Barb Question

It's not a bad move, if all you want to do is pull catas and drop a few armas here and there.

What are your goals?


Barbs are easy to specialize but expensive to make well rounded. A catapuller tends to make a lousy tank, a clawbarb tends to make a lousy catabarb, a dex build/str build tends to be mediocre at both but not great at either. And none of them are cheap to make "excellent". All of them have their advantages and weaknesses, all of them have a certain niche in pk.

I found my favorite barbs were all dex barbs with 100-120 dexterity. These barbs did the best at holding aggro, so I modeled my barb after that then decided to go clawbarb at 100. I had no interest in pulling cata and like the versatility and found that claw barbs make the best pve tanks and have more survivability than a vit build. 130 extra vit is a small amount compared to what refines give you so I don't feel I lose anything, but I am sort of envious at vit barbs that have an easier time doing pulling full deltas. Then again, I hold aggro and "tank" better than most once the mobs are pulled. I know there are stength barbs with +12 R9 axes and 2 Drakeflames, but honestly their damage is about equal to an average 3.33 aps bm or 2.86 aps sin, and with FR spam and aggro skills they can compete for aggro against a 4.0 bm or 3.33 sin, but even excellent skilled +12 R9 barbs will have their aggro ripped at will by a 5 aps bm or 4 aps sin. And for Vit barbs, the best thing they can do in PvE for endgame is devour to help others tank.


So we can't really suggest a vit barb or a str barb or whatever until we know your goals. I kind of went off on a rant, trying to explain that its a spectrum and its hard to be an all-around barb but here is how I view it.

Vit<

---

>DD
Useful in PvP (TW, 1v1)<

---

>Usefulness in PvE (tanks, support DD)

Where do you want to be on the spectrum?

For me, I find that 2/3 STR and 1/3 VIT seems to work well so far. I do like the isea of using resets later on down the road to see how it changes things.

Where as I dont know all the finer points of aggro and catapulls and such, I tend not to worry too much and just have fun in this game. If you can afford it, building your own armor and weapons is always a good thing, ans well as sockets and refinement. Too bad your limited on how many characters you can have per account, and are limited to two accounts. Still, that should give me plenty of characters to experiment with.

For my barb I have full r9 so I went with this build stat wise.

Modified stats:
VIT: 501
STR: 330
MAG: 19 (left base stat wise)
DEX: 77 (60 base stats)

My barb has 36.5k hp in tiger form and hits fairly decent.