Basically can anyone give me any suggestions for how to improve overall damage as well as the best way to keep my character from killing everyone in my party? (I already know about things like righteous wrath and iron heart surge but I would rather not bother since both are debatable)
Now THAT's funny... Your real name isn't Alannis Morissette, is it?
I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but you want to play a
Frenzied Berserker, and moreover, you want know how to play one that
doesn't suffer any ill-effects from Frenzy, and you're rejecting Iron Heart Surge and Righteous Wrath because they're "debatable"?
Really?
Balls o' brass man, balls o' brass. Consider my headgear well and truly doffed.
OK, keeping my tongue out of my cheek - mostly - and trying to answer the question at face value, try the following suggestions on "how not to kill your party because of a frenzy":
1) Don't be a Frenzied Berserker. It's a foolproof method, and your DM won't hate you.
2) Be a Frenzied Berserker, but only take two levels. That way, you only get one frenzy per day and you can just get rid of it first thing in the morning by running more than 3+Con rounds away from your party and smacking yourself in the face until you lose it. This ought not to take long. Alright, you're missing out on the whole Frenzy deal but what the hell: you still got yourself Supreme Cleave, right?
3) Multiclass Warblade (by no means a stupid thing to do anyway). Max out your Concentration skill. Take the Moment of Perfect Mind maneuver at 1st level to replace your Will save with a Concentration check once per encounter. Take careful note of the last line...
Moment of Perfect Mind said:
You can use this maneuver any time you would be required to make a Will save. Make a Concentration check instead of the Will save and use the result of that check to determine the save's success. You must use this maneuver before you attempt the Will save. A result of a natural 1 on your Concentration check is not an automatic failure.
You should be able to get your Concentration check into the stratosphere without too much difficulty. I know it's not foolproof but it's better than nothing, and not automaticaly failing on a 1 is
good. Make sure the first thing you do once you've used Moment of Perfect Mind is recovering your maneuvers.
4) Craft Contingent Spell + [any one of several options] Yes, this is going to involve someone other than your character, but it'll work. Probably only once, unless you're going to get
very clever with your contingency wording, but your best hope in any case is probably going to involve stacking lots of fallback plans and hoping your options don't run out. The best idea I can come up with for having several contingent spells that will go off as you want them to is to have them command-word activated so any other party member can holler one out if need be.
5) On the subject of stacking options, max your Will save
hard. Trouble is, later in the game you can find yourself routinely taking 50 points of damage in a go, and you're simply not going to make a DC 60 Will save unless you've got some sort of auto-succeed buff running. As such, a high Will save is only really going to help with those once-per-round DC 20 checks. Even so, Cumbrous Will, Steadfast Determination and so on will help you keep a lid on your inner psychotic murderer.
6) Travel with a
Bag o' Rats. Make sure everyone else has one, too. Bust them out whenever you have a spare moment before a fight and keep them at heel so you've always got something close to slaughter that isn't a party member. Hopefully this will buy you enough time to succeed on the save... after all, once you've put a few of these measures in place it's probably only the initial DC 10-plus-damage saves that will be a problem. Unless you get damaged again. Um...
7) Take Leadership. Get a cohort. Get a
Wizard cohort: this is never a bad thing in any case. Give
him the Bag o' Rats... or just ensure that he's always stocked and ready with prevent-the-guy-with-anger-management-issues-from-killing-his-friends spells (
grease being one of the most foolproof
and the most entertaining). By mid levels, he'll be able to handle all the Contingent Spell wossnames and you got him with
your feat so it counts as
your character handling it, yes?
And, hey, you've got a pet wizard.
You can even give the whole thing a back-story: maybe you're a member of a (justifiably) feared Barbarian tribe whose warriors always segue into FB when they're sufficiently of a high level... By tradition, you get a barbarian magic-user following you around to stop you randomly slaughtering people you'd only regret killing later. Being such a magic-user is probably a high-status occupation back in your homeland. With danger pay.
8) Talk a level in Thayan Knight whilst your party/cohort Wizard takes a level in Red Wizard. You then auto-fail saves against the Wizard, giving him less-humiliating options for stopping you. I appreciate that this doesn't sound ideal, but it's infinitely preferable to what'll happen to you if you end up actually taking a swing at the Wizard and fail to kill him on the first attempt.
Personally I'd go for options 1 or 2: the Frenzied Berserker just isn't so good that it's worth all the game-bending antics you have to go through to allow it to work with an adventuring party. If your DM goes with the Righteous Wrath fix, all well and good, otherwise why is your party hanging out with someone who could randomly decide to butcher them because he's stubbed his toe?
In these post-Tome of Battle and Psionic Handbook days, there is plenty of non-magical crazy crap around to help you increase damage output without resorting to playing someone who's at best a potential liability and at worst a TPK waiting to happen.
