Barb Shaman are fine. play what you like. I rolled troll because well, my last shaman was barb and I wanted something different. True, troll regen is legendary up to about lvl 9-10 beyond that its less important as youre hp pool gets bigger. at 50 its a drop in the bucket. I'd have gone Ogre but plain and simple, I dislike the way an ogre looks in chain, and I hate Oggok.
Just for my own satisfaction, I PLed a troll shaman and a barb shaman to 35 on PEQ, measured how long it took to regen from under 10hp to full each wearing +5 regen gear (more than is possible on P99) in bearform, with regrowth on. the difference was, IMO, not that big. Certainly not game-breaking. Maybe not even enough to counterbalance the hassle of banking in Neriak, and the exp penalty. Stun immune is quite a benefit though. I wont lie. Pretty often I wish I was stun immune. I wonder if at 50+ as an ogre I'd ever wish for better regen?
As for more concrete differences: Barbs have more starting mana from a higher base wis. Canni makes maxing wisdom less important than other priest classes, so once you get a solid number (I'm gonna stop stacking at 190-200ish -maybe less as I get a better feel for it) then you can make your HP pool into a defacto mana pool. so we stack stam. Ogre is clearly gonna win this contest, but the troll has a large hp pool, and the regen+regrowth+bearform regen will go a long way to negating Canni especially until Canni IV, which takes some huge chunks of life. Barb will just have to cannibalize less, via bigger mana, or gear differently to stack stam.
In the end, playing the min/max game is much much less important than comparing say, warrior races.
Thats my 2 cents.
|