Barbarian vs Fighter - Comparing the two classic frontliners of Pathfinder 2e
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- Опубликовано: 24 июл 2024
- Every adventuring party needs a hard-hitting front line figure, and the barbarian and the fighter are probably the two best choices for this role. How do these two classic martial stalwarts stack up against each other? Which is best for you? The hard hitting, vengeful, and sometimes blind with rage barbarian, or the more tactful and disciplined fighter?
0:00 Intro
0:46 Frontline Role
5:17 Versatility
8:00 Ease
9:43 Feats
12:11 Roleplay
13:36 Conclusion 
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My campaign has a Barbarian and it’s so satisfying hitting those big crits. 50-60 damage at level 5 on two targets with swipe is wild. Cheers around the table.
Played a pre written game from pf2. (The circus one), we had a champion, a barbarian, a bard and a cleric (saranrae). One of the best team we had, as long as the barbarian didn’t run off after monsters! The +1 was key, the champion tanked everyone (he took 2 crits total to level 20) and a saranrae cleric is an outstanding damage dealer! We completely avoided some battles from a well placed sunburst, great fun!
Sounds like everyone is contributing a lot to that party!
Barbarians in PF2E tend to sit on the Bruiser to DPS scale.
Rage is an awesome mechanic that can shore up damage from a barbarian using a one-handed weapon to dish out combat maneuvers and there's a barbarian feat that gives a circumstance bonus to such maneuvers while raging. Once properly geared, however a Barbarian really wants to pick up Reactive Strike and a two handed weapon to really capitalize on their damage potential.
Fighters are the most adaptable and versatile martials in the game and can be anything from tanks, skirmishers, bruisers, DPS, or ranged combatants. With heavy armor and a shield, they can be dramatically tankier than a barb despite boasting fewer hitpoints and their +2 boon over almost all other classes with their favored weapons makes then the most reliable DPS in the game. They're not as 'swingy' as barbarians are and tend to have more options in combat that they can fill pretty effortlessly regardless of build.
I play a Gnome Bard and am forever having to patch up the Barbarian whose a/c drops when she rages... We have a Barbarian, a ranger ( ranged weapon specialist ), a swash buckler and a rogue plus me in the party. At times I wish one of the party was a straight fighter - we just do not have a good "tank" to hide behind. I have had to become a beast master and obtain a riding drake to give me a little more protection. I thought I would be playing a support character but have at times ended up inflicting more magical damage than the martial characters have caused physical damage.
What can I say? Bards are the best!
I prefer Fighter over the Barbarian, because I favor accuracy over more damage. Both can deal a ton of damage anyway. I like the consistency the Fighter brings. I do not like that the Barbarian needs to use Rage to be most effective.
I am considering the Paladin as free archetype for my Fighter. I expect Retributive Strike to provide more overall dps and damage mitigation in the build. Healing hands seems great too. I hope I will be able to attack two times each round with full accuracy by having both Attack of Opportunity and Retributive Strike.
My favorite groups that I'm GMing rn for have: Thaumaturge, Monk, Investigator and Magus and they are really working together well without bard or figther/barb :> It's probably the strongest party I'm running a game now for
That's good, because any team comp should work
That is why it's a roleplaying game, it would suck if you had to min max and play certain classes or even team comps
GM controls the balance of the game
My current party has no spellcaster and runs fine for balance and teamwork, but having one or two would definitely have made many fights or puzzles/situations easier.
@@sqoo5 my party is Alchemist (me), superstition barbarian, rogue and gunslinger
Rogue and gunslinger are spotter sniper duo
Barbarian can demoralize and I can debuff with bombs so the gunslinger can crit and it works so wonderfully
@@sqoo5 we’re solving that problem via Thaumaturge’s scroll Thaumaturgy and Magus who makes scrolls for him :p
@@bilboswaggings I mean, not necessarily. It’s perfectly logical and reasonable that party that have diverse set of abilities will work better than party in which everyone has their specific strengths and weaknesses. While yes, GM controls the difficulty, it’s far easier to do when you know that they have abilities that can solve almost any situation with some thinking. For example party made out of fighters alone will struggle a lot with non fighting challenges and GM will not have good time imo
I like the barbarian when it fits my concept, like I built Enkidu as an unarmed animal instinct barbarian with Wrestler archetype to help with battle field control and to set up my party members. It just wouldn't have come off as well with a fighter. But I love my fighters builds too!
From your wordings, you seem to be assuming that you need to be wielding 2 agile weapons for Double Slice, which isn't the case.
Great video!
Definitely don't *need* two agile weapons, but you do need two weapons, and there is a slight penalty on that second attack if the second weapon isn't agile: "If the second Strike is made with a weapon that doesn’t have the agile trait, it takes a -2 penalty". So, no, you don't need a single agile weapon at all for this feat, but there is a mechanical advantage to having at least one. I also think the flavor of the feat lends itself to agile weapons as well - when I think of dual wielding I don't think of two clubs but I do think of two daggers.
It should be mentioned that Vicious Swing / Power Attack does NOT require you to use a two-handed weapon. You can also use this feat as a sword and board fighter or even as an unarmed fighter.
True, you can Power Attack with a dagger if you want, but I figure if you're winding up for a huge attack, might as well do so with a huge weapon. I think this is especially true because if you're using two actions for the attack (which counts as two attacks when calculating your multiple attack penalty), you likely won't be using a typical free-hand action like shove or trip on that third action, or might not even have a third action if you needed to move with your first. If I'm power attacking, I'm fully committing to it with a big ol' weapon.
It's funny, I played Pathfinder 1, then D&D4e, then 5e, and now PF2. When I started out, I mostly defaulted to barbarians, especially in PF1 as my philosophy about the martials was "fighter BOOOORRRINGGG". Many characters later, and at least 1 fighter in every edition along at least 1 barb in each edition after PF1, I can honestly say that I was a dumb fricking noob. It's also taken me longer to try playing a barb in Pathfinder 2 than a fighter, just because of how "restricting" I initially thought the class was compared to Pathfinder 1, but that was when 2 first came out, and I also got infected with the grognard rage from the detractors who sneered at 4e in favor of Pathfinder 1 when 2 came out. TL;DR: Barbs are a little harder to role-play if you actually care about your character beyond "who done hits goodest/hardest". This is a good thing, I think.
I would have waited until Barbarian remaster is released to make compare them.
I don’t think shield-using or dual-wielding are out of scope for the Barbarian class at all. In fact, I think a d8 one-handed weapon and a shield are excellent for the class, as even though you don’t have shield block, being able to raise your AC and offset the Rage penalty is just excellent.
From a dual-wielding standpoint, you just don’t use Agile weapons. Swing around that longsword and warhammer, and have a blast.
Or… do both! Longsword in one hand, shield with shield boss in the other, and double slice away.
Very true. I actually have a build video that creates an animal instinct barbarian who uses a shield. I think it's a great idea for smaller parties that might not have as many healing resources, requiring the barbarian to be a bit more defensive.
Love the cafe from brasil sack there. I'm from brasil.
Some thoughts about Barbarian:
• Honestly surprised PF2E kept the name, considering where the word comes from. Fury or Berserker felt like they could have been fair.
• Barb also has wildly fewer meaningful options. Fewer maneuvers, kinda no concentration, lacking exploration tools, I dunno hurts a lot of archetype potential (also not even allowing Demoralize unless you invest a Feat SUCKS).
• Damage in this game escalates so much, so kinda wish the raging resistance scaled better.
• Beast Barb is kinda just awful compared to the others at low level, and “it gets good later” or “it gets good if you get these exact Feats” kinda taints the “PF2E is so well balanced” message. The Superstition and Fury Barbs just ain’t it either.
Despite all of these gripes, oh my god Barb is my favorite base book class. It just feels awesome to get those beefy hits in, and I love getting that temp HP and Resistance (so rare for classes to have Resistances baked in, and honestly I want more of this). And so many of my gripes can be remedied in the remaster.
Go fighter, dip into giant barb for the rage and the level 6 basic instinct so you can basically be Guts with the Dragonslayer ;)
What are the benefits and deficits of rage, the key ability of the Barbarian, half of the focus of this video? Not worth bringing up. Smh