Rage - why doesn't it follow the Warlock example?

[Theodoxus]

Ok, I have got to be missing something, but rage is driving me nuts. Having rage recharge on a long rest makes it unsatisfactory at best. (And I'm not going to even go into what a trap Frenzy is.)

What would be the harm in using the Warlocks spell slot progression used for rage? So, first level, you have one; second through 10th, two; 11th through 16th, three; and 17th to 20, four. All recharge on a short rest.

If you view Rage as a combat enhancing resource (because there's little (not null, but little) non-combat use for it), it's on par with Warlock spells. Barbarian attacks san rage are akin to Eldritch Bolt attacks. Eldritch Bolt is enhanced by Hex (using a spell slot) Barbarian attacks are enhanced by Rage (using a rage). Rage even has more drawbacks (outside of it's recharge mechanic) than Warlock spell slots.

So, would it significantly increase the barbarians power to have fewer rages, but have them recharge on a short rest? Granted, it depends on party makeup and how often you're resting (and the types used) - a party with a sorcerer, cleric and ranger will want more long rests than short rests; a warlock, moon druid and fighter will want more short than long...

Rage itself, as fluff, makes no sense to me as to why sleeping recharges it. You can work yourself up into Hulk Smash three times a day, but your reserves are so exhausted you have to sleep like a baby before getting your adrenaline back? I get it's a game, but physiology doesn't work that way. Even a 10 minute hour long breather will allow you to push your limits again. So, mechanically, logically and balance-wise, short rests make more sense to me - but again, I'm probably missing something.

Would you require an additional drawback to a short rest recovery? Have you found barbarians to be more tactically minded than a dumping of mental stats would normally predicate? "If I rage now, I won't have another until we go to bed in 6 hours. I'll just wear my half-plate and hope to not get hit instead" seems pretty high level reasoning for a stereotypical 8 int/wis guy.

[Ralanr]

I'm not sure. It is odd that rages are long rests.

[calebrus]

Might as well just give Barbarians their unlimited Rage capstone at level 2. Because that's essentially exactly what you'll be doing.

[Giant2005]

Personally I think the decision was made to give those that want to play a Martial the option of playing one with long rest mechanics.

[Tenmujiin]

To be honest I didn't even realise they were on a long rest recharge. I see no reason that barbarians shouldn't be recharging on a short rest, almost all of their class features are tied to it (even if it costs them rages per recharge)

[Dralnu]

As someone that has played with a barbarian since level 2, currently level 7, and has seen nearly all other classes as well in this level range...

... no, I wouldn't allow it as a DM. It's perfectly fine how it is. The damage reduction is insane. Taking half damage from nearly everything on a d12 HP class means that yes, using Reckless Attack on every swing is a no-brainer, which is ~+3 to hit, double the crit chance, oh and you also have advantage on sweet things like grappling, and you get bonus damage. The result is a god of war, at least at these levels.

What doesn't make sense about needing a long rest? I see rage as pushing your body to the limits. You do that multiple times per day, you'll need a nice long rest to allow the body to recover.

EDIT: Yeah, looking at OP again, you're looking at Rage as just a +2 damage modifier like Hex. That's not the case. It's the damage reduction that's the real money, which leads to significantly more damage (hi Reckless Attack!). The +2/3 damage is the cherry on top.

[weaseldust]

What would be the harm in using the Warlocks spell slot progression used for rage? So, first level, you have one; second through 10th, two; 11th through 16th, three; and 17th to 20, four. All recharge on a short rest.

Well, they'd be able to have rage on almost every encounter at level 2, and almost all the time later on. The suggested numbers are 2 encounters between short rests, and I think most people stick roughly to that, though I've hardly done a survey. Rage presumably isn't balanced around a 1:1 rage-to-encounter ratio at those levels, since the existing Barbarian can't rage every encounter at level 2.

What would be interesting would be if they had different kinds of rages they could enter, with different mechanical effects. Then the analogy to Warlock spells would be stronger. (You could probably do this just by breaking up the existing features of rage. They could have one 'rage' give them the extra damage, one give them the damage resistance, and one give them the advantage on strength checks. That might be better balanced balanced around 2+ rages per short rest.)


If you view Rage as a combat enhancing resource (because there's little (not null, but little) non-combat use for it)

It's pretty useful for tanking your way through hallways full of traps and then smashing the door at the end.



Rage itself, as fluff, makes no sense to me as to why sleeping recharges it. You can work yourself up into Hulk Smash three times a day, but your reserves are so exhausted you have to sleep like a baby before getting your adrenaline back? I get it's a game, but physiology doesn't work that way. Even a 10 minute hour long breather will allow you to push your limits again. So, mechanically, logically and balance-wise, short rests make more sense to me - but again, I'm probably missing something.

I think rage is meant to be much more taxing than just interval training, or whatever. Even if it's just a physical thing, it could be tearing your muscles and bursting your blood vessels. If it also has mental or supernatural components, you might also feel mentally or spiritually drained.

There's also a narrative aspect to rage: you should be pushing yourself to the limit in truly desperate situations, not just to squish another bunch of mooks. Admittedly, the existing rage rules are also flawed according to that picture, because they let you rage more and more often as you level up, until you can do it all the time.

I'd prefer it if you could only rage when threatened, e.g. when you've taken a lot of damage or are facing strong enemies. (Proposal: drop the damage-resistance part of rage; when you begin a rage, you can set aside X hp; at the end of every round, if you've taken less than X damage, ignore all the damage from that round; if you've taken more, ignore X amount of that damage; at the end of the rage, take X damage, unless that would reduce you to 0 hp, in which case you drop to 1. That way, you have a strong incentive to rage if you expect to take lots of damage or are already close to 0 hp, and much less incentive otherwise.)


I'm not going to even go into what a trap Frenzy is.

I didn't want to start with this because it might drift off-topic, but I don't get the problem. Frenzy lets you attack 50% more for probably 1 encounter. If you follow the recommended 6 encounters per day, that's an extra 1/12 or 8% (ish) of your daily output. I think that would be worth trading for one level of exhaustion even at the beginning of the day, since the drawbacks are unlikely to cripple your effectiveness or cause your death. But the trade is actually more favourable than that. You can save it to use late in the day, when the drawbacks will be much shorter-lived (or non-existent, if you use it in the last encounter of the day).

And if you know you're near the end of the campaign, it's the final showdown, and failure means death, you can rack up 3 or 4 uses of frenzy in a day, still be somewhat effective the rest of the time, and recover from the exhaustion during the inevitable post-campaign downtime. Of course, this requires your having some understanding of your DM's intentions and the narrative of the campaign. But all classes are affected to some extent by DM-ing style and the nature of the campaign, and in groups where you do have that understanding, Frenzy is a pretty handy ability.

[gameogre]

Grogthur The Mighty Shiety here!

Look my fellow Slayer! I can see where you are coming from with this. How can you have too much of a good thing right? I agree in theory. More Rage= Better!

See the thing is, my buddy the fighter has been complaining about me for levels and levels now. I told him to just make a Barbarian but he just doesn't have the stones for it. I keep outdoing him at every turn and frankly it would be funny if that damn DM guy didn't start to pay attention to him, I noticed him writing down our damages and how much we could take and other stuff a lot.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I even found myself trying to hold back a little, you know, to pad the numbers a little bit till he stopped lookin.

The longer it went on though I noticed that when I couldn't rage (or wouldn't) things started to look up for my buddy and the DM started to look a little more laid back.

Finally sometime in the teens both my buddy and the DM seemed to turn happy and his list would match mine, maybe even beat it at times. They both cheered that the class's were balanced and they put up there little papers and stopped counting so much.

To be honest, just between you and me though, it's a good thing they stopped cause Good Lord I don't know how much longer I could have held back! Har! har! Har!

If I didn't have this limit(Har!) on Rages there is no way in the nine hells I could have folled em!

What I think we should do is complain and sigh and look downcast whenever those little fights pop up that we don't rage on. Act like its the end of the world and scream and cry....talk about other games where the rage is just across the fence and much better and how its so unfair. We will fool them all! Har! Har! Har!

[Magic Myrmidon]

^ I love this guy.

[Theodoxus]

Good post, gameogre ;)

I guess I see it like a discussion my group had last night about descriptions vs reality. We were talking about WoD specifically, where 5 dots in an ability pretty much had you listed as being godlike in that particular stat (or at least damn near unique - 1 in a billion type person) . But when you actually play with said stat, it feels much less unique than the description.

I have the same problem with the opening credits of a lot of single player action games, where your character is a total badass, sneaking onto a battleship and eliminating all foes, and then you take over and walk into walls like a epileptic mouthbreather.

Rage has the same feel for me. The recharge mechanics insinuate that rage is on par with a 6th level spell. The actual benefits are a small strength rider on top of a nerfed Warding Bond (2nd level) - and it only lasts 1 minute, max, and could easily last much less, if you run out of foes in range, get held or otherwise made to stop fighting. (and I'd get beat down if I used the 'I punch myself in the nuts/arm/stub my toe' cheese to keep a rage going.)

[Ralanr]

Good post, gameogre ;)

I guess I see it like a discussion my group had last night about descriptions vs reality. We were talking about WoD specifically, where 5 dots in an ability pretty much had you listed as being godlike in that particular stat (or at least damn near unique - 1 in a billion type person) . But when you actually play with said stat, it feels much less unique than the description.

I have the same problem with the opening credits of a lot of single player action games, where your character is a total badass, sneaking onto a battleship and eliminating all foes, and then you take over and walk into walls like a epileptic mouthbreather.

Rage has the same feel for me. The recharge mechanics insinuate that rage is on par with a 6th level spell. The actual benefits are a small strength rider on top of a nerfed Warding Bond (2nd level) - and it only lasts 1 minute, max, and could easily last much less, if you run out of foes in range, get held or otherwise made to stop fighting. (and I'd get beat down if I used the 'I punch myself in the nuts/arm/stub my toe' cheese to keep a rage going.)


At least until level 15, where your rage only ends if you choose it to end or fall unconscious.

Wait...does this mean you can be in constant rage out of combat? Can you just rage in combat, and stay in rage when you want to do something (like knitting) out of combat? That's hilarious if that's true.

Do we even need to sleep in 5e? Long rests don't need sleep, you can just sleep in a long rest.

I WILL PUT ALL OF MY FURY INTO THIS SWEATER!!! GRANDMA WILL LOVE IT!!!

[ad_hoc]

Rage has the same feel for me. The recharge mechanics insinuate that rage is on par with a 6th level spell. The actual benefits are a small strength rider on top of a nerfed Warding Bond (2nd level) - and it only lasts 1 minute, max, and could easily last much less, if you run out of foes in range, get held or otherwise made to stop fighting. (and I'd get beat down if I used the 'I punch myself in the nuts/arm/stub my toe' cheese to keep a rage going.)

I don't think I understand what you are saying.

Who gets 6th level spells at 1st level?

It is much better than Warding Bond. You take extra damage equal to the amount that the target takes. So really, you're just transferring half of the damage they take onto yourself.

1 minute is enough for the vast majority of combats. Durations in 5e tend to be 1 min, 1 hour, and 8 hours.

Most combats are over in 18-30 seconds.

The benefits are huge. Barbarians get advantage on every melee attack they make. That's crazy good. And if they really need to be defensive they can do that too.

[Safety Sword]

If you give Barbarians this many rages you just might as well give them double hit points and additional damage to all attacks.

It's a resource you're supposed to manage.

[Strill]

The actual benefits are a small strength rider on top of a nerfed Warding Bond (2nd level)

Try actually reading Warding Bond. The person doing the warding takes damage whenever the target does. That's not at all how rage works.

[ChubbyRain]

I've never liked the limited rage mechanic of D&D. A barbarian at low level shouldn't be getting tired or peaceful just because they raged for 30 seconds. Through mechanics and through story, that is just stupid.

Reckless Attack makes for a better rage mechanic then rage does.

I would make reckless attack be rage (plus advantage on strength checks) and then give the barbarian smaller features to compliment their reckless attack.

Hell, it doesn't even make sense that the most feral of classes should be based around book keeping... Just strikes me as odd.

[ryan92084]

The only thing I wish was different about rage in this edition is allowing it to be used as a reaction (by feature or feat). I was always a fan of instantaneous rage. The number per long rest seems appropriate by mechanic and fluff to me.

[Person_Man]

Rage is a Long Rest for metagame reasons. It is one of the most powerful abilities in the game. And the Developers didn't want you using it in every combat. (Until 20th level when your allies are throwing around Wish and Simulacrum). They wanted it to be something special and awesome, which it is.

[j_spencer93]

Ya no problem with rage actually. It works great for its purpose. Making it usable more often just breaks it. Wondering who has actually played one and been like "I need to take 1/2 damage more often as well as advantage on all strength rolls, and a +2 to damage because im to weak doing it 2/long rest. Ain't like no one else can do this." Wait a minute...no one else can. Seriously though its freaking great.

EDIT: this came off as more of an ass then attended. Take no offense.

[LordVonDerp]

Might as well make everything go off a short rest.

[Safety Sword]

Might as well make everything go off a short rest.

Just play with the 1 hour long rest variant and save yourself the trouble of changing all the abilities...

[Battlebooze]

I wouldn't mind allowing a Barbarian to trade a couple of hit dice worth of recovery healing for a Rage charge when taking a short rest. This would give Barbarians a way to recover some Rage charges, but not without a cost.

[Theodoxus]

I don't think I understand what you are saying.

Who gets 6th level spells at 1st level?

No one. My point is that rage recharging on a long rest is the same as any 6th level spell from any caster. It's not that strong, so it shouldn't require a long rest.


It is much better than Warding Bond. You take extra damage equal to the amount that the target takes. So really, you're just transferring half of the damage they take onto yourself.

Agreed. Although WB also provides a bonus to AC and saves. But given it's an hour long buff that requires no concentration and it halves all damage, not just bludgeoning, piercing, slashing (and not everyone plays a Bear Totem barbi), WB is stronger, even with half the damage being shared instead of negated. Heck that AC bonus was enough to ward off two attacks in the last game I played. It's quite the boon.


1 minute is enough for the vast majority of combats. Durations in 5e tend to be 1 min, 1 hour, and 8 hours.

Most combats are over in 18-30 seconds.

Agreed here as well. It's less the duration of combat, although rage dropping is a real concern, and more about having fewer times to have access to it. I come from PF, so I have a very biased view on rage, I get that - hence my question as to what I'm obviously missing. I'd rather rage be delegated out on a round by round basis, used exactly when I want it, for exactly how long I want/need it. The fatigue rules in PF sucked, and FE has made some pretty significant improvements in general to PF play - so dropping fatigue completely wouldn't be out of turn for the incremental power increase FE has over PF.


The benefits are huge. Barbarians get advantage on every melee attack they make. That's crazy good. And if they really need to be defensive they can do that too.

Rage doesn't provide that benefit, reckless attack does. It's separate and not fueled by rage. And yes, it's crazy good - though gaining advantage isn't particularly hard... though neither is inflicting disad to negate the advantage on getting hit.

[Dralnu]

I come from PF, so I have a very biased view on rage, I get that - hence my question as to what I'm obviously missing.

You're missing that rage isn't just one bonus, it's many -- advantage on strength checks, doubles your effective health pool, and increases your damage. Not only that, but rage doesn't exist in a void: it synergizes extremely well with a barbarian's other abilities, like DR going well with d12 HP and Reckless Attacks. Just because a Wizard can get DR with a high level spell doesn't mean he can use it as effectively as a barbarian can, who fights in melee, will be getting hit, and will be tying it together with his high hit points and reckless swings.


I'd rather rage be delegated out on a round by round basis, used exactly when I want it, for exactly how long I want/need it.

Sounds like you should play a Battlemaster Fighter. You get to use your maneuver dice exactly when you want to, how you want to. Same with Action Surge. Short rest recovery, too. It's pretty much exactly what you're asking for.

[Malifice]

I key paladin smites of short rests (they get 2 per short rest, gradually increasing to 4 per short rest) and de-linked them from spell slots (the damage scales with paladin level).

I would be interested in such a mechanic for Barbs, but I would only ever allow 1 rage per short rest (so every second or third fight) for balance reasons.

You get to summon your anger once between taking a breather.

To compensate I would change the rage damage bonus to a dice instead of a fixed number (d4, d6 and d8, instead of a fixed 2, 3 and 4 damage) at the required levels (to better interface with the crit fishing nature of Barbs).

[Vogonjeltz]

I've never liked the limited rage mechanic of D&D. A barbarian at low level shouldn't be getting tired or peaceful just because they raged for 30 seconds. Through mechanics and through story, that is just stupid.

Reckless Attack makes for a better rage mechanic then rage does.

I would make reckless attack be rage (plus advantage on strength checks) and then give the barbarian smaller features to compliment their reckless attack.

Hell, it doesn't even make sense that the most feral of classes should be based around book keeping... Just strikes me as odd.

1 minute of extreme exertion is actually a really long time when you pile combat onto it. I guess it's interesting because HP is also sort of a simulation of stamina, so when the character takes damage it's really them getting more and more tired.

[XmonkTad]

I always figured it was to stop Frenzy Barbarians from really gimping themselves with exhaustion. If it takes a long rest to reduce exhaustion by 1, then a frenzy barbarian can only ("safely") frenzy once per long rest and their regular rage is sub-par compared to a totem barbarian.