Among the changes in the 2024 PHB, one that was kind of interesting was the change to allow Barbarians to get their Rage bonus on Unarmed Strikes as well as Weapon Attacks. Now, this could be a help in a situation where the Barbarian is unarmed, like if their weapon is hit with a Heat Metal spell or stolen or something.
The real question is this: can we actually build a Barbarian that actually does decent damage with unarmed strikes?
Obviously, the Monk is the unarmed strike master, built entirely around them. And while I generally abhor multiclassing, it can sometimes be a last resort to make a build work (I think a Bladelock, for example, gets so much benefit from taking a level of Fighter that it's kind of hard not to).
Let me explain why I'd be looking at this conceptually:
I have a premise for a character that's kind of the first real Barbarian character I've actually felt excited to play. Loosely inspired by the Alan Wake games (particularly II,) he's a horror novelist who finds himself trapped in the Shadowfell for over a decade, desperately trying to stay alive in an ongoing nightmare. Whether it's an actual outside presence or just a persona he comes up with to help him survive (and people with D.I.D. often develop these other personae as a response to trauma,) the character manifests an alter-ego known as Mr. Teeth, who takes over when he goes into a Rage. The idea would be that at early levels, Mr. Teeth would just be a change in posture, expression, and tone of voice, but eventually he'd manifest as a kind of shadow over the character, the appearance of which I'd describe as looking like if someone had gone into the film stock and colored over him with a black marker in each frame - despite the fact that this would be in "reality" as he and the people around him knew it.
Now, if I ever play this character, I'll probably wind up just giving him weapons, because the class is clearly built for that. But I wanted to know if I could make something that at least worked decently.
Thematically, the subclass I'd wind up taking is Berserker, which, despite being kind of the "vanilla" Barbarian, has a few features that feel very appropriate. Berserkers are a more offense-focused subclass thanks to the new version of Frenzy. Mindless Rage feels particularly appropriate, as Mr. Teeth kind of manifested to help the character endure the terrors of the Shadowfell. And even the capstone, Intimidating Presence, is kind of perfect because he's become a scarier monster than the ones that terrorized him.
Why do we want unarmed strikes? Well, it's primarily an aesthetic thing. Most monsters don't really need weapons because they have claws and teeth and such. It would also mean that, when not raging, the character can look like they're just some normal guy.
I'd probably also have the character be Human. While I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for us to get the equivalent of Tasha's "customize your species" equivalent for backgrounds, being Human will allow us to grab any Origin Feat we want, which is nice.
Now, let's talk about Unarmed Strikes.
By default, we do 1 plus our Strength modifier (and also our Rage bonus) with an Unarmed Strike. This "d1" damage die is going to lower our damage by a lot - if we start off with a +3 to Strength, comparing this even with a Dagger is a difference between 6 damage when raging and 7.5. Compared with a Greatsword, we're looking at 6 versus 12, which is fully half as much damage before we even get into the fact that we're losing the Graze mastery, which is so good.
So, it's an uphill battle, and one that I doubt we're going to actually be able to win. But let's give it the old college try!
The Tavern Brawler feat is pretty good for unarmed strikes. It upgrades them to a d4 (meaning we're now at least doing as much damage as we would with a dagger, light hammer, sickle, or club) and allows us to reroll that damage die if we roll a 1. Thus, the typical 2.5 damage from a d4 becomes a 2.875. Eh, that's... better I guess? We also get proficiency with improvised weapons and can, once per turn, push a target 5 feet from us when we hit them as part of the attack action.
Ok, so this is definitely better - doing 7.875 damage on our hits rather than 6.
Still, we're pretty far behind.
Broadly speaking, Barbarians (and most melee builds) divide into what I'd call three broad categories: Sword-and-Board, Dual-wielding, and Great Weapons. The latter of these does also include polearm builds. Sword-and-Board can be very good, but sacrifices damage in the name of survivability. We're not really going for that so much, so we want instead to focus on damage output.
Now, our unarmed strikes are not going to be competitive with a great weapon's damage. But they do start to approach the damage of a dual-wielder's weapons. However, we run into the following problem: dual-wielders are built around just that - dual-wielding. Their attacks deal less damage, but they get to make more of them.
I'd love to build a "pugilist" feat that allows you to effectively dual-wield your own fists - one of the ironies of D&D's design is that someone wielding Light weapons can effectively attack faster with them than with their own empty fists.
In a lot of ways, the Monk's bonus action attack kind of corrects for this. And here, we do really need to start considering whether a dip into Monk is going to solve a ton of our problems.
Being a Monk will be a bit challenging, though, given that both Dex and Wisdom are considered their Primary Abilities, so you'll need at least a 13 in both. Going Point Buy or Standard Array will mean you're pretty spread-out, and you'll need to be somewhat lucky with rolled stats to get this. That said, talk with your DM and see if they will waive this for you.
Let's take a look at the Monk's Martial Arts feature.
We get two major benefits here: the first is that you get a d6 hit die for your Unarmed Strikes (and Monk weapons). This brings your punches (or kicks, headbutts, bites, etc.) in line with the damage of a Shortsword or Handaxe.
The next big benefit is that we get to make an Unarmed Strike as a bonus action. Because this doesn't involve the Light property, that attack gets the full benefit of our Strength and Rage.
While Monks can use Dexterity in place of Strength for unarmed strikes and monk weapons, it doesn't say you have to.
Now, I will say that if you eventually take this build all the way to level 20, you might sadly miss out on the amazing capstones for each class. But given how few campaigns actually go that far, it might not actually be that bad. The more bitter pill is that you'll be delaying Extra Attack, which is rough.
Still, just one Monk level now gives us a bonus action attack (which, to be fair, won't come up until round two, after we've Raged).
In terms of which class we start off with, I think Barbarian's probably wise, giving us Con save proficiency. Then, maybe just at level 2 we pick up our Monk level and then stick to Barbarian for the foreseeable future.
Now, as much as I enjoy the introduction of Weapon Masteries, it makes calculating damage a lot harder (depending on the mastery). Given that a dual-wielder is likely using a Handaxe or Shortsword, both of which use Vex, I kind of dread calculating it. But we could compare this with a Greatsword-wielding Graze build.
We'll take a look at this at level 4, allowing our unarmed Barbarian to become a Berserker, while our Greatsword character is going to be picking up Great Weapon Master.
Again, the assumption here is that the GWM build is going to be doing more damage. But it's a question of how far ahead they are:
Ok: Assumptions:
This is still tier 1, so the AC of our target is probably not super high - maybe a 15.
We need to account for the ramp-up time here (which to be fair would be true for a dual-wielder who has the Dual Wielder feat as well - though the Nick mastery is nicer to Barbarians than how things used to be). Thus, we'll take the damage over a course of three rounds. Again, this is going to favor our GWM build because they'll be at full speed from the get-go.
We'll assume that we started with a 17 in Strength (though given the lack of feats to really support this, we might have gone only 16 on our unarmed Barbarian, both to help us get our Dex, Wis, and Con to decent levels and because we're probably just going to be taking ASIs) and so our GWM now has a +4 while our unarmed guy only has a +3 to Strength.
So, let's try it out!
GWM:
With +4 to Strength, we're looking at a +6 to hit. Against an AC of 15, that means we're hitting on a 9 or higher, meaning we have a 60% hit chance. GWM is also going to add our PB to the damage when we hit.
Our damage on a hit is 2d6+8, or 15 on average.
With Graze, we also deal some damage on a hit, so that's 4 on those misses.
Finally, our crits, 5% of the time, give us an extra 2d6 (or 7) damage.
Thus, we have: 15x60%, or 9, plus 4x40%, or 1.6, plus 7x5%, or .35, giving us a total damage per attack (and thus per turn because this is tier 1) of 10.95 damage.
Over three turns, this becomes 32.85
Unarmed:
We only have a +3 Strength, which means our attack bonus is +5, so we're going to hit on a roll of 10 or higher, or 55% of the time.
Our hit damage is 1d6+5, or 8.5. And a crit adds 3.5 damage. Now, that said, if we took the Tavern Brawler feat, this is actually false: instead, our d6s are going to do an average of 3.917 (ish, it's actually .9166666, etc.) So, our hits are 8.917 and our crits add 3.917.
Thus: we get 8.917x55%, or 4.934 (ish) plus 3.917x5%, or .196(ish) for a total damage of 5.13.
However, after the first turn (when we're using our Bonus Action to Rage) we will get to do this twice per turn. In other words, over three rounds, when the GWM gets three such attacks, we're effectively getting 5 attacks.
Thus, over three turns, our Unarmed Build does 25.65 damage.
So, we're doing about 80% of what the GWM character is doing.
Sadly, I think that the math does not favor us as we get to higher levels - GWM scales remarkably well, and when they get Extra Attack, our solitary Unarmed Strike bonus attack is a bit deprecated in value in comparison.
A dual-wield build will likely fare better, thanks in large part to Weapon Mastery (with the Dual-Wielder Feat, we can get four attacks in per turn after the first once we have Extra Attack) though because Barbarians don't get Fighting Style feats for free, you'll be losing out on your Light weapon attack's damage as well.
Essentially, I think this build can work in the broadest sense, and I don't think people are obligated to play optimally, but I think that if I ever play this character, he's probably going to have some kind of big weapon to fight with.
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