The invincible Barbarian

Arunsun

I just had some enlightenment. Cloak of Atonement is the path to invincibility.
A barbarian wearing DoE, Belt of Innertial barrier, using hardiness and Cloak of Atonement Armor of Faith is immune to all physical damage, and this, with very low duress in terms of gear (only DoE and the belt are to be equipped to reach these resistances).
Let s say you play a solo Dwarven Barbarian
Now add to this Shorty Bonus, possibly a human flesh armor, a helmet of defense and you will have about 100% success on your saving throws, as well as many barbarian immunities to almost everything.
In the end there is nothing that may affect you except imprisonment and dispel magic (though the latter will hardly be ever succesful due to you being higher level than your enemies because you are soloing. The sooner can be solved with book of infinite spells: Spell Turning. I believe Slayer form makes you immune to imprisonment as well).
You may also get immunity to every kind of damage except acid through gear.
Overall, the barbarian can, as soon as chapter two, become invincible to everything he can possibly encounter.

Of course there are a couple of downsides, the most worth noticing of which being that Cloak of Atonement is a charge item, and a random one on top of that. But if you don't mind reloading a couple of times you may use these charges only to get AoF. And you will certainly not need it for every fight (With hardiness only you already have a 80% physical damage resistance). And if cheesing does not bother you, you may still sell and rebuy it to some merchant to get back your charges.
And you can maintain permanent slayer form with cloak of the dark moon (gives you a 3 times per day 4hour long 100% protection from magical damage) but that does come quite late unfortunately.

FinneousPJ

Or you could roll an arcane caster

Seriously though, I also love the barbarian. It's a good class, both solo and in a party.

Arunsun

Soloing an arcane caster is very nice and not that hard till you get to the Ravager which IS a though fight you can hardly cheese, and Amelyssan which is nearly impossible to do without cheesing (as an arcan caster)

Lord_Tansheron

Too bad 99.99% of the dangerous damage in the game is magical and not physical :P

But I guess it pays to have a tank sometimes. Certainly would be much more impressive in IWD, though.

semiticgoddess

In vanilla, Hardiness stacks with itself. Same goes for Armor of Faith (I assume EE changed both). Any warrior, druid, or cleric could become immune to physical damage--although not necessarily for very long. The Cloak of the Sewers is another valuable tanking, at least in vanilla, granting 90% physical damage resistance for 20 rounds at the cost of crippling the user's main hand attacks (off hand attacks worked as normal). There are also many sources of resistances from mods, if you play with them.

Even without this Cloak of Atonement thingy, though, a Barbarian should be nearly invulnerable with its high HP pool, 80% resistance with Hardiness and the Defender of Easthaven, and some potions when things get hairy.

@Lord_Tansheron is right that magic is usually the greater danger in BG2, although this has less to do with magical damage than disablers. Fortunately, a Barbarian has immunity to almost all disablers when raging.

Musigny

In ToB you are exposed to a fair and direct amount of physical damage too (even without a HLA enablement mod). In that perspective a dual-classed fighter (berserker) - > cleric used to be popular.

Arunsun

@Lord_Tansheron enemy dangerous magics are disablers to which you are immune with barbarian rage. I can't think of any fights where my warriors died to magical damage. Most of the time they get hit by some disabler and killed by fighters. Not to mention armor of faith, belt of innertial barrier and batalista passport you can mitigate fire and magical damage (which are about the only kind of damage dealt by spells that are significant). Physical damages are MUCH more dangerous in ToB than elemental damage (not to mention you can adapt to the fight and get high resistance to every type of elemental damage fairly easily)

@semiticgod Indeed they fixed that, now reaching 100% can only be achieved that way (or maybe with a very high level dualed shadowdancer/warrior)

Lord_Tansheron

Might just be my experience, but I run with a metric ton of mods. Guess I just got hit by ADHW contingencies and Dragon's Breaths too often. You remember those things...

Arunsun

That s where Belt of innertial barrier and batalista passport come handy as well

Jarrakul

In vanilla BG2, fighter-types hardly ever die to spell damage, except from dragon breath weapons (and those only because they've softened you up first) and beholders. Mages will rarely fire off more than one ADHW, and that's not usually enough to kill a barbarian even without the belt of inertial barrier.