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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EerieEgg" data-source="post: 7834130" data-attributes="member: 7016181">Coming back to Berserker's "Retaliate", is the feature overrated?For sometime on paper at least, I thought it would be quite good -- especially since you can provoke Opportunity Attacks during your own turn (that you may resist the damage from to boot) to guarantee it triggers and to gain "Reckless Attack" on your "Retaliation".In practice, however -- I now think the ability kinda sucks purely because DMs can deny you your Retaliate -- and will probably do so when you're up against "intelligent" enemies. For example, I've had two DM that simply have enemies ignore hitting the Barbarian at all -- they put their damage towards other more "squishy' chars.They also have enemies simply not take the Opportunity Attack you give them if you're a Berserker. Therefore, Retaliate most often does not come into play at all.Additionally, if you do Retaliate, you then threaten no Opportunity Attack for the turn which means your opponent is free to move away from you at that point -- maybe not a huge deal, but it is relevant.Basically since intelligent foes will either not attack the barbarian (at least not til he's the last man standing) OR will focus them with mental saves that they're specifically weak to, I actually now think Retaliate is at least somewhat overrated.Any ability that DMs can "meta game" and screw you out of using is not an ability that I really want or like. "Divine Fury" is great on the other hand because you almost always get it and your DM can't do much to deny you from getting it for example.Zealot's "Rage Beyond Death" is an ability I also think I don't like (though I also don't like the idea of infinite HP Druid) -- I'd go so far as to say that ability maybe is poorly designed because it is completely binary -- either you CANNOT be killed anything in the encounter (physical damage won't cut it) or your enemy has one of the counters (sleep/calm emotions/power word kill/etc) and the ability is near useless. DMs will simply "meta game" to have an answer prepared for it OR it makes you literally unkillable if no such answer is provided for enemies to have. I don't think that's very fun in either case since either your DM is meta gaming to counter you or your enemies literally pose no threat to you at all.</blockquote>

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