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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Systole" data-source="post: 5710469" data-attributes="member: 93930">Inspired as I was by Treantmonk's wizard guide (and more recently, by Stream of the Sky's Witch Handbook), I figured I'd try my hand at a barbarian guide. I would never have thought that this was really necessary, but Ultimate Combat has dumped a bunch of truly subpar options on the table, so I think the newbies out there deserve a warning sign on some of these things. In terms of classes, barbarians are probably mechanically the simplest. This doesn't make them bad, by any means. I personally consider chopping hordes of goblins into a large pool of chunky, greenish salsa to have a quaint and timeless humor, sort of like the role-playing equivalent of fart jokes. However, if you're really looking to challenge yourself with stealth and sneak attacks and battlefield control, barbarians are not for you. That said, barbarians offer exceptional role-playing opportunities. You can be the life of your adventuring party. Eventually, your group will need someone to run screaming into a horde of orcs, or to render a dragon flabbergasted by reckless idiocy, or maybe just to kick in a door and smash everything inside into little bitty pieces. THAT'S WHERE YOU SHINE! And outside of combat, you can keep yourself occupied by drinking and punching livestock in the face (in whatever order you'd like), while the rest of the party makes silly Gather Information checks.   Barbarian Tactics Step 1: Charge the enemy.Step 2: Hit the enemy really hard with the biggest weapon you can find.Step 3: Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you (a) win or (b) die. That's all you need to know, really.   A Note on Rage Powers and Feats In your career as a barbarian, you will have to make choices in regards to feats and rage powers. If you used Intelligence as a dump stat, you may find these choices overwhelming to the point of shouting things like, "ME NO UNDERSTAND! ME SMASH PUNY ADVANCED PLAYERS GUIDE!" Here's a helpful guideline to allow you to select the best feat for your barbarian: If it lets you smash monsters better, it's good. If it does not help you smash monsters better, it is bad.  Note (and this is the tricky part) that things like doors and tables do not count as monsters. Paizo has put a lot of tricksy rage powers in here which target furniture. These are not worth taking. The important concept here is, that besides the smashing monsters and smashing furniture abilities, there are a lot of abilities which let you avoid damage. These are almost as useless as the anti-furniture abilities. A barbarian does not win fights by attrition. He wins fights by pounding the ever-loving crap out of everything as fast as possible. If you want to play a barbarian, that the goal you must aspire to. Now, there is one single exception to this rule: Better Will saves are also good. Got all that? Fantastic. Let's proceed.</blockquote>

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