Diablo® III

Barbarian will surely be the beginner's favorite for the normal difficulty because of the low monster dmg, but on higher difficulties I think it will get harder and harder to use .

in d2 the barb was pretty straight forward ,all of his skills except shouts were made to rush into combat and kill everything in a pretty simple manner, but its much harder when you reach hell no matter who u play if u dont gear up your char close to your lvl with appropriate items you would most likely die many many times, in d3 beta ive played him and the idea is pretty much the same but u can get much more tactical with him now with all the skills combinations, that's what he missed in d2 imo, and on that note in d2 you propably made some wrong skill choices or something because any class could breeze through normal when u focus on 1 tree and some added skills from another tree

If you had played D2 as a barbarian beyond normal difficulty you would know that from nightmare and onwards being a barbarian gets really scary as you will be heavily penalized for being a melee class., anywhere from the small boneguys in Durance of Hate to Iron Maiden spam in Act 4 would instagib the moment you entered melee. Not to mention the multitude of times Duriel would just casually slice you dead while chasing a sorceress or you are poisoned and out of potions and town portals running for your life in the Maggots' Lair.

1 point in berserk solves the problem of iron maiden in act 4

for me, d2, first character, necro,....melee necro who lived off mana pots to cast any spells at all. Made it to 46 before I gave up and rolled a proper character lol.

After years of playing, I found all classes were equally easy, only difficulty was if you had no gear, but then thats your fault for not having any mf.

People who base their whole argumentation that the Barbarian will make whole D3 easy are simply shortsighted. seriously the beta is a fraction of the game and the starting area, which is supposed to be easy and introduce the players into the gameplay. of course you ll be able to smack the hell out of everything. and i dont disagree that in the beta the barbarian might does this quite easier than other classes.

but just thinking of the monsters and elites that will come in the later difficulties, im totally sure that the melee classes will have the toughest time against big and challenging elite combinations. any range class can just kite the !@#$ out of the mobs and bring them slowly down but the only choice for a barbarian is to throw themselves into the combat. even the monk has some basic attacks which have quite some reach and could kite even though it could prove challenging.

for example just think of a rare range monster group with nightmare in combination with the waller ability at the inferno lvl + a big angry hard hitting monster group. when feared you cant do anything and if you are walled in your char cant automaticly run out of the danger zone.
all you can hope is that you wont get chain feared for 2-3 times (as i noticed in beta you wont be feared of the same rare mob for a certain amount of time once it triggered but you still can get feared from the other rare mobs from which it hasent triggered yet) and survive until you got fear immunity from em and be strong enough to kill them fast enough before you ll get cc ed again.

Later on difficulties, its gonna be hardest to be a barbarian or monk, because they have to get in the middle of a fight.

Like in Diablo 2 on Hell, being melee could be a pain, because enemies hit freaking hard. Unlike Diablo2 where you had mana, in Diablo 3, if barbarian doesnt fight, he has no resources. a thing you should not forget on later difficulty, that means if barbarian cant stand and survive hits he cant even fight at all.

I was actually considering rolling a ranged class because I fear the Barbarian will be the by far most difficult class, and it might be better to gear up with a ranged class beforehand. So no, maybe he's easymode in normal, but that doesn't count for much once you start running into the nightmare+ guys that hits like trucks.

Range classes are the easiest. In fact the melee got a 30% reduction to all dmg, because you would die way to quickly and due to the fact barb is melee they can't kite.
Source: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3123246179#14

11/01/2012 14:26Posted by OldManSocks

The gaming got really stale, and i finished the game at lvl 24 i think... I never got the whirlwind ability :(

Good news for you. Diablo 2 "starts" AFTER completing Normal :) You still have the best part of Diablo 2 left to do!

Remember that when you play Diablo 3. You are not done when you have completed Normal. Normal, just like in D2 is the warm up, the tutorial. You continue with the same char to Nightmare. It is not like other games where you can start the game in different difficulties. In D3 you continue to them with the same character, everything just gets more complicated :)