Is the Barbarian overpowered?

[cmad1977]

Short answer: no.

Long answer: Nooo.

 

[Gladius Legis]

Definitely not. They're weak at ranged combat, for one. And while they have high round-to-round DPR (or at least the typical STR-builds do), they don't have any real burst damage capability. Nothing like Divine Smite or Action Surge. They need to be as survivable as they are to justify themselves as an option.

Oh, and DEX-Barbarians, while their AC is potentially ridiculous, deal no damage to speak of (since both Reckless Attack and Rage damage bonus only works with STR).

 

[Satyrn]

Oh, and DEX-Barbarians, while their AC is potentially ridiculous, deal no damage to speak of (since Reckless Attack only works with STR).

I kinda regret not trying out the Dex-based berserker gnome with an 8 strength I randomly generated. It looked terrible on paper, so I switched to battlemaster, but I've since grown curious to see how it would actually work out in play.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Hello there,

Looking at the barbarian in 5e I was surprised by how some of his abilities work. Mainly the defensive ones.

1) Rage apparently gives you resistance (half damage) to absolutely all physical attacks, is that right?

2) Unarmored Defence allows for a better AC than a fighter in heavy armor, possibly?
In this case one could eventually hit 20 in both Dex and Con, for an AC20, and use a shield with that for a total of AC22, while losing very little damage potential if you're using a Finesse weapon.

Adding everything you could have:

• An AC22 Barbarian
• that takes 1/2 damage from all attacks
• still has +5 to hit and damage from Dex

And as a bonus:

• high Dex saves (possibly always with advantage)
• a gigantic pool of HP with 1d12 + Max Con
• possibly immunity to fear and charm, making even "mind" effects harder to stop him.

This all seems way overpowered to me at first glance. To the point that I'm wondering why bother with other melee classes (unless specifically for flavour of course), or with armour.

But since I'm not very familiar with 5e standards yet, I might be missing some crucial details, or this might not be so powerful as it seems at first glance.

Any thoughts on that?

PS: Of course you could just not min/max abilities, and a Barbarian with Finesse sounds a little ridiculous, but it's still weird that the most "optimized" Barbarian possible would be a high-Dex Finesse one, instead of your classic raging brute.

1) It's not the physical attacks that kill you, it's the mental.

2) If you roll hp, and you get very lucky. In practice, in a point buy game, most barbarians have dex and con between 14 and 16, and are better off wearing medium armour.

3) As some have already pointed out, rage doesn't stack with finesse. So you can have AC or you can have damage, but not both on the same character.

In my experience, barbarians are weak compared to fighters and paladins (the actual 5e OP class), and are dull to play.

 

[Xeviat]

Barbarian damage resistance makes up for their offensive ability (reckless attack) giving attackers advantage to hit them. They're hit "twice" as often, and take half damage.

 

[Charlaquin]

The Barbarian is very hard to kill. Big pool of HP, damage resistance, and can get some pretty high AC. But they don’t put our as much damage as an optimized fighter, especially if the barbarian sacrifices Strength for Dex and loses out on Rage and Reckless Attack. And they can’t really leverage their toughness because they have no ability to deter enemies from ignoring them and attacking their squishier, more damage-dealing allies. So I’d say no, they’re not overpowered at all. They’re great if you want a character who can survive almost anything, but that’s about it.

 

[TwoSix]

A Dex barbarian is fantastically tanky at high level, but you're missing a lot of context. Which is totally understandable, because as you've stated, you're pretty new to 5e.

1) Assuming point buy or standard array (which is important for considerations of inter-class balance), a level 1 Dex Barbarian will have an 18 AC unarmored (+3 Dex +3 Con +2 shield). Any heavy armor martial will be comparable at level 1 (16 AC chain +2 shield) and even higher if they go for Defense fighting style.

2) While a level 16 barbarian (4 ASIs total, raising Con to 20 and Dex to 20) will hit a 22 AC, heavy armor martials will be hitting a 21 AC as soon they can afford plate, which will usually be in the mid single digit levels. The martials are ahead in AC for the bulk of the game. The heavy armor characters also have a greater chance of gaining magic items that affect their defense, assuming a game where magic items are randomly determined.

3) A Dex barbarian is also only going to be doing 2 attacks at 1d8+5, which might seem good initially but is actually pretty poor damage in the overall context of 5e. They're missing out on the extra rage damage from using Strength attacks, and the accuracy bonus of Reckless Attack. Not to mention they can't use the bulk of the best of the damaging feats, like Great Weapon Master and Polearm Master. A tank fighter will have a 3rd attack, and a tank paladin will have Improved Divine Smite plus spells.

This isn't to say a Dex barbarian is bad! As you noted, it is extremely survivable; all those benefits you listed are real and powerful. But they're making a serious dent into their offensive power to do so, compared to a Str barbarian or any of the martial classes. Honestly, if I was putting together a Dex barbarian build, I'd probably favor Barbarian 5/Rogue X, assuming you're allowing multiclass. Then you're getting Sneak Attack plus Uncanny Dodge on top of the benefits of Rage and Unarmored Defense.

 

[Kupursk]

Thanks for the clarifications, folks.

I hadn't noticed the fact that you need to use Str on your attacks to get Rage bonus to damage.

I guess the best you could achieve initially, if using the standard point buy system, is picking 15, 14, 14, 10, 10, 8. Then use the variant human to boost Dex and Con, and then pick an initial feat that gives +1 to either Dex or Con. You'd end up with these values, in order: 14, 16, 16, 10, 10, 8.

By level 8 you'd have a (supposedly) very strong AC of 20 using a shield, while still using your 14 Str to attack gaining the Rage bonus, for quite respectable damage, I guess, even if not maxed.

Yeah a full plate could give you the same AC, but having the same AC as a full plate while "naked" feels quite powerful, if you consider you'd also have beastly amounts of HP, great Dex/Con saves (which are two of the most used), and will be taking only 1/2 damage from most attacks, possibly "doubling" your HP. And you can still push those values higher with more levels.

I guess how powerful this is really depends on the campaign you're playing:

* If full plates or wealth are abundant to your players, it's less of a big deal. Otherwise if they're uncommon or wealth is tight, a suit of full plate costs a whooping 1,500gp.

* If magic is quite common, then the 1/2 from physical attacks is also less of a big deal. But if you're playing a low-magic, grittier campaign, where almost every attack is claws, bites, blades and maces... taking 1/2 from everything might be really overpowered.

So on second thought, the AC is good but not as powerful as I initially thought.
But the damage resistance might be insane depending on the setting you're playing.

 

[FrogReaver]

For a barbarian to do really good damage he uses a two handed weapon, great weapon master feat and reckless attack.

That means he gets 17ish ac with 14 dex and medium armor. Enemies get advantage to hit him. He resists most damage. All in all a barbarian that does really good damage isn’t really any more tanky than an average front line character.

You can play a really tanky barbarian but his damage is going to greatly suffer.

As such I don’t see the issue. A fighter will do comparable damage to the damage barbarian and be just as tanky. Or the fighter will do much better damage than the tanky barbarian but be a lot less tanky.

All in all I don’t see the barbarian being OP compared to other melee classes.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Thanks for the clarifications, folks.

I hadn't noticed the fact that you need to use Str on your attacks to get Rage bonus to damage.

I guess the best you could achieve initially, if using the standard point buy system, is picking 15, 14, 14, 10, 10, 8. Then use the variant human to boost Dex and Con, and then pick an initial feat that gives +1 to either Dex or Con. You'd end up with these values, in order: 14, 16, 16, 10, 10, 8.

By level 8 you'd have a (supposedly) very strong AC of 20 using a shield, while still using your 14 Str to attack gaining the Rage bonus, for quite respectable damage, I guess, even if not maxed.

Yeah a full plate could give you the same AC, but having the same AC as a full plate while "naked" feels quite powerful, if you consider you'd also have beastly amounts of HP, great Dex/Con saves (which are two of the most used), and will be taking only 1/2 damage from most attacks, possibly "doubling" your HP. And you can still push those values higher with more levels.

I guess how powerful this is really depends on the campaign you're playing:

* If full plates or wealth are abundant to your players, it's less of a big deal. Otherwise if they're uncommon or wealth is tight, a suit of full plate costs a whooping 1,500gp.

* If magic is quite common, then the 1/2 from physical attacks is also less of a big deal. But if you're playing a low-magic, grittier campaign, where almost every attack is claws, bites, blades and maces... taking 1/2 from everything might be really overpowered.

So on second thought, the AC is good but not as powerful as I initially thought.
But the damage resistance might be insane depending on the setting you're playing.

You may also want to pay attention to how rage works -- skip a round of attacking and don't get attacked and rage is done, soend another. If you're doing set pieces, this is no big deal, but a running encounter absolutely murders rage efficiency.