So after the recent update Barriers were nerfed so badly its no longer a useful enchantment to run or have. Changing Barrier from a Percentage base stat to a flat amount is in its current iteration ridiculously useless. The base amount needs to be higher as a flat base amount since its no longer a percentage making any enchants that affect Barrier absolute Dogwater.
Moon Studios, seriously? nerfing Barrier to utter uselessness is ridiculous, just remove it from the game altogether as it’s implementation was over-powered and now with the new update it has become useless. Please think about your nerfs and balancing before just throwing these nerfs into balancing overpowered build.
i believe right now it’s only useful for activating “while have barrier” gems
have you tried using it like that yet ?
As far as I recall barriers were based off of a flat percentage of health, it was change from being based off of health to a flat number which is ridiculously low and makes having a barrier useless. It was crazy overpowered at its previous incarnation which needed to be nerfed.
In its current form its just useless and no i would never use a gem to enhance stats based on having a barrier. Unless Moon Studios changed how barriers are now implemented they are altogether a useless enchant. Barriers were used to supplement your health and depending on enchantment enhancing gems used say like the mottled gems based off of low health you could increase the potency of enchants on gear by up to 100% (now 50%) which is good, However changing barriers gained from (% health) to a static number makes it useless as its just way too low to sustain a hit.
It should be a lower percent of health not a flat number imo.
I tried using barriers for the enchantment power, but since they don’t last long now since they are so small, I wasn’t all that impressed.
I had a crazy OP parry barrier build pre patch: Ultimate Tank Build . 70% barrier gain from lucky exalts. Eating an apple would give me something like an 80% barrier. Parries kept the barrier up as well. I just never lost them. So it definitely needed a nerf. I’ve been slowly going through my builds after the patch, and this one was definitely hit the hardest.
I was using mottled pearls and have moved away from them since the barriers aren’t providing much protection anymore and I wasn’t using lifesteal because of that protection. I prefer being able to have full health and a large health pool now. Barriers are just sad now, especially considering this build goes all in on them. They don’t feel viable at all, even maxed out, which means they are even worse normally. It makes sense that barriers wouldn’t be based on % of health so you can’t increase them by having a bigger health pool, though they left the head enchant which gives a barrier on eating still a percentage rather than fixed number, but it maxes at 5% now rather than 10%. Barriers paired well with blocking, but they instantly disappear now. They can no longer counter act the chip damage you take from bosses. That’s probably a good thing in that this was another way to ignore the combat system, but it does kill any dreams of being a traditional tank with bosses.
It feels like blocking is great for trash since you mitigate most of the damage and parrying is the way to go for bosses, though with the mottled pearl nerf, I can no longer delete anything with a parry. So overall I think it brings things more in line with souls like combat, but at the cost of making barriers mostly useless now. The fixed numbers need to be doubled now, if not tripled. I feel like for barriers to have meaning, there needs to be a dependable, skill based way to maintain them. They were a great way for learning parry timings since barriers would mitigate missing a parry, and I think that’s a great direction barriers could go. So tanking bosses would be about getting parries to keep up a barrier rather than mindlessly blocking everything. All that would take is reverting the glove enchant nerf, since the nerfs to enchantment power should keep the barrier in check.
I switched all my barrier gems over to lifesteal. This made blocking bosses much more feasible since I would recover the lost health quickly and would also recover health when parrying. Looks like I just need to get off barriers entirely. More and more of my builds are defaulting to lifesteal gems 
Exactly why i said that Barriers are now a useless enchantment. Barriers definitely needed to be nerfed but I didn’t expect Moon studios to nerf them into the ground so they are now useless. Even if per say you use Barriers as a way to enhance enchantments on gear the “while having barrier” is useless as you take a hit and its gone and it becomes a useless enchantment.
The update was really well done in some cases and really over nerfed in others. Balancing needs to not only look at overpowered enchantments but look at the impact of nerfing said enchantments has on others. Whether Moon Studios reverse or increase barriers gain to a reasonable static amount to make its use inline with other enchantments affected by it viable only remains to be seen.
Altogether Barriers in its current state is dead and no longer a viable way to gain survivability as a mechanic and until its fixed life steal is the next best thing to surviving until Moon studios decides that Life steal also needs to be nerfed into the ground and makes NRfTW into an ARPG that’s heavily Soulslike rather than an ARPG.
I won’t be switching any of my current gems, they are just too much shannigans to find them. It’s easier to just farm gear and rework builds that are viable for life steal.