Casters could cast shield or mage armor over barbarian. As savage barbarian can benefit from both spells without loosing class features (as they are spell effects than wearing armor). Anyways update and also lengthy OOC to explain how encounters in general work in XP and rare loot wise and how tricky is to pull off 'giant encounter cut down to nuking single foe at time in open field'.<br/><br/>Ideal stragedy would be fast runner with high AC aggroing mobs and bring them to bottle neck and then grind through the mobs to get most XP and rare loot chance. But during betatesting such scenarios was cut to minimum to avoid XP grind exploits but the stragedy is still sound to do in open fields (it needs finesse and skill to pull off so designers left chance of it happening as extra reward for planning grind well).<br/><br/>Also XP reduction was introduced as means to reduce '40 man raid killing single mob at time to get full XP from it'. Only raid or boss mobs give full XP despite number of folks attacking it and also loots are based on higher percentage.