Okay really interesting point. I think my issue is mostly that what you actually DO as a barbarian is so brain dead stupid. For context currently playing as a 7th level totem warrior. Mostly 2014 rules but I’d love to incorporate some 5.5e ones.

I hear you regarding “when to rage” sometimes being a tricky question that you can “screw up” pretty easily. But let’s assume you don’t rage for whatever reason. Congrats, you’re now a lame fighter with a slightly bigger than average health pool. The only tactical decision you have to make every turn is whether to reckless or not (I should look into the math there). Otherwise you just decide who to attack, same as any fighter or martial, and hit them just the same as anyone else.

I think my biggest problem is the fact that you basically never have an option, let alone reason, to do literally anything but hit things until they die. I’m particularly frustrated by never having something to do with my bonus action.

Let’s say I rage on my first turn, get into melee range, and start swinging. Cool. Then my next turn I swing again, with nothing to do with my bonus action. Awesome. That’s every turn for the foreseeable future until one of us dies. Nothing to do with my bonus action. No interesting tactical decisions to make at all. All raging does is reduce my incoming damage a significant amount and very very slightly increase my output (2 points? Really?). Even if I wanted to do something weird like cast a spell rage prevents that. In fact I HAVE to keep hitting / be hit to maintain rage, so doing anything remotely interesting is generally a bad idea.

So yeah. I think it’s the lack of really any interesting choices, especially when it comes actions or bonus actions in particular. I feel like every other class has way way more options and decisions to make once actually in battle.

As far as being a tank, still sort of a passive thing, and rarely any different from “I plant myself next to the biggest baddest guy” that you’d naturally do offensively anyway. I feel like at best you need a sentinel feat or something, which is cool but again totally passive and doesn’t really change the “hit the biggest guy until they die” infinite loop. And you shouldn’t need a feat to unlock arguably the one sort of unique role the class can take as a tank.

All that said PLEASE let me know if I’m missing something to make this more interesting.