Barbarian weapon swapping

[gladi8or]

I'm just curious what the reasoning for shapestrong rage really is. Is there really any purpose to making you have to go through the entire process of going to large, then swapping weapon, then back to medium all just to swap a weapon? Is this necessary? When you look at the output of barbarians, they aren't any better at damage dealing that anything else. The rages are wonderful, but so is mortal strike and called shot, sneak attack etc. Is it really necessary to go through the tedious process to swap weapons on a barbarian? I honestly think that using shapestrong rage could be more useful for something like allowing the toon to use mercurial greatsword or some other massive weapon as a medium sized toon rather than messing with weapon swapping. Just my two cents.

[Deleted]

Play a small character and use medium weapons and never have that problem!

[desocupado]

A flat +20% damage would work even better - without size shenigans.
Maybe the barbarian himself should permanently be larger (or not, since it's useless being larger due changes in KD and Disarm and loses in AC, AB).

[KnightErrant]

@ Gladi8or:
The reasoning would likely be that you could be/play a large toon if you wanted with any race you has access too.
The ability to equip a large weapon and a shield and change back to medium was originally a bug/exploit in the system.
iirc when a bugfix was figured out so many players had double weapon Barbarians that they left it as it was...


KE.

[chirality]

also, when comparing damage output with other classes, barb w/ shield is getting the nerfed 2h%, so yeah, in current meta they're not known for doing more damage than other 2hers. nonetheless it's a strong class and can be played as a "normal" 2her glass cannon without shapechange, and definitely competitive. but before the nerf, easily top tier dps, actually barbs had rep as "highest damaging" class in early 2h days--true or not, they were definitely extremely strong. and even longer ago, in double weap heyday, afaik them and cot had rep as top dogs. point being shapestrong now seems lame, but that's because we've been using it for lil more than just "changing size if you want to use a larger weapon/shield combo", which would be a "cool" (albeit gimmicky) feature to give more build options, instead of being hallmark feature that enables either double weap or 2h dmg with a shield. consider that it's pretty clunky mechanic because you're literally doing something that doesn't make much sense and isn't really intended behavior--cheezily changing size multiple times to get 2h% bonus (or double weap attacks) *with* a large weap and a shield (and not losing 1 ac/ab from being large on top).

not judging that one way or the other, but it's not like barb is a weak class that would suck without that gimmicky ability. imo almost as bad is the deafening rage, which maybe wasn't a big deal way back when only doing hells, and/or with no bard for clang, but it feels pretty outdated now. i think changing the static sonic dmg buff into something else for that feature would be a good way to go for the future. could come up with some ideas for what to do instead, if there's no way to only add the damage if weap already has sonic, maybe change it to some kind of debuff (sonic imm%, skill or save penalty to synergize with rage aura, do something like silence onhit etc). shapestrong clunkiness + deafening clunkiness is really what made barb into something that gets a lot more hate than love from vets/pros in recent years.

as far as enabling merc gs (not that anyone in their right mind would bother unless huge weaps get a buff ), i didn't test in a while, but last time i checked that actually was a thing shapestrong lets you do. and even use it w/ a shield at medium size.