The Barbarian is the only character left from D2. Just because this giant clad in steel hero became favorite for many, not only for his looks, but probably mainly for his effectiveness in the battle field.
He killed easily, was very hard to defeat and gave loads of buffs.
Would Barbarian in Diablo 3 be the same? I dare to say – hell yeah, and even better!
Blizzard gave him this time a very big variation of skills, many of which seem to be useful in PvP. What comes with it is a great amount potentially playable builds and functions for Barbarian in the Team.

So, what the new Barbarian can and can’t do? He can kill for sure, in many ways, because the arsenal of his offensive skills expanded greatly. Compared to previous Diablo, Barbarian got a lot more territorial and distance skills, which increases his chances in the battle with characters fighting from distance. What deserve special attention are skills like Weapon Throw with Throwing Hammer rune, Ancient Spear and combination of Whirlwind with Hurricane rune and Sprint skill. The last seems to be most lethal.

Our new barbarian’s granted with abilities improving his movement. Leap(Call of Arreat/Death from Above), mentioned before Sprint and furious charge appear to be more than just interesting. Sadly, we could choose only six of this abilities, which leads us to abandon some of our great stuff. However, the choice between various abilities will depend on player own preference, rather than "must have" opinions, so we shouldn't suffer from lack of some abilities.

The other type of barbarian will be "one man army". Effective rather in melee range, which makes him interesting option for mirror matches. Blizzard gave barbarian many buffs, which can be hold practical without any breaks. Too bad that our buffs for team suffered a lot, which leads us to "one man army" strategy, but speaking of : Here we use what mother nature gave us in excess - fury.

Battle rage skills (Marured's rage), War cry (Invigorate) and Wrath of the berserker great complement themselves, which in addition to our Whirlwind(Wind shear) makes us old fashioned killing machine. To these skills finely fits passive abilities like Ruthless, weapon master, inspiring presence, animosity, unforgiving, but here choice is also very difficult.
And now last, but not least of this jig-saws, something like black horse in race :Barbarian gained awesome possibilities of crowd controlling, in his case it is stuns, knockbacks, and slows - abilities which comes very handy for e.g. in TvT. Seismic slam (stagger), Threatning Shout (intimidate) and Ground Stomp(deafening crash) seems to be dedicated just to those match. We should pay attention to combined abilities Ground stomp (deafening crash) with Earthquake (chilling earth). With good timing, using only by this combo we should score a potential "insta win".
These are just three rough vision. Fortunately D3 leaves us plenty of ways in hybrid builds, and any skills change could be useful while fits to current opponent.
At last few words about items, despite we haven't got much informations about them now. I can say now one thing - thanks to our new damage system we should choose wisely between our weapons - 1h, 2h, or dual wield? I hope that choice will be everyone personal preferences, not only choosing shield + sword because of someone thoughts about that setup.
To sum up, our new barbarian seems to be very mortal opponent to each of new class and core of almost every team. We can just hope that Bllizard will provide us patch introducing PVP system as soon as possible.

This text is my personal thoughts, which accurate everyone should be able to verify maybe in fall of 2012.

Torgoch 2012-05-08 21:49