The Barbarian
Tremble in fear of the bitter cold and the almighty toppling wolf
Foreword
For many of these classes, we will need to establish context for the class—perceptions of it, how it fared in the original game, or external factors that affect the class. For the Barbarian, we need to acknowledge a pretty clear issue with the overall game design of 2024 5e.
I'm certain that most of the changes in the revision were made in a complete vacuum from each other—with little consideration for how those changes affect other elements in the game. This leads to rules confusion (RAW, most monsters' melee attacks are invalid for opportunity attacks) and contradictions in effects (most effects that stun reduce movement speed if they fail, but stunning itself doesn't affect movement).
The Barbarian suffers massively from two changes in monster design. The first is that many effects that monsters can cause on hit that previously forced a saving throw now automatically inflict their effects on hit. The majority of such effects are things like knocking prone or poisoning, effects that were countered by the two saves Barbarians are strongest at.
The second is that many monsters beyond low CRs have extra non-B/P/S damage tacked onto their attacks. This means that for most Barbarians, whose damage resistance only applies to B/P/S, their Rage becomes less and less effective at mitigating damage as you progress to higher levels and higher-leveled foes.
These two factors take a class that is supposedly the pinnacle of resilience and might...and coupled with other class features, make them especially vulnerable to anything that doesn't exclusively deal B/P/S damage.
This is just as massively overblown. Yes, monsters deal a lot more energy type damage, but it has never been easier to get energy type resistances either. Barbarians are still the class with the most hit points, and being prone doesn't really matter much since they attack recklessly often. The updated monster design, however, sped up the game and increased monster effectiveness, which was a great improvement. I might also add, that there are also changes in the barbarian's favor, like the vampire bite now requiring a CON save
instead of making an attack roll. I do admit, these are less common than the removal of a saving throw.
Most monsters still deal b/p/s damage, and the barbarian weathers it like they did before.
Level 1
Like most martials, Barbarians get Weapon Mastery. Perhaps I'll address my issues with that feature in another post. It is worth noting that of the classes that get Weapon Mastery, Barbarians are the only ones with restriction on what weapons they can take masteries for: melee weapons only. Given that they get proficiency with all ranged weapons nonetheless, it's bizarre for them to have an exclusion.
I personally don't mind it. Barbarians can still take masteries for weapons that have the thrown property.
Unarmored Defense is unchanged.
Rage has a few changes. It now lasts 10 minutes. You get one back on a short rest, which I have mixed feelings about. On one hand, for longer adventures at low levels, this gives the Barbarian a bit more oomph. On the other hand, at higher levels this becomes largely irrelevant for the Barbarian, while for a character who takes a one-level dip into the class, this doubles the number of Rages they get on a day with two short rests.
I really don't see the issue with any of this. You are saying that a hypothetical 1-level dip into barbarian being able to rage after a short rest breaks your verisimilitude or something?
Forcing a saving throw maintains your Rage, but taking damage does not. This means that if you can't make an attack or force a save, you have to use your bonus action to keep your Rage up. It also means you get to spam said BA out of combat to keep your Rage up, which we will get to the problem with later.
Previously, the only instance where this would be a problem is if you get incapacitated. Except now, being incapacitated drops your Rage immediately (until level 15). This is a significant problem for the Barbarian, due to how their features encourage them to make themselves more vulnerable and how they typically rely more on Rage than AC. Anything that can incapacitate knocks them out of their tankiness, leaving them exposed to heavy damage without the saving grace of higher AC that other martials may have.
You have also missed that rage now grants the bonus damage to thrown weapons, which is a big improvement. I have had it many times where my players expected barbarians to deal the damage on thrown weapons as well.
In any case, I think this version of rage is straight up more usable at the table. 10 minutes can help a barbarian get multiple fights in, in a few situations. Maintaining rage while doing something hostile by forcing a saving throw also gives players more options in combat.
Incapacitation doesn't really happen enough to be a big difference, in my experience.
Level 2
Danger Sense now no longer cares if you're blinded or deafened. This isn't a huge change, but it's strange in light of the Evasion change that does now care if you're incapacitated. Lessened restrictions here, increased restrictions there.
Reckless Attack now applies to off-turn attacks and non-melee attacks, which is fine.
Fine? It's great! I have had SO many situations where a player expected Reckless Attack to work on their attacks off-turn. This was a good and sensible change that I think is just good for the game.
Level 3
This is where you can expect to see a mention of 2024 5e removing the flavourful titles for subclasses every time I write a summary up.
The Barbarian also gets Primal Knowledge, which in addition to giving them another skill now lets them make certain skill checks using Strength—Acrobatics, Intimidation, Perception, Stealth, or Survival. While most 2024 features have the flavour stripped from them, this one describes how "When you use this ability, your Strength represents primal power coursing through you, honing your agility, bearing, and senses." This is presumably an excuse for how stupid this function is.
For starters, this bears little connection to Barbarian skills. If it applies to all the skills on the Barbarian list, that would make sense for the primal connection. Instead, we are somehow able to Stunt Angrily and Sneak Angrily even though Barbarians have no regular inclination towards the Acrobatics and Stealth skills to begin with.
Furthermore, we have to acknowledge that, by being Strength checks during Rage, these checks automatically get advantage. So we're not just using our best ability for a bunch of skills, but we get advantage on our Tracking Angrily. This gives a huge boost to a Barbarian's early-game skill utility, to the point where a skill with proficiency will give them better performance than the class that eschews combat focus for skill mastery (the Rogue).
Why is it bad that barbarians now have more utility outside of combat? Maybe we play the game different, but one PC being good at a skill doesn't mean other PC's don't use the skill anymore.
Level 9
Yes, we're jumping to level 9, because the 2024 Barbarian gets nothing new between Level 3 and Level 9. This is very much A Thing, because most other classes get significant new boosts in this stretch and a Barbarian gets...nothing.
Instinctive Pounce has been made baseline, and they get a bunch of great features, some of the best in the game, actually. Multiattack, 6th level subclass feature (which has been reworked for many of the subclasses), a feat, extra movement and advantage on initiative is incredible. You seem to want to compare the barbarian to other classes like it's some sort of power ranking, which confuses me. Barbarians do great at this tier.
What we get at 9th level is an overhauled feature. Originally, Barbarians got Brutal Criticals, which beefed up their crits. This was a bit underwhelming, so now we have Brutal Strikes. What Brutal Strikes do is that when you use Reckless Attack and don't have any disadvantage on your attack, you can give up the advantage on one attack to do 1d10 extra damage and an added effect on a hit.
So, to use this feature:
1. You can't have any source of disadvantage (like, say, being bitten by a 1/2 CR snake and getting auto-poisoned).
2. You have to use Reckless Attack, even if you have advantage on an attack already.
3. You have to give up any advantage to get the benefit, making you more likely to miss.
For comparison, in a few levels, Paladins will get +2d8 damage on their baseline number of attacks just for existing. So these added effects better be worth someth...
...oh, you can move an enemy and then yourself, or you can slow an enemy. Remember that pushing and slowing enemies are already things you can do via Weapon Mastery—and even then, on something that's free with every attack, these options are situational unless you're building your strategy around abusing these mechanics.
Yeah I am not a fan of Brutal Strikes. It's a lot of hassle for little effect. Some people dig the crunch like this, I don't. And yes, paladin as a class is the most powerful of all martials. Still, the barbarian I play usually does great alongside them, often better.
Level 11
Relentless Rage is changed so that rather than dropping to 1 hit point, you instead have a number equal to twice your Barbarian level. On one hand, this seems like a benefit. However, you have to remember that 2024 monster damage is significantly inflated due to added non-B/P/S damage, so until you get to high levels, many monsters can wipe out 22 hit points on a Barbarian as easily as they can wipe out 1 hit point.
It's still a buff, oh well.
Level 13
Brutal Strike gets two new options, one which imposes disadvantage on the next saving throw it makes and prevent opportunity attacks and one which imposes a +5 bonus to the next attack someone else makes against it. Even though both of these options are significantly better than the Level 9 options, a single attack is very rarely more impactful than a failed saving throw, so you're going to have one option you'll be using more than everything else.
Much like the other brutal strikes, for my barbarian, I hardly use these. Between reckless, masteries, double masteries from my subclass, I am ok with just hitting most of the time. For these, however, I am happy to have the options.
Level 15
Persistent Rage now lets you restore expended uses of Rage when you roll initiative once per long rest. We're going to see this "restore a resource when you roll initiative once per LR" mechanic in other places, and it always has the exact same problem: the assumption that you're only going to want to refresh a resource for combat, even when there are non-combat uses for that resource.
As mentioned, this makes the one/SR Rage restore a bit useless, but more so, this creates a balance issue with the subclasses. Several of them have features that are limited by rest in use, but you can burn a use of Rage to use them again. Having a big stockpile of Rages means that those subclasses with features you can spam more often become more powerful than subclasses that don't have this mechanic.
It also still abides by the 10-minute limit, but this likely won't have much impact.
Once again you make a buff sound like a negative. The refreshing of rages is perfect for a long adventuring day with successive fights where the barbarian gets knocked out of rage a couple times. And yes, the combat class recharges it in combat, isn't that what we want the barbarian to be about?
Level 17
Brutal Strikes goes up in damage to 2d10 and you get to use two effects at once. This will almost always be Staggering and Sundering. It's a bit lazy design-wise that all you get is just "more of the same".
Lazy design? It's called efficient. Just adding more complicated effects is not a good idea at this stage of a campaign. This way the player and the table already know the effects, but the barbarian does become more powerful!
Level 18
Indomitable Might now affects saving throws as well as ability checks. But as we covered in the foreword, many effects that previously called for Strength saves now auto-hit, so this is much less useful than it would have been in 2014 5e.
Not all effects, just some... Once again you make a buff sound like a nerf.
Conclusion
And that's the summary of 2024 Barbarian changes. All in all, as we described, the Barbarian suffers from having its primary niche eroded to a massive degree. Your damage resistance means much less, your saving-throw strengths mean much less, and your mechanics push you to make yourself more vulnerable to your major weaknesses. Once you get the cheesy-at-low-levels Primal Knowledge, you get very little new until Level 9, where you get the underwhelming-at-first Brutal Strikes.
So now that we've touched upon these issues...
Building a Better Barbarian?
- If giving monsters more non-B/P/S damage on attacks is going to be a facet of design, then the class meant to soak up attacks needs an answer for this. Some form of non-B/P/S damage protection would be perfect for a higher-level feature, giving an invested Barbarian more resilience than the quick-dip multiclass builds.
- A better way to handle Primal Knowledge? Make it based on Constitution. That way you don't get the unbalancing auto-advantage, and it incentivizes building up your secondary ability score. Heck, you could give a higher-level feature that extends Rage's benefits to Constitution ability checks and saving throws to make the feature better at high levels.
- If other classes get more new gimmicks earlier on, then so should the Barbarian—they shouldn't have to wait until Level 9 for new toys. I'm frankly of the opinion that, rather than throwing out Brutal Criticals, building on that would have been a much better design direction. Give the Barb a feature at Level 5 that allows added effects on crits—this way the opening options can be more impressive than just "push or slow someone". Retain Brutal Criticals, and add new features that give the Barbarian better crit chance when using Reckless Attack, thus making it an option and incentive but not an explicit requirement.
First, thank you for sharing your insights. I think you presented it really well and I truly appreciate you taking the time for this.
But I don't agree with this assessment at all. Barbarians are still really tough, but are now more flexible and have more utility. The designers were also not afraid to improve their higher level features, which was needed.
- Yes, they have lost some of their durability from their damage resistances at higher levels, but it has never been easier to gain them through species, magic items and spells.
- There is nothing unbalanced about getting advantage on a skill check by spending a rage. Let me know when you see play experience where this is an issue.
- Barbarians got weapon mastery and improved rage, what else do you need early levels?
All of this just doesn't seem to line up with the experiences I have had at the table. The new barbarians are great, do better what they did before and have more options. I have been enjoying playing one, even though I don't care for weapon masteries and brutal strikes much. Maybe it's just because I only started playing one at 13th level after my bard passed away.
