HoratioVonBecker
Imperfectly Aligned
It's a little more complicated than that. Basically, 5E seems to have about four 'shares' worth of resources it wants to dole out per class per long rest. Wizards, Clerics, and Druids all get three shares worth of spells on a long-rest recharge cycle, and Wizards get a fourth gated behind their first short rest of the day/chapter. Sorcerers get all four at once, Warlocks get them one at a time. There may be a discount for Warlocks, on account of having so few slots at a time?For whatever reason 5e went in on making some classes short rest dependent for resource recovery (fighter, warlock, monk), some classes long rest dependent (barbarian & all other spellcasters) and some classes not really needing to recover resources (rangers, paladins & rogues to varying extents). I can't explain why they did this or why the non-spellcasting classes are short or long rest dependent.
The Rage pool doesn't evenly divide into that, though, and neither does Bardic Inspiration. Which makes those features hard for me to evaluate.
*They are, but I don't know how it's supposed to stack up against other long-lasting buffs, let alone passive features.
- Rages are a long lasting buff you can pop with a bonus action. It encourages everything barbarian wants to do, discourages stuff that isn't part of the 'class fantasy' (berserk mages are a rarity in fiction & D&D has never really gone in on raging spell casters) and is the core of the class. My assumption is that rage recovers on a long rest because the devs wanted you to not do this every fight, which is a very real possibility with short rest resources.
*Unsupported fantasy archetypes, off the top of my head: Black Knight types locked in their armor. Basically every blaster-type shounen hero. Basically all explosive psychics. Harry Dresden.
*Making it short rest would actually make it easier to tune, though?
...Do subclass abilities not count?A barbarian's rage defines the class such that every subclass is about interacting with your rage. Despite this, only the 11th & 15th level barbarian features require you to be raging to use them.
They're within a couple points for the first ten levels, but at Level 11 they fall behind and stay behind. That's half the game, ostensibly! I'm hoping to get a clear enough picture of their design to know why that is, and how - or if - it should be fixed.
- I can't tell how you calculated damage output and I don't really bother with this sort of optimisation, so all I can do is point you to this. But I am pretty confident barbarians keep up with other martial classes in sustained output, but ultimately can't really compete with the paladin's nova ability.
By official Point Buy, the Standard Array is seven shades of illegal. Neither is terribly close to roll-4d6-keep-3. All are officially suggested.
- It kinda is though. Using point buy you can't have a str higher than 17 at level 1. So its expected a barbarian who wants to max their ability scores (and isn't multiclassing) will max their strength at level 8.
I also don't know whether they balanced the damage buff against someone who prioritized tanking (with their highest stat in CON), or who prioritized attacking (with their highest score in STR). They might even have balanced against Fighting Styles, which are hard to evaluate because it interacts differently with the available weapons.
I think there's something that can be done - maybe a banishment from the dreamworld on hitting 0HP, thus splitting the party? Still, full character death is too much.So they shouldn't have been ported to 5e then. If anyone wanted to use this they'd either have to make it so death ins't a penalty (not generally a great idea in D&D I've found) or nerf the monsters.