So, caveat: of all the 5th Edition classes I've played, I've barely touched a Barbarian, having played a one-session beginning of Dungeon of the Mad Mage that we did when someone in our Wildemount game wasn't able to make it. I never even raged.
Thus, my experience is more from DMing a Barbarian - one of more consistent players is an Ancestral Guardian Barbarian (a Loxodon in the Selesnya Conclave).
The fundamentals of the Barbarian are things I'd generally try to avoid futzing with too much - there's a lot here that makes the class unique, between being an unarmored tank, getting to halve most of the damage you take (which plays into the prior value,) and being able to dish out a decent amount of damage as well.
Now, I personally have a pathological need to maximize my AC on the characters I play, and so Unarmored Defense for Barbarians always leaves me a little twitchy, given that, unless you roll absurdly good stats, you'll never be able to actually maximize your AC.
That being said, with the standard array, you can get it pretty high. By level 20, if you assign racial bonuses to give yourself +3 Strength and +2s to Con and Dex at level 1, you can eventually max out your Strength and Con. If your DM is generous with defensive magic items, giving you Bracers of Defense and a +3 shield, by level 20 you could have an AC of 26 - which is really freaking high. (If you somehow were able to max your Dex as well, that becomes 29).
However, to bring things down to earth a bit, unarmored defense will give you a slightly lower AC than other strength-based, plate-wearing classes, but the resistance granted by rage will generally make up for that, maybe even more than make up for it.
While I don't have the personal experience to say for certain, my sense is that the Barbarian is fundamentally sound on a class level.
But what about subclasses?
In the PHB, there are only two options currently - the Berserker and the Totem Warrior. I think on a conceptual level, these two do a good job of exemplifying two aspects of the class. The Berserker is its more physical, athletic side, while the Totem Warrior is its spiritual side. However, as we've seen the subclasses come out for the class, it seems that the Barbarian in general leans more into this mystical, spiritual side with basically all of the others. Does that leave the Berserker as the odd one out?
I guess a question to be asked is whether there's room to design more non-supernatural Barbarian subclasses, or if the Berserker covers that so effectively that it takes up the whole room. The oddity is that the base class isn't really tied to magic, yet nearly all of its subclasses are.
I do think the Berserker should be included as one of the PHB options, though I might grant it a few tweaks. One is that its Berserker Rage's exhaustion penalty is perhaps too strong - it makes using this ability more than once a day too heavy a price. I might instead grant some ability that allows the Berserker, while raging, to make the extra bonus action attack a certain number of times a day, maybe equal to one's proficiency bonus (or twice PB). Perhaps you could even allow the Barbarian to overexert themselves, letting them make these attacks beyond their limit at the cost of a level of exhaustion, but giving them a certain number of them free.
The Totem Warrior, I think, also works quite well as the second option. I might tweak some of the animal bonuses - the 3rd level Bear Totem thing is maybe too powerful for such a low level investment, and maybe some of the others should be buffed to compensate.
Now, I think that every class should have a minimum of three subclasses in the PHB. So, what should we give to Barbarians as their third? To my mind, and granted this could be the influence of having played WoW for so long, when I think about this kind of outlander-mystic-warrior class, I find myself associating it strongly with the natural elements. On a conceptual level, I love the Storm Herald Barbarian. That said, I do think its mechanics fall behind compared to the others - Ancestral Guardian has extra tanking utility, Zealots pump out a ton of damage and are eventually unkillable, and Totem Warriors can soak almost any kind of damage (if they go bear).
Thematically, I think that Storm Heralds make a great counterpart to the two PHB subclasses, but I think they could have some of their mechanics reworked. I did attempt a homebrew class inspired by the Millwood Knights in Dark Souls III's Ashes of Ariandel DLC - these hefty knights have numerous abilities that send shockwaves through the earth, and I think it makes sense for an Elemental Earth-themed Barbarian subclass. But Storm Herald already exists, and a "raging storm" sure sounds like something a Barbarian could embody. I guess a revisit to the design could help make it a competitive option with a little tweaking.
If there are elements I've missed here, I'm going to chalk that up to my lack of experience playing the class. Running out of Rages seems really un-fun, but it's also a key element of resource management for the class (and of course hitting 20 means never running out, not to mention your insane buffs to Strength and Con).
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