In this Diablo 3 Barbarian Guide, we’ll be looking at how you can master the most popular class in Diablo 3. Barbarian is an extremely fun class to play if you are like melee characters. Barbarian is more like a tank class of Diablo 3. They can get very good defense and attack, both at the same time.

Barbarians have their own set of offensive and defensive skills that help it withstand powerful attacks from other classes as well as deal heavy damages in very short time. Let’s go through each and every guide related to Barbarians to help you master this class. We’ve divided this Diablo 3 Barbarian guide into several sections. Make sure you check out each one of them.

Diablo 3 Barbarian Gameplay

If you are new to Diablo 3 and have no idea what Barbarian class is, then I highly recommend that you head over to our Diablo 3 Barbarian Gameplay guide. It describes all the important features of Barbarian. We also cover what it’s like to play Barbarians as solo, in group, in player vs player as well as how it compares with other classes.

To summarize Barbarians are a melee class with high DPS, good offensive and defensive buffs with the best tanking abilities in game. It can wield two weapons and has a 30% inherent damage reduction since it’s melee. Next in this Diablo 3 Barbarian guide we will look at resource system and various skills for Barbarians.

Barbarian Resource System in Diablo 3

Barbarian’s resource is Fury. Its initially empty if you do not perform any action. As you kill more enemies and use ‘Fury generator’ skills you generate more Fury that can be spent using Fury spender abilities in battle.

Diablo 3 Barbarian Guide – Skills

Once you have a basic understanding of features of this class, it’s time to understand the skill system. Overall your skills are divided into six main categories:

• Primary: The primary skills are your basic attacks that generate Fury. You will be using these most of the time as they are bound to your left click. A good part about these skills is that despite being your basic attacks, they can become ridiculously powerful when combined with right runes. We’ll talk more in builds section later.
• Secondary: These are your Fury spendor skills that you mainly use to clear mobs, or a group of monsters. They are area skills and most of them are also accompanied with status effects.
• Defensive: These are skills that allow you to escape or to engage mob without taking too much damage. Ground Stomp for example, allows you to engage a mob by stunning all the enemies around you giving you plenty of time to clear them one by one without taking too much damage. Leap and Sprint are your close-gap pvp skills or escape skills. Ignore Pain is a powerful defensive skill, good for tanking tough bosses.
• Might: These are your powerful area or single target skills. They give you variety of powers, but I’m not really sure why they are classified as might. More details covered in the skills section.
• Tactics: Tactics are your status skills, either on you or on enemies that momentarily give you a significant advantage. The Weapon Throw is more of a Might skill, that I feel should not have been classified in this section.
• Rage: Extremely powerful skills with high cool down. Earthquake deals a ton of area damage over time, or give you high attack damage and speed for a short duration. Mainly you use them to engage large mobs.

I recommend that you check out the Diablo 3 Barbarian skills section once where I explain each and every skill in more depth along with tips and tricks on situations where they would be applicable. You will also find tips on how to use them more effectively. The skills guide is a recommended reading for newbies! The next part in this Diablo 3 Barbarian guide focuses on strengths and weaknesses of Barbarians.

Diablo 3 Barbarian Guide – Strengths

• Tank: Barbs have good tanking skills and by default 30% damage reduction. They can withstand a lot of damage. However, you don’t really have to! Use status skills and powerful armor along with shields to your advantage.
• Status skills: Just cause you are a tank does mean you have to absorb damage all the time. Skills like Ground Stomp help you to engage mobs with a stun that significantly reduces the damage you take.
• Armor and Shield: Barbarians have heavy armors that not all other classes can equip. Along with Shields you can build up really high defenses which make them a tough nut to crack down.
• Escape and close-gap skills: One of the most important strengths they have is their set of close gap and escape abilities like Leap, Sprint, Ancient Spear, and Furious Charge. Not all characters have these, for example Witch Doctor. This set of skills along with its powerful tanking abilities make Barbarians the most popular class in Diablo 3.

No class is perfect in Diablo 3. Barbarians, while they are strong at defenses they do have some weaknesses, but in my opinion they are comparatively less and moderate with respect to their ability to survive.

• Less powerful attacks: Barbarians have moderate attack damage compared to other classes. They even lack area, or chain skills that allow you to take multiple enemies at once. This makes it rather slow to level Barbarians along with the fact that they are melee.
• Melee, Not Ranged: Yes, this is a biggest weakness, but they are tanks and tanks are usually supposed to be Melee. Your close gap skills helps take care of this weakness somewhat.
• Heavily dependent on gears: Your tanking abilities depend on your equipment. You can either use defense equips or sacrifice that for more powerful attack power equipment.

Diablo 3 Barbarian Stats Guide

Two important stats for Barbarians are Strength and Vitality. Barbarian is the only class that benefits from the Strength attribute.

• Strength: For every point of strength you get +1% damage and +1 armor. For example, if you have 35 Strength, you will get +35% damage and +35 Armor.
• Vitality: Next nice to have stat for Barbarian. Each point in Vitality increases your maximum health by +10. Not so much important initially, but I think this will play a significant role in the inferno level difficulty. If you have 30 Vitality, your max health will increase by +300.
• Intelligence: For Barbarians it increases elemental resistance by 0.1 per point of this stat. If you have 27 Int, you will get +3 Resistance against Physical, Cold, Fire, Lightening, Poison, Arcane and Holy. The value is rounded off and is dependent on the enemy level. More on this topic later.
• Dexterity: Increases dodge by 0.1% per Dexterity. If you have 25 Dex, you will get +2.5% dodge rate. Dodged attack do no damage.

Diablo 3 Barbarian Equipment and Gears Guide

Gears and equips for all classes in Diablo 3 are mainly classified into four different categories – Gold Find, Magic Find, Leveling and Attack. Depending upon whether this is your first character, or you already have a high level character, you would be using a different set of gears.

• Gearing for Beginners: If you are new to Diablo 3 and this is your first character, then I suggest that you go with the flow. Just equip whatever looks best, i.e. high attack power and more defense. If you get any rares that gives a significant boost in other adventure attributes, then use those. Strength is your best friend. Magic Find and Gold find gears are nice to have as extra magic items and gold is always welcome.
• Gearing for Inferno: Not much is known about Inferno yet, but since it is expected to be extremely difficult, I would suggest that you save up on equips with good defense and Vitality as they might be very useful against bosses and rare mob packs. If you are going for Tank build, then you can either go for a max Vitality equips or a Hybrid of Vitality and Strength. Shields are important.
• Gearing for PVP: Shields are must. Look for Hybrid gears with reduction against Arcane (against Wizards) and Poison (against Witch Doctors). More on this later, when PVP goes live.

List of Diablo 3 Barbarian Guides

While all of the above focused on introduction to important features for Barbarians, in our next set of Diablo 3 Barbarian guide go a step further as we cover topics such as leveling, player vs player and builds very much in-depth.

Diablo 3 Barbarian Leveling Guide:

Barbarians are very good when it comes to leveling up. Their attacks aren’t as powerful as others, and you do find yourself taking a lot of damage at early levels but you survive. Once you get more area skills, you will see a drastic improvement in your leveling speed. Visit our Diablo 3 Barbarian leveling guide to learn more about tips and tricks for power leveling along with explanation on what skills and runes work the best.

Barbarian PVP Guide

Barbarians are equally good in PVP as well. Again, right set of skills and runes will decide your fate in majority of PVP matches you fight. However, there are some tips and tricks that will come handy with no matter what build you choose. I’ll be uploading a special PVP guide just for this. It’s currently under construction, keep watching this space for more.

Barbarian Builds Guide

If you need help with sample, yet effective skill runes and builds then head over to our Diablo 3 Barbarian Builds guide to check out various Barbarian builds. We cover different situations like pvp, inferno, bosses, and farming. I already have put up builds for Barbarian. I’m working on few others.

Concluding the Diablo 3 Barbarian Guide

To summarize this Diablo 3 Barbarian guide, it’s important to remember following points.

• Strength is your best friend.
• Vitality is important at higher levels.
• You can dual wield, but shields are more useful.
• Barbarians have excellent PVP skills

Hope you liked our Diablo 3 Barbarian guide. While this guide is short and simple, if you really want to master Barbarian I highly recommend that you check out the other guides in Barbarian series. Tell us what you think about our Diablo 3 Barbarian guide.