Bloodlust

I'm tossing my 2c on the floor. If anyone wants to pick it up, feel free.

Zerks, imho, take a different sort of mindset to play than most classes. With any other class in the game, if you screw up, you flee (provided you aren't lag locked) and run away to try again. Now take zerks. Once you are in combat, you are pretty much in combat. Unless you take the weak path, which is like a warrior with sucksauce dribbled liberally over it. Zerks take a "balls to the wall" kind of mindset to play, because if you screw up, then thats that. Good game, slap your cabal mates on the rump and go reequip. Add to this the fact that reequiping as a zerk is about one notch down from reequiping a voker, and there is your problem. You got a class that is all about tossing all your chips down and praying to your god/goddess/uncle tom, and one that is one of the hardest to reequip. This; I would think, and judging by the player base here I am right; is why zerks have always been unpopular and considered weak. Meh. Or I could be smoking the peace pipe again, ya never know.

Strange. Zerker is one of the few classes who have received only tone ups' date=' and not a single tone down ever since 1.0. Yet apparently, people have adopted a 'consensus' that zerkers are extremely weak, despite many successful zerkers having been played in the past.[/quote']

I didnt post this to buff them again, I was just bored at work thinking up random ideas. I think the new haymaker buff makes me even wana roll one.

I think zerks are wayyyy harder to re-equip than invokers, unless you're counting the time it takes to mana charge. Invokers don't need gear, berserkers need it like crazy, and they can't PK or solo anything while naked. My invoker re-equipping consisted of me killing somebody in brass and a power staff.

That doesn't make sense either. With their massive boosts to hitdam and damage from rage' date=' zerkers should be feeling the EQ-weakening least of all.[/quote']

But rage carries very significant downsides. In my fights with Lmathr as Ilendriel (which are my main experience with recent zerks, though before the newest changes), her raging was never something I was worried about (she hit me a little more often, though not much, but the reverse is also true... and as a curing attrition class, rage often just made my job a bit easier)... it was making sure I didn't let her start slamlocking me while I was dirted, which is the exact same concern I'd have versus a warrior; whiplock warriors like Bathai I found to be FAR scarier than any zerks.

Granted, this is with an elf paladin, and the ridiculous melee defense the combo has... mages/communers may be a bit of a different story, but I'm willing to bet most melees maintain a level of dominance over zerks (reduced defense for better offense is very, very dangerous against high melee output classes) and Vryxtyx had no trouble pounding on them either (zerk vs necro basically stops the zerk from being able to rage, as the necro just then blinds and has pets start taking the hits). Communers/invokers/bmgs I could see as still having some trouble, though the addition of sockets means that a lot more weapons/shields can be made burnproof so the zerk loses ways to cost their opponent defenses...

I'm just going to stop now, because I'm going on pure theory here outside of maybe two fights on Vryx half a year ago and a half dozen on Ilendriel against the same zerk each time, and I haven't played one past 40 ever. However... I've talked to a number of zerk players, a fair number of whom still feel that zerks are a bit weak. Rage isn't something zerks can or should do all the time, which means for a lot of fights they're hurt just as much by the EQ weakening as other melees. Given that it's pretty hard to find rares these days, even a lot of the weaker ones, a class that basically is a win or die fighter is going to suffer because re-equipping after a death is very difficult. I personally loathe dying and having to re-equip. I've deleted many, many chars because of a single death that really pissed me off, and I know I'm hardly the only one here who has done this. The harder it is to equip after a death, the less likely you're going to really want to keep going on that char, especially when you know you're playing a char that will be having this danger in every fight you enter (zerks are, in my opinion, the least survivable class in the game, which is a large part of why I don't play them).

Lets get something straight - you cannot open with weapon or shield cleave even after the current changes. You can open with haymaker and roar has been changed.

Berserkers are a class that I have found to require an almost purely offensive mindset. There is no place for half measures, pussy footers or might-doers. If you want to be a sucessful berserker in almost all cases you need to be thinking about how to maximise your damage output into your opponent. This requires more than a set of shiny hit/dam eq and a few nice weapons. Anything less will see you getting beat up time and again.

The good news is that if you can work it out you can be a real force to be reckoned with.

Personally, I believe beserkers are a bit on the weak side of things - mainly because they really cop a hiding vs melee and most hybrid classes and don't overly dominate mages and communers.

L-A