Demon or Sage Barb?

We actually have a while thread about demon vs sage. But maybe its biased as its called "why are demon barbs superior"

It really depends on what you want, what is your style and what point you intend to reach in the game.

Demons and sages usually have a different build and play style.
Demons have a bunch of bonusses to critical strike chance. It is not so impressive to crit if your damage is mediocre at best anyway, so demons like to go max strength and no vit. This makes an offensive barb. The damage output of such a barb equals or surpasses the DD of the typical DD classes like sins, archers and psys. Meanwhile his defences are still much better than all those classes, but they have range and/or superior CC skills to balance that in pvp.

If you like to play defensive and have lots of hitpoints, sage probably fits the picture better. If you have 300 strength and 500 vit. What good are those crits anyway? 2x little is still not much. You want that bit extra HPs and defence that sages get. Combine that with all the defensive options you can rotate (invoke, dew star, solid shield) and you are nearly immortal.


Territory wars is the purpose of life for most of the best geared people. Barbs have a very important role in there by pulling the catapults that destroy the enemy base. This requires a defensive playsstyle as you need to minimize the chance of dying to maximize the effect of the catapult. The team needs vit sage barbs who are tough enough to withstand the damage of a dozen end game DDs attacking them. Unfortunately for my faction, my brain is not wired for that. I am a BM, not a barb

In other team PvP, i think the vit sage barb is less usefull since while the enemy team cannot easilly kill him, they can just pretty much ignore him in most situations. Although he is of course still the best flag carrier, but thats pretty insignificant.

In 1v1 PvP, i feel like demon strength works better because you can kill people much faster. You may be able to survive fewer hits, but an enemy that is dead wont be hitting you anymore so killing faster = taking fewer hits. When charms come into play, the sage barbs only chance of killing his enemies will be if they stand around waiting for an armageddon. On the other hand, the sage vit barb will also be near unkillable for any 1 single enemy. So more drawn out fights that might end in both parties just giving up on the endless charm ****. (that already happens quite regularly in HA vs HA fights even if there are no vit builds involved)

In PvE, i have not a shred of doubt that indeed the demon barb is far superior to the sage. There is simply nothing in the game that is strong enough te be a danger to the demons weaker defences and with nearly every hit being a crit (always use sunder or onslought before doing anything else) he makes short work of any mobs. Tanking as mentioned is surviving + keeping agro. In the very beginning your gear might be of such quality that you feel surviving is an issue to work on, but as soon as you have mid refined G16 (the standard that is worn by the vast majority of the players) surviving is easy no matter how you built your barb. Agro skills dont scale well with gear so you'll soon find them useless in comparison to pure damage output.

Dont look too much at the details like you mention. The health loss from armageddon is not even a factor at all. You will quickly learn to always have bloodpaint on you when doing PvE and it eliminates the health loss pretty much completely. (bp makes every AOE you cast between many mobs an instant full heal) Also many other differences are pretty minor. Its the total play style picture that you choose between. Sages are a little tougher, demons have a better damage output trough critical strike bonusses. These differences are greatly magnified if you fit your vit/str to your demon sage choise to make 2 totally different toons.
Demon vit or sage strength barbs would be suboptimal and unlogical mixes imo.

I know I havent played in like 10 months but sage has yet the aggro needed, demon barbs are nice no doubt that but sage can be more powerful than demons in so many ways. This is my own opinion that I have when I started to play...

_Arias_ - Harshlands wrote: »

I know I havent played in like 10 months but sage has yet the aggro needed, demon barbs are nice no doubt that but sage can be more powerful than demons in so many ways. This is my own opinion that I have when I started to play...

No sense say sage is better or demon is better.
Depend on your play style and what you want to do with your barb.

Sage full vit = better for cata barb and survive in massive pvp.
Demon full vit = nice for cata barb and big armageddon.
Demon full str = better for 1vs1

Btw to tank toad in human form with T3 axes maybe you have weak r999 in squad or they simply pay attention to not steal aggro. I do the same with r999 +12 and i have some problem with +12 sins and archers.

phreyyy wrote: »

Sage pure str b:surrender

Sage pure strength is the best thing to do while PvEing in anticapation of restatting to vit in the future when you are OP, bored of PvE and will do only TW catapulling b:pleased