One of campaign 2's characters on Critical Role is Ashley Johnson's Yasha. Yasha is an Aasimar Barbarian, and her subclass is Path of the Zealot. And while that is a show that sets the stakes pretty high pretty frequently, I think you're going to be hard pressed to actually see Yasha die at any point, at least in a combat situation.
Zealot's not new - it was introduced in Xanathar's Guide to Everything. While you can, sort of, play it a bit like a Barbarian's version of a Paladin, given that it's a subclass built on devotion to some divine entity, the Barbarian aspect of it is quite strong - flavor-wise, it fits very strongly with chaos rather than law (and while there's no longer any rule that Paladins have to be lawful, the class flavor certainly leans that way in most cases.)
Indeed, there's nothing that says you even have to be following a good deity. Your Orc Barbarian might be devoted to Gruumsh, for instance.
Let's talk about what the Zealot gets, though spoiler alert: the level 14 capstone is the thing I'm most blown away by. Still, the other features are good.
At level 3, when you choose the subclass, you get two features: Warrior of the Gods and Divine Fury.
The former is mostly flavorful, but can potentially be a life-saver when your party doesn't have the funds to get a bunch of revivify diamonds - basically, resurrection magic doesn't need a material component to bring you back. As long as your Cleric has a 3rd level slot, you're good.
Divine Fury will be a more frequently-used thing. Once per turn, when you hit, you get to deal an additional 1d6 plus half your Barbarian level damage when you hit with an attack. You choose when you pick this subclass if the damage is radiant or necrotic - I imagine the idea is that good deities will do radiant while evil ones do necrotic. It's too bad that radiant tends to be more useful in more cases, so I imagine most will choose that. This is a pretty nice boost to a Barbarian's already respectable damage output.
At level 6, you get Fanatical Focus - while raging, you can reroll a failed saving throw to try to succeed. You get to do this once per rage. While I can tell you that I don't think I've ever turned a failure into a success with my Fighter's similar Indomitable feature (he's pretty hyper-specialized on the three ability scores he need for core features - Strength, Int, and Con) this is still a good Hail Mary to use if someone tries to dominate you.
At level 10, you get Zealous Presence. As a bonus action, you can give yourself and up to 10 allies (so the vast majority of adventuring parties) within 60 feet of you advantage on attack rolls and saving throws until the start of your next turn. It's a pretty nice buff to the party that can make the first (well, second, as you'll probably want to rage on the first one) round of combat go a bit better.
However, now we come to the crazy one:
At level 14, you get Rage Beyond Death. Hitting 0 hit points doesn't knock you unconscious if you're raging. And while you'll still get failed death saves from taking damage at 0 hit points, you cannot die until the rage ends. And then, you only die if the rage ends and you have 0 hit points.
Which is freaking crazy.
While I think a DM could rule that if you take massive damage (i.e. taking enough damage to put you at "negative your max health") that might kill you anyway, but then, you're a Barbarian, so that's going to have to be an utterly enormous amount of damage. Likewise, I could imagine ruling something like Disintegration could also kill you despite this. But still, in the vast majority of situations, you're basically unkillable.
Consider that this comes after Relentless Rage, which allows you to make Con saves (with a rising DC each time, resetting on a long rest) to avoid dropping to 0 hit points, and then that at the next level's Persistent Rage, your Rage only drops after the full minute is up, if you end it yourself, or if you fall unconscious (which you won't be, because of Rage Beyond Death,) and you become basically invincible for a minute every time you rage. (And given that the language on Relentless Rage does account for massive damage, which could be read to say that Rage Beyond Death then does not even allow you to die from that, you really cannot die.)
The image here is astounding - you could be burned to a crisp, half your skull exposed, and actively on fire, but you're just so profoundly unrelenting that you still fight. And man, isn't that what you're going for with a Barbarian?
Also, remember that even if you have three or three hundred failed death saves while raging, as long as you get any healing whatsoever before your rage drops, you don't die.
Bringing this back to Yasha: she's an Aasimar. Which means that she has a once-a-day touch-range heal that restores HP equal to her level.
So she could be basically dead, but spend her full minute carving up whatever horrifying demons or aberrations they're facing, and as long as she taps herself on the shoulder and uses Healing Hands before that minute is up, she's going to walk away from that fight.
No comments:
Post a Comment