D&D 5E Berserker is balanced with Zealot without exhaustion from Frenzy

I ran some math. I used the average assumed adventuring day of 7 encounters of 3 rounds each. No feats or multiclassing are used. Starting Strength is 16. Our whiteroom warriors wield greatswords.

This is their average DPR over the 21 rounds, taking into account how many rages they get, etc. For the Berserker, I let them have Frenzy for free every single time they raged.

There are two columns for the Berserker, one with and one without Retaliation figured in.

[Edit: The damage for 4th-level Zealot should be 16.]



As you can see, the Berserker starts off doing a bit more damage on average, but the Zealot catches up at level 12, and surpasses him from 14 on.

Enter the Berserker’s nifty Retaliation feature. The feature introduces new variables, so I had to use rough estimates. 1) You don’t get the benefit of Reckless Attack with Retaliation, so I decided to only count 75% of the damage from these attacks. 2) We don’t have a parity of class features here like we have with attacks (you just assume all attacks hit for both characters if they have the same attack bonus, because any variable will affect both equally). Without parity, I’m not assuming that the conditions for Retaliation come up every round. Barbarians do get damaged a lot, and I went with an assumption that this feature would trigger on 75% of rounds.

With those considerations noted, we can see some estimated effects of Retaliation. Basically it prevents their damage from dropping below the Zealot’s at level 14, instead pushing him well ahead.

So the Berserker will be just a little bit ahead of damage at lower levels, even for a couple levels, and then solidly ahead at higher levels.

(If you’re like me, you don’t care for the idea of the Berserker being even for those levels, and their lead at lower levels looks a bit slim. The good news is that the longer your fights are the better the Berserker is. So if you can manage to get your average battle to stay above 3 rounds, you’ll fix that issue.)

So how do the rest of the subclass features balance? Generally quite well.
- The Berserker’s slightly higher damage at the start is balanced by the Zealot’s Warrior of the Gods perk.
- Mindless Rage and Fanatical Focus are well-balanced. The first is situationally awesome, while the second is going to save your bacon regularly. I prefer Fanatical Focus myself, but I think they are more or less balanced.
-Zealous Presence is really good. It most definitely kicks the laughably situational (IMO) Intimidating Presence out of the running. Not directly balanced here.
-Rage Beyond Death is great, as is Retaliation. Retaliation is probably a better, which is good, because it then makes up for the unimpressive Intimidating Presence.

As an additional note, one shift towards Zealot’s favor is that Divine Fury triggers on your first hit—making it more reliable than Frenzy at dealing its extra damage. Because of this, Zealots probably effectively do more damage than a Berserker before 14^th level using an average adventuring day. This is unfortunate, but I can probably accept it. There may be other such issues I haven't considered--hopefully they'll lean in favor of the Berserker.

Now, to review the point of all of this—this balance (which is really close, but probably favors the Zealot on paper)—is based on there being NO exhaustion at the end of Frenzy. I assumed Berserkers can just Frenzy every time they rage with no drawbacks. If you do not make that assumption, then Zealots are clearly going to blow them out of the water.

With the removal of exhaustion, it’s close enough to make me happy.

Maybe WotC will print up a sidebar variant option to drop the exhaustion penalty from Frenzy as long as they had bacon for breakfast or something.

Congrats, you've successfully demonstrated that if you change the rules for one thing you can make it equal to something else.

ccs said:

Congrats, you've successfully demonstrated that if you change the rules for one thing you can make it equal to something else.

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No, he proved that the exhaustion penalty on the berserker is indeed needlessly punitive and that even with its absence the subclass does not significantly outperform its peers. It's a reasonable piece of supporting evidence to the argument that has been espoused for a while that the berserker is underpowered as a result of this handicap. Unless you're somehow arguing that there is a benefit in keeping the berserker in its awful state then there's obviously more value in his data than a reductive goal of numeric similarity.

I personally play a 14 Berzerker in AL so purely RaW and its been fine. That being said, in a home group we tried replacing the level 10 ability with a con save vs exaustion with the DC increasing by 5 on each succesful save. It was a pretty good adjutment. I personally am fine with both classes where they are but I can see a desire for the exaustion being removed as valid. I doubt it will happen on an official level however.

Exhaustion makes Frenzy a feature to avoid. It's written as if you didn't need a frikkin fifth level spell to remove it.

Without Frenzy, Berserker is a subclass to avoid. The only fix is to not play it, unless you deliberately want to give yourself a challenge.

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Dualazi said:

No, he proved that the exhaustion penalty on the berserker is indeed needlessly punitive and that even with its absence the subclass does not significantly outperform its peers. It's a reasonable piece of supporting evidence to the argument that has been espoused for a while that the berserker is underpowered as a result of this handicap. Unless you're somehow arguing that there is a benefit in keeping the berserker in its awful state then there's obviously more value in his data than a reductive goal of numeric similarity.

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Knew that long ago

A decent houserule I've seen is to make berserkers ignore exhaustion penalties while they're raging.

I would point out that Berzerker/Frenzy probably jumps ahead once GWM enters the picture, but I think we're all aware that GWM is a bad idea anyway.

TwoSix said:

I would point out that Berzerker/Frenzy probably jumps ahead once GWM enters the picture, but I think we're all aware that GWM is a bad idea anyway.

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It's still an important piece of the puzzle to consider IMO

I've read or heard several times from Mearls or Crawford that subclasses and classes are "asymmetrical." I wouldn't expect the Berserker to be equivalent to the Zealot. I would expect the Zealot to be fun to play with all of its features. With respect to the Berserker being fun to play I feel the one character I have in an AL game is enjoying himself. He's currently level 7. The player is not much of an optimizer.