combat, mentals will make you learn faster, charisma helps with some roars. In general I'd recommend getting strength and stamina as high as you need in order to carry all your weapons and armor without being burdened, and then focus on getting all stats to 30 before choosing to specialize. Charisma enables many of the powerful roars such as Wail of Torment, but the charisma-based roars are late-game. As such, Barbarians don't have a true "dump stat," but charisma is the closest to it, so leaving charisma low has no practical consequence for a long time.

New Barbarian Guide

Understanding Inner Fire

The Barbarian equivalent of mana/concentration is called inner fire. Inner fire is a measure of a Barbarian's remaining combat strength, and most abilities (outside of roars) interact with, or cost, inner fire in some capacity. The Barbarian "guild confound" is being in combat. As such, inner fire has two states: active regen in combat which allows recharge to 100%, and passive regen outside of combat, which caps at a certain point. A circle one Barbarian with no abilities will have a passive cap of around 30% inner fire, so it's important to pick up Duelist mastery early on, effectively doubling your "starting mana" for one spell slot.

Aside from passive regen, inner fire can also be restored by killing challenging creatures or striking another player in PvP, though the recharge in PvP has a cooldown of about 60 seconds. Scoring a kill with an ACM will generate even more inner fire than a normal kill, yet another reason to train all weapon categories. Barbarians are designed to kill, not knit while in combat, so chain together ACMs and kill frequently to top off that inner fire.

Ability Types and Limits

Barbarians have four categories of abilities: forms, berserks, meditations and roars, with masteries acting as the Barbarian equivalent of magic feats, 1-slot meta-abilities that provide passive bonuses.

• Forms are long-duration (90 minute cap) combat buffs or wards. They have no start-up cost and minimal upkeep cost. Their primary "cost" is the lowering of passive regen cap and the lowering of inner fire generation with kills. Rather than active cost, think of forms like lowering your "mana regen." Forms are hard capped at five forms at once. Though forms can be put up instantly, they have a build-up time and take about 30 seconds to reach max potency.

• Berserks are short-duration (10 minute cap) abilities with a variety of functions. They have high start-up cost and small upkeep cost. On top of standard functions like combat buffs or wards, they provide powerful effects like area-of-effect knock-down against all engaged opponents (Earthquake), huge vitality or stamina boosts (Famine and Avalanche respectively), even the ability to escape death at the cost of inner fire (Volcano). Berserks are uncapped, you can run all eleven at the same time provided enough inner fire.

• Meditations are medium-duration (40 minute cap) wards or buffs. Meditations have a high start-up cost and no upkeep cost. They have a moderate start-up time and longer roundtime, both of which can be lowered by wearing chakrel. As an example, Serenity meditation is the most powerful anti-magic barrier in the game, but saps some inner fire with every blocked spell. Meditations are hard capped to three at once, though Staunch and Dispel can be used even if you have three active already.

• Roars are the primary Barbarian debilitation effects. Rather than costing inner fire, they drain voice pool, which regenerates quickly over time. By default roars are limited to either single-target (ROAR xxxx <target>) or area-of-effect limited to engaged enemies (ROAR xxxx), though you can unlock ROAR AREA and ROAR CREATURES with Strategos mastery. You can check your current voice level with just ROAR or ROAR QUIET, and Cyclone berserk speeds up voice pool recovery. There is no limit on roars provided you have the voice pool to succeed the stat contest, though like all debilitation effects they have diminishing returns on subsequent use.

Training

Training Expertise

ACMs will all train Expertise on use, as will War Stomp for bigger Barbarians. Expertise is generally trained by using ACMs {remember how we said to train all weapons?), though it can also be trained with Barbarian-specific ANALYZE combos, such as ANALYZE FLAME, which function much like the Tactics combos. Unlike the tactics combos, missing the hit will move the combo forwards, and the combo carries over between kills (i.e. no need to restart combos if the creature dies).

Outside of ANALYZE FLAME for young Barbs, the Barbarian combos have mostly fallen out of usage due to the ease of training with ACMs and War Stomp, though ANALYZE ACCURACY and ANALYZE DAMAGE can still be useful for training, or facing difficult opponents at the edge of your skill, such as champion mobs.

Training "Magic" Skills

Unlike other guilds, Barbarian "magic" skillset learning does not (currently) scale with difficulty level. An intro or basic ability will continue to train the same as from rank 1 to rank 1750. As such, training recommendations follow a general ability-class structure instead of specific abilities at specific skill ranges.

Forms teach poorly. They have a small amount of experience generation shortly after start-up, and a long cooldown before the same form can grant more experience. A form can be re-started periodically (about every 2.5 minutes) to learn 1-2 mindstates of the appropriate skill.

Berserks and meditations are much better trainers for augmentation, warding, and utility. Each ability will grant about 4-5 mindstates of the appropriate skill, and can be used again on a ~90 second timer. Assuming you have enough inner fire, berserks are the most practical trainers given the immediate activation at max potency, and the lack of roundtime.

Roars will be your debilitation training method for a long time. Once you can keep Earthquake berserk running, debilitation will be mind locked whenever you're in combat.

Remember that you can use MEDITATE RESEARCH <xxxxx ability> to learn 3-4 mindstates of the appropriate skill of that ability. This functions as the Barbarian equivalent of magic research, has moderate roundtime (5-8 seconds), and a cooldown of about ~5 minutes. This can be used even if you haven't learned the ability you're trying to research.

Given that concentration is an otherwise-unused resource pool for Barbarians, I would recommend all Barbs get a sanowret crystal for easy Arcana experience and TDPs.