The barbarian’s main abilities are physical melee attacks like Bash and Hammer of the Ancients. Most similar to World of Warcraft’s Warrior class, the barbarian generates fury, instead of of rage. and exhausts it with special abilities. Your barbarian’s build will be focused on fury generation and then hard hitting ways to exhaust accumulated fury. The barbarian is also one of the most popular beta classes possibly because people think it’s one of the easiest to play, but there is nothing setting it aside from the other classes in regards to it being ‘easy’. So let’s take a look at what you’ll want to know as a barbarian going into the live version of Diablo 3.

Barbarian Equipment

The barbarian can wear three types of unique gear. The mighty belt and 1h and 2h mighty weapons. What’s the benefit of these over the normal weapons and belts? From the beta I’ve noticed that there are a few specific mighty weapons with strength as a static stat at the blacksmith but they will also provide unique affixes and mods that barbarians will be interested in. Unlike other belts, mighty belts can have life steal on them. All three pieces of gear will also be seen with fury heals which is a mod that will heal you when you exhaust fury. As fury heals, life steal and increases your fury capacity become more important as the difficulties get tougher, mighty weapons will be your sanctuary.

Barbarian Stats

As with the other classes, stats are extremely simplistic for the barbarian. A barbarian will be primarily interested in strength, since it directly benefits the damage output of every attack. However, unlike other classes, the barbarian is very concerned with their damage mitigation and survivability so vitality and dexterity (which increases dodge) may interest them as well. 10 Dexterity will increase your dodge by 1% and 10 vitality will increase our life by 10.

Barbarian Itemization

Barbarians don’t just want to do damage but they also need to mitigate a lot of damage, so picking items with the right mods will be a balance between the these two objectives. Due to the melee nature of the barbarian, there are a lot of modifiers that will interest us. There is a big list of available stats at D3Inferno and there aren’t a whole lot of them that I would ignore as a barbarian. Only time and testing will tell the importance of armor vs. block or dodge, or life % vs. damage increases or hit procs vs. resource generation. I think these difficult decisions (which monks will also face) will make the barbarian one of the harder classes to play at level 60.

Here is what I’ve come up with for as far as a barbarian stat cheat sheet:

Important: Many of the strategies and tips I share here were originally inspired by the people at the Diablo 3 Gold Secrets Forum. If you're serious about making the big bucks in Diablo 3, or just being the best players, you need to signup ASAP.