Barbarians in Dragon Fights?

[Livegood118]

Or really, vs any other big targets like Thaos or Concelhaut etc ...

 

I've never found Barbarians useful at all in these kinds of fights other than getting rid of the initial mobs that might be surrounding the big dudes, which go down fast enough anyways. 

 

Maybe there are some kind of goofy tactics you can use with spelltongue? Scrolls maybe? 

 

I'd always prefer a Chanter for steady AoE with Dragon Thrashed in normal mob fights and then vs. big dudes letting rip with the Seven Nights frost spell and hitting targets for 400-600 damage.

 

I guess this is kind of like asking what strategies scissors are going to use vs rock rather than paper.

Edited December 5, 2016 by Livegood118

[Braven]

That is about it; handle the extras and provide distraction duty while another class deals with the dragon.  For solo, I suppose you would need the usual cheese tactics most classes are forced to deploy.  Tons of scrolls of confusion, tons of pre-buffing with food/drugs/etc, extra item slots talent, and then just abuse the poor enemy AI by attacking from afar.

[Dr <3]

Yes, you can try to "aim" well your heart of fury to kill as many extras as possible, but in the end you have to use scrolls for kill the main business. Stalwart defence is useful to stay alive anyway.

[Jojobobo]

I'll be trying it when I get there with my current unarmed solo Barb, I'm thinking Blackwarden's Breast and high DPS. Barb's tend to have defences in the right places (high Fort for example) and decent might to punch through the DR - just keep healing and I think it would be do-able. But no, I would say they're the most ideally suited class for a dragon fight by a wide margin.

[Elric Galad]

A barbarian with hallowed St Ydwen redeemer is basically Concelhaut kryptonite.

Use Heart of Fury in the middle of the adds crowd and the fight will suddenly become far easier...

For dragon... well, he is not so great.

Edited December 6, 2016 by Elric Galad

[rheingold]

Thing is, for me at least, the adds are the toughest part of the fights, not the big bad boss itself, so a Barb with HOF and dragon leap works wonders. But, yeah, sure one on one in boss fights is not their strength. And to be fair, they were intentionally designed that way. If you had a character with high enough defenses and single target dps - and a barbs crowd control it'd would be a bit silly.

[Kaylon]

VS dragons you should try to get as many adds as possible near the dragon, leap in the middle and then use HoF. The dragon will take carnage damage from all the adds you're able to hit.

[Braven]

I wonder if there is some way to kill dragons with massive DR and health, combined with barbaric retailation. With max CON, barbarians can reach several thousand health. Add in Binding wounds and it might be possible to reach 10k. Barbaric retailation is raw damage, so it doesn't matter that dragons have really high DR.

I am not sure what the highest passive CON is, but here are some off the top of my head without consumables:

20 Dwarf starting
1 effigy resentment
4 ring
4 duel Whispers of Yenwood (copied with wax)
2 prostitute
3 rest bonus
1 god boon
= 35 Con, which is 125% more endurance/health

On top of that, there are temporary ones like +6 from greater frenzy, food bonuses, and so forth.

At level 16, barbarian would have: 720 endurance (from 35 con). With a 6x health muliplier, it is 4,320 health (I think). Lost health while buffed with temporary bonuses will effectively be free, further increasing the health pool.

With binding wounds, field triage, and greater frenzy boosted might/con, you could probably have over 10k. If you get hit in melee by the dragon, say 100 times, before running out of health and deal 10 raw damage per retaliation (we will assume a lot of grazes), that is 1,000 passive damage to the dragon.

The main problem is endurance regeneration. I am not sure if stacks of moonwell scrolls can keep up, even with maximum healing multipliers, high might, and high INT.  I think that build would also want max DR (legendary plate, thick skin, second skin, etc) and enough defenses to avoid critical hits.  The scars armor could be good since it buffs DR further when "low" on health, which is a large amount with a max health barbarian and would have the range doubled because of the binding wounds talent (that you would wait until almost out of health to use)

 

Another race option could be Fire Godlike.  Then you get more DR at under 50% Endurance and an additional retaliation source.  Not sure how easy it would be to consistently stay under 50% endurance without dying, but given the huge endurance pool, it might be possible.  Having a maximum number of retaliation sources is probably better than absolute maximum health since eventually you run out of endurance regeneration and more retaliation will kill the dragon (and everything else) quicker.  I think someone said that Fire Godlike retaliation scales really well so it could still be a very significant damage addition.  The biggest downside of fire godlike is that you miss out on a helmet and there is a really good one for dealing with dragon breath (which you want to negate since retaliation triggers on melee, not breath attacks).  You also miss out on max item might and the +2 racial might nad +1 racial CON.  Might is really important since it helps both endurance regeneration and retaliation damage.  In fact, Might is probably still better than CON since more health doesn't help if you can't gain endurance fast enough.

 

For stats, you have very little need for DEX or Resolve, so those get dumped.  You will want max might, con, perception (retaliation rolls accuracy).   Decent INT is helpful for endurance regeneration duration and carnage range for killing off the minions with heart of fury.

Edited December 12, 2016 by Braven

[Remix]

Before my computer died I had a barb in my potd party. I had two tanks that I would send at crowds and bosses first and then I would use my barb to either flank the boss or guard my casters against mobs.

 

I also slapped items with second chance on him as soon as possible. Athletics, ancient memory and having a tank paladin gave him a lot of survivability. Barbs have huge health pools. As long as you keep healing and reviving them they will do a lot of natural damage.

[peddroelm]

100 dragon hits to do 1k damage ..that would take a lot of time (assuming you could survive them all).  Frenzy and other buffs will expire long before that. 

 

Wounding dagger with 0 recovery would probably do orders of magnitude more damage during this time. 

[Boeroer]

Barbaric retaliation only works when you get hit in melee. Breath Attacks and other AoE thingies won't trigger it.

[Remix]

The barb that I used was a simple human with base stats of 19 might, 19 int and 10 everywhere else.

 

He survived just about every boss fight with my last potd party and he had done the most overall damage by a pretty significant degree (although I'm sure that's because the game doesn't really keep track of damage done by the Chanter's flame/slash chant).

 

This was a really carefully planned party, though. The strategy was based around the notion of causing constant foe aoe damage and lots of cc.

 

I was able to do things like take on the revived Raedric and enter the massive battle for caed nua underleveled and still come out on top. By the time I started doing the 3rd tier bounties I was pretty much unstoppable and my barb was almost never KO'd.