My Proposal For Balancing the Barbarian

[GravityEmblem]

Alternate Title: I fixed Barbarians with this ONE WEIRD TRICK! Optimizers HATE me!

Forgive me if this goes in Homebrew design. Perhaps this is already a widely-used trick, and I'm just embarrassing myself, but the Barbarian class can be easily adjusted simply by moving the exhaustion from Frenzy to the 3rd level Bear Totem ability. Instead of putting a massive drawback on a merely decent ability, move it to the ridiculously good one. The ability is still good, of course, but now you have to pick your battles-when is the benefit worth exhaustion? And perhaps this would be enough to encourage people to try the other Totems, or even (*exaggerated gasp*) to pick the Berserker subclass.

[dopl]

The issue with this is it makes the totem barbarian garbage. Totem is an incredibly strong and versatile subclass, but it is by no means broken or even the Barbarians strongest one. There is no need to nerf it.

Removing exhaustion from berserker would let it be incredibly powerful offensively, and make it a relatively solid choice, even with contenders like Ancestral Guardian and Totem.

[stoutstien]

Bear totem isn't really ridiculously good. It barely comes out of the mediocre category at best and at worse it is a ribbon.

[Unoriginal]

The Barbarian is already balanced.

[stoutstien]

The Barbarian is already balanced.

I wouldn't go that far. I would say the barbarian is reasonably balanced as long as they rarely, if not never, have more encounters than they have rages in a day.

[ProsecutorGodot]

Bear totem isn't really ridiculously good. It barely comes out of the mediocre category at best and at worse it is a ribbon.

It often gets touted as ridiculously good because "Barbarian" has become synonymous with "Durability" where your measure of strength as a Barb is whether you can take hits all day long.

I'll agree with previous statements, I don't think the change proposed is all that great. The most widely used change, as far as I've seen, is just to flatout remove the exhaustion mechanic from Frenzy. Don't switch it to another subclass, just drop it. If balance is a major concern, you could do something less restrictive such as half proficiency bonus rounded down(or up if that's your preference) uses with exhaustion for more.

In general, I don't like the mindset that to make other things viable the better options must come down. I'd prefer if all the options were strong.

[Amdy_vill]

I understand wanting to balance an underpowered thing and an overpowered thing but giving one the other downside but this doesn't really work.

1. negative game design should be avoided. instead of penalizing actions, actions should give rewords. Example: instead of house ruling death saves so players are penalized for getting up from 0 reword them for getting up from 0 as fast as possible. this is still a penalty but it comes out of not getting the player up instead of getting the player up.

generally, Features should not have a negative outside of missing if they can miss. I very much disagree with Tashas if you miss you keep the power idea. but if a power does something it should not give you a negative especially not exhaustion.

2. time, how does the bear totem time. if it gives exhaustion every time you rage you have nerfed the bear totem into the ground. no one who understands your ruling will pick it. if you now have to trigger the bear totem we have more problems about actions. is it a reaction, bonus action, or just an action. What's it time. so on. it's just a bad nerf.

No the other hand removing exhaustion from frenzy is just a good idea. most DMS already do it. I would just keep the buff for frenzy and leave it at that. there are ways you could nerf the bear totem but they would require extensive modifications to other rules and monster stats.

Example: what if we changed it to non-Magic damage. while there are two problems now. one, almost all creatures deal non-magic damage even a dragon's breath weapon is non-magic damage. two this ability is meant to counterspell damage which is a rare exception to the Monster all deal non-magic damage rule. problems like this present themselves as you go through other ways of balancing the bear totem.

You can't even change its level because you would mess up the scaling of the totems. the first one is the strongest and the rests are modifications and ribbons. you would also allow some combos that are ridiculous like no you 6th level Barbarin is moving at 55 feet a turn and is resistant to almost all damage.

[Gtdead]

So instead of using frenzy for toilet, we are going to use bear totem. Hmm, yea I quite like the idea of adding fur to my toilet seat.

Just remove the exhaustion penalty and a lot of people will want to play it. If you nerf bear like that then zealot will just dominate the barbarian subclasses.

[Amdy_vill]

Bear totem isn't really ridiculously good. It barely comes out of the mediocre category at best and at worse it is a ribbon.

I disagree. halving all damage magical and nonmagic outside of psychic(One of the rarest damage types) is a massively powerful ability. it effectively doubles your health while raging. like most of the 3rd level totems, it a massively powerful and there is a reason totem warrior is one of the best Barbarin options. all the other totem are really powerful too, it just happens the bear is the strongest by a hairs length.

[Amdy_vill]

The issue with this is it makes the totem barbarian garbage. Totem is an incredibly strong and versatile subclass, but it is by no means broken or even the Barbarians strongest one. There is no need to nerf it.

Removing exhaustion from berserker would let it be incredibly powerful offensively, and make it a relatively solid choice, even with contenders like Ancestral Guardian and Totem.

So I have noticed a lot of people bring stuff like this up and I would like to point out the almost every Barbarin sub gets a 3rd level bonus action damage ability without penalty. I think removing frenzy would not make it "incredibly powerful offensively" I think it would just bring it in line with other subclasses.

[Gtdead]

"Effectively doubling your health" can be done in numerous ways. Especially early, adding 2 AC has the potential to more than double your effective health. So no, bear isn't overpowered by any stretch of the imagination. It's easy to use and a fairly fun ability because seeing the effect is better than imagining it, but other than that, is a moderately strong ability in a fairly mediocre class.

[Sception]

The Barbarian is already balanced.

until you hit tier 3.

The real balance problem with the barbarian is that miniscule increases to damage on critical hits does not make for meaningful scaling in the latter half of character progression. An extra die of damage on crits, when most barbarians are only critting on 20s, is in the best case +0.35 average damage per attack. It's meaningless. Apart from standard ASIs and a subclass feature that may or may not be decent, the barbarian class basically stops dead after Relentless Rage at level 11. If you want to fix something, fix that.

Edit: I failed to account for advantage, but that only improves the total to 0.6825. still well below a single point of damage on average. a non-feature if ever there was one, and again this is the primary feature the latter half of barbarian has to offer.

[stoutstien]

It often gets touted as ridiculously good because "Barbarian" has become synonymous with "Durability" where your measure of strength as a Barb is whether you can take hits all day long.

You would have to take a lot of damage other than the standard B/P/S to make any real difference. Even in campaigns focused on elemental themes I would say at max 30% of the expected damage a raging barbarian will take would fall under bear's resistance. Then they still suffer from being rage dependant for said durability.

[ProsecutorGodot]

You would have to take a lot of damage other than the standard B/P/S to make any real difference. Even in campaigns focused on elemental themes I would say at max 30% of the expected damage a raging barbarian will take would fall under bear's resistance. Then they still suffer from being rage dependant for said durability.

I didn't say I personally agreed with the statement, I don't think sponging up damage is actually all that effective if it isn't accomplishing something else at the same time.

Most of the dangerous damage types that would fall under bear resistance are spells, many of them aoe. Sure, your Barb is taking less damage but he's already got more hit points to work with and the squishier characters around him are gaining no benefit from his durability in these cases.

[Gtdead]

Most of the dangerous damage types that would fall under bear resistance are spells, many of them aoe. Sure, your Barb is taking less damage but he's already got more hit points to work with and the squishier characters around him are gaining no benefit from his durability in these cases.

This is the correct answer. Barbarian is a low value target for most of the non physical damage types due to high health pool. Bear or no bear, it's always better to have your Barbarian take a fireball to the face than pretty much any other class that doesn't have both mitigation and dex save proficiency. Resistance to exotic damage types is a nice thing to have, but considering that the Barbarian already has low AC, especially if he lacks a shield and uses relentless (which is the most common playstyle), then the most efficient way to take him down is to just attack him with weapon attacks and rage already offers resistance to these types no matter the subclass.

[Quietus]

Disregarding the issues with Barbarians in tier 3-4, not getting any good abilities up until their capstone...

If I was to make any change to the barbarian, I'd start with the following.
- Activating rage is a free action, only available on your own turn. The bonus action cost conflicts with actually using some of the abilities that raging activates, and with the TWF berserker fantasy.
- Frenzied berserker doesn't hit you with exhaustion. Either change it so the bonus action attack is a 1d4 base, OR change it entirely so you can reroll one missed attack per turn while raging.

... That's largely it. Up until later levels, I don't have a problem with how barbarians work.

[TigerT20]

I feel that if the Barbarian needs any patching, it's in the bits that don't involve being hit by sticks or hitting things with sticks.

FYI I don't have Tashas so excuse me if they did stuff there