I haven't played barbarians much, so I was thinking of rolling one.
Corpse-eater sounded interesting at first. Oh, eat a kith/wilder/beast corpse and get +3 rage and heal +50 health? Neato. Oh, it takes 3s with 3s recovery and at 0 range? Oh, well, I guess it has to be balanced out somewhere.
But wait, this downside: "abilities cost 1 more rage"... what??
Never mind that your likely rage spenders are super cheap so +1 rage cost is a massive increase (with 6 rage you could do 6 barbaric roars on a vanilla barbarian vs... 3), but the +1 rage cost means that if you use three abilities in a fight, you have to eat at least one corpse in a fight just to do the same thing a vanilla barbarian can. I.E. with 6 rage you can barbarian blow three times with a vanilla barb, or barbarian blow twice, eat corpse, barbarian blow again and now you've just done what a normal barbarian could already do... you don't really start to benefit in most cases until the second corpse (and if you're spamming frenzy/shouts you actually need three corpses to turn a "profit"). I mean, sure, you heal 50 health/corpse, but this ignores the fact that you probably had to break off an engagement to go eat a random corpse and the opportunity cost of wasting 6 seconds to do this (likely more with armor). And in fights with vessels/spirits/primordials, you're just straight up worse than a vanilla barbarian. Seems like an awful lot of downside for little gain (e.g. long kith/wilder/beast fights where you can eat enough corpses to turn a "profit" all while that 6 second/corpse opportunity cost isn't somehow costing you the fight).
Am I missing something here? Is kith meat/forbidden pie just that good in practice?