Adjustments to the Inner Shadow Barbarian

 So, iteration is always important in design.

Generally speaking, I think that good design in something out of D&D is when you get something cool and new but it's rendered in the simplest, most elegant way.

The Inner Shadow Barbarian is my design for a character I'd want to play. It's pretty important, though, for me, to make it balanced and also coherent. So often, I think, 3rd party and/or homebrew design can veer into wish fulfillment, being either overpowered or trying to force a scenario that could potentially play out in other ways.

I presented this in an earlier post, but I had two goals for this subclass:

First, to make a viable Barbarian subclass focused on Unarmed Strikes. Second, to make a subclass that flavored Rage as more of a transformation.

Since getting into the games from Remedy, specifically the Alan Wake series, I've been really interesting in the Jungian idea of the Shadow. Jung, of course, studied with Freud, who came up with the idea of a threefold psyche composed of the Ego, Superego, and Id. The Id (whose potency as an idea is really aided by its simple two-letter spelling) is the impulse and unchecked drive and desire, which I think relates well to the idea of Rage - a kind of submission to the Id and the abandonment of any of the checks or restraints the Ego and Superego place upon the Id.

Jung's idea of the Shadow is not really the same, but they could be related - it's basically the aspects of our selves that we aren't aware of - an unconscious self-perception or desire that might even contradict the image we have of ourselves.

So, the concept here is that Rage unleashes a suppressed or even just unconscious part of the Barbarian's psyche as a separate persona.

Now, I'll concede here that the connection between that and the mechanical theming of an unarmed Barbarian isn't inherent to the concept. But I do think we need a good unarmed Barbarian subclass, and I think that this fits with multiple Barbarian character concepts I've had. Given how much Gothic Horror is about that Jungian shadow (describing it before he defined it in the 20th century,) I think both the folklore of the Werewolf and also the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story both sort of fit with this idea. I had really wanted to make a werewolf Barbarian, but the Path of the Beast didn't really do it for me (I'll concede that at least on a conceptual level, there's certainly overlap here).

But later, I had a more elaborate character concept of a man who becomes trapped in the Shadowfell for several years (yes, like Alan Wake getting trapped in the Dark Place) and manifests this shadowy persona called "Mr. Teeth" in order to survive there, though he erroneously (or I guess it'd be up to my DM) thinks that Mr. Teeth is a separate being who terrorized him (but also just happened to slaughter anyone who threatened him in the Shadowfell). Having returned to the Material Plane, he's brought Mr. Teeth along with him, and becomes the monster when he needs to protect himself.

But all that preamble aside, what changes have I made since that first post? And what other changes might be called for? For reference, here's a link to the initial post.

First off: damage scaling.

I think one of the things we have to do with any unarmed-focused subclass is not step on anyone's toes. It sucks when one class is better at doing the thing that another class is entirely built around. Thus, I've changed the scaling of the Inner Shadow's Unarmed Strike damage to be at best equal to an equivalent-level Monk, never better than it. Thus, when you get the subclass at level 3, your unarmed strikes deal 1d6 damage. At level 6, a level after Monks get their first upgrade, your unarmed strikes go up to a d8. Finally, at level 14 (three levels after Monks get this) you go up to a d10, and that's where it stops. A d10 is fine - it's the equivalent of a Glaive or Halberd. Thanks to the Wraps of Unarmed Prowess, unarmed strikes will at least be able to get the most basic scaling with items (though I do think we need some items that let you add extra dice to your unarmed strikes, like a Vicious Weapon).

Next, we look at the Flurry of Claws element of Monstrous Claws (which is now Monstrous Swipes). This is a buff primarily to avoid some awkwardness - your bonus action unarmed strike still gets to add your Strength to it. Mainly, this felt necessary if we were going to let your unarmed strikes benefit from Graze - why should you get to add your Strength only if you miss?

We're going to come back to Shadow Manifestation, which I think might need a redesign for clarity.

Vicious Swipes (the new Nightmare Claws because we're saving the "Nightmare" term for later, and also swipes allows for non-slashing damage) is unchanged.

Ok, now, Raging Hurl was cool, but we were trying too hard to do what we can already kind of handle with Shoves. So, we replaced it (as I already mentioned in the subsequent post) with Enraged Manipulation, which gives foes disadvantage on their saving throws against Shoves and Grapples if we're raging. The intent here is to recreate the benefits that Rage gave to these actions in 5.0, essentially, when they took an Athletics check.

Vicious Claws got renamed to Nightmare Swipes, because "nightmare" feels like it should be more powerful than "vicious." I will say that I'm now wondering if we should get a once-a-turn Fear effect on our attacks, like an Undead Warlock. I also bumped it to level 14 to make it fair to Monks, and as mentioned before, it bumps you to a d10 rather than 2d6.

Secrets of the Id was a feature I liked, but it also felt potentially like not enough for your level 10 features (especially when putting Nightmare Swipes at level 14). I didn't want to directly replicate anything from another Barbarian subclass, so you don't get full immunity to Charm and Fear, but you get advantage on saves against them while raging. It's strictly worse, of course, than Mindless Rage for Berserkers, but I think we have enough unique stuff going on here that it's probably ok. You still get those extra skills with Primal Knowledge.

Metamorphic Manifestation is unchanged.

    So, let's come back to Shadow Manifestation.

The real problem I have here is just wording it clearly. The idea is that if you're raging and you get hit with any damage, you deal a bit of extra damage on any attacks until the end of your next turn. But while this idea isn't hard to communicate, it's surprisingly hard to put into strict and clear language. I considered saying "when you take damage, you enter a state of shadowy fury. While in this state, your Rage bonus damage to your attacks is doubled." That's a bit awkward, but the older phrasing "when you take damage your rage bonus is doubled until the end of your next turn" could lead people to think this is exponential - get hit three times at level 10 and you're dealing 24 extra damage per hit. That's obviously not the intent.

So, we could keep hunting for a new way to phrase this, or we could just come up with a different mechanic for Shadow Manifestation.

I still have this design in my "version 3" document, but I do think there's a reasonably similar feature: we could just say that "when a creature within 30 feet of you deals damage to you while you are raging, they take Force damage (could be psychic) equal to your Rage bonus." This could give us more or less damage depending on how many times they hit us. But one thing I like that's kind of elegant here is that it's not rolled, just a flat amount, which means that it can be shouted out easily during combat without pausing much.

If we go with this, maybe when we hit level 10 (which still feels a little thin) we might get to start to add our Strength modifier to this, helping it scale better into higher levels.

It's admittedly maybe an imperfect design - Barbarians usually don't disincentivize monsters from attacking them because it's better for them to get attacked than their allies - but it could still be good.

Inner Shadow Barbarian vs. Death Knight

 Yes, I'm doing a build/damage calculation for a homebrewed subclass!

As a note, I think that I'm already altering the design slightly: I love the flavor of Raging Hurl, the 6th level feature (see the previous post for a breakdown of the subclass as a whole,) but it's a little over-designed and fiddly.

Thus, I think I'm going to go with the alternative that I proposed in that previous post and switch it to something simpler:

Level 6: Enraged Manipulation:

While you are in a Rage, creatures have disadvantage on their saving throws against your attempts to Grapple or Shove them with an Unarmed Strike.

Now, that could make my life calculating damage a little harder, given that the Grappler feat gives us advantage on attacks against grappled targets, and so we would need to figure out how likely it is that the Death Knight gets grappled by us. Luckily, we have an out: we just use Reckless Attack every turn so that everything has advantage, whether we are grappling the Death Knight or not. Grappling would still have great utility, allowing us to keep the DK from our allies and even maybe drag them off of a steed, assuming they don't Legendary Resistance out of our grapples.

Still, we'll just assume we're hitting it with our unarmed strikes, and maybe making a grapple attempt one one attack each turn with the Grappler feat, but focusing more on damage.

    Stats:

This is simple: we start off with 17 in Strength and then whatever we need for good Dex and Con. We can even kind of dump Wisdom a bit if we just want to rely on Primal Knowledge for the big Wisdom checks.

    Feats:

Here's where we're going to need to be creative. Typical Barbarian feats like Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master, and even Dual Wielding don't work with this build. Now, the obvious one to take is Grappler. We could just cap Strength at level 8, and thus be able to boost our Dex and Con more at levels 12 and 16 if we go up that high later on, but I might instead take something like Mage Slayer and then figure out whether to split an ASI at 12 or find one last Strength-boosting feat. For the purposes of this white-room test, it'd be better to just cap things, but I'm going to say we go Mage Slayer as a more realistic choice in a long campaign. Sentinel could also be a good option as further control. That means only a +4 to Strength.

    Gameplan:

Very simple: we're going to rage and then we're going to do our best to pummel this Death Knight into next week. We'll use Reckless Attack, and I'm going to assume that we're taking at least a little damage each round and benefit from Shadow Manifestation. Notably, on round one, we aren't going to get our off-hand punch or that bonus because we A: need the bonus action to activate our rage and B: don't get the damage boost from taking damage until we are raging. If we can rage prior to combat, that's great, but we'll assume we can't.

So, turn one, it's rage-punch-punch, then turns two onward is punch-punch-punch.

    Damage:

Ok, let's get that first turn. Our attacks at this level deal 2d6+7, or 14 average damage on a hit (naturally something like Wraps of Unarmed Prowess would be good to have, but we have done all of these sans magic items unless we're an artificer who can make our own). We have a +8 to hit, which would normally give us a 45% chance to hit, but we're recklessly attacking, so it's actually a 69.75% chance, and a 9.75% chance to crit. Our bonus crit damage is 7 on average. So, we're looking at 9.765 plus .6825, or roughly 10.4 damage per attack, giving us 20.8 damage on average for our first turn.

Now, turn two, things accelerate:

First off, assuming we take some damage from the Death Knight (which feels likely but not guaranteed - though more likely if we can grapple them or lock them down if we take Sentinel) we'll be adding an additional 3 damage to each attacks, so it becomes 2d6+10, or 17 on a hit. The crit bonus is the same and just as likely, so we just find 69.75% of 17, or 11.8575, and then add in the .6825 extra damage for crits, and we get 12.54 damage for our main action attacks, or 25.08 damage.

However, we then get our "off-hand" attack, which lands for 2d6+6, or 13 on average, so, 69.75% of 13 is 9.0675, and adding the crit bonus gives us 9.75 damage.

Thus, we get a total damage of 34.83, which is very respectable but not insanely outside of the range of damage outputs we've seen before (I'm pretty sure it's behind our Wizard and Sorcerer builds).

However, I realized something: we forgot Brutal Strike.

So, going back, if we assume our first attack is going for a Brutal Strike, we need to drop one of our attacks. Given that our bonus action attack hits for less than our other strikes, it's actually probably ideal for that to be the one we risk having a lower hit chance for. We can't do that on turn one, though.

So, turn one, we drop the 10.4 damage from one of our action attacks and then find what we get without advantage but an additional d10. We have a 45% chance to hit with this and a 5% chance to crit. A hit deals 2d6+1d10+7 damage, which becomes 19.5 on a hit and an extra 9 damage on a crit. So, 19.5x45% is 8.775 and then 9x5% is .45, so that attack now deals 9.225 - which is a damage loss, actually. We might still want to do it for the chance at a Hamstring Blow.

On turn two, though, we can do this with our off-hand attack. Thus, we lose the 9.75 damage to do 2d6+1d10+6 damage without advantage, or 18.5. Given that that's less than the attack on turn one, I think losing advantage really does wind up being a damage loss even with the extra d10. Against a lower-AC target, I think that would change.

But thus, we can expect to deal 25.08 damage on average on our first turn and then a very healthy 34.83 damage on subsequent turns. I'm actually quite pleased with this result, which feels in-line with what other characters can do.

The Berserker build I did does better, and even winds up getting into the 40s if they can reliably get a Retaliation attack, so perhaps there are ways I could even soup this subclass up.

EDIT: Oh duh. I forgot Graze.

Now, I realize that there's a flaw here: our "off-hand" attack doesn't add our Strength, typically, but Graze is a mastery that allows us to do our Strength modifier in damage on a miss. Perhaps there's a reason that they don't put it on light weapons!

Turn one that issue shouldn't matter: we have a 30.25% chance to miss when we're attacking with advantage, so we can add 4x30.25% to each of those attacks, giving turn one's 10.4 damage per attack an extra 1.21 damage, bringing them up to 11.61, and thus the total damage on the first turn ought to be 23.22.

That extra 1.21 can be added as well to the two regular attacks on turn 2. But how do we square the off-hand attack?

Well, here's a place where we might just buff the subclass. Maybe our bonus action attack also gets to add the Strength modifier? After all, I think this is true for the d6 option for the Beast Barbarian (who kind of presaged the Nick property). Given that we dropped it in our earlier calculation, we can very easily just add a flat 4 to the damage of our off-hand unarmed strike. (Essentially, the other 69.75% of the damage is already accounted for in our Attack action attacks, adding up to 4 with that extra 1.21). So, now we're going to basically add 2.42+4 to the total damage done on turn 2+, or 6.42.

Thus, it becomes 41.25 damage on those subsequent turns, which is quite good. Is it too good? ...Maybe, but I also think that martial characters could stand to do more damage. And this is still contingent on taking damage each round.

Naturally, you might decide to take other Masteries than Graze, but for damage output, especially against a high-AC target like a Death Knight, it's the clear winner.

And yeah, I think I will drop the "don't add your Strength modifier" thing on the bonus action attacks, because not only does it make the subclass feel cooler, it's also simplifies it!

Homebrewing the Barbarian I Want to Play: Path of the Inner Shadow

 Barbarian is a class that I've often struggled to find a fun character hook for me to want to play one. I've only ever played one very briefly when the class was more or less assigned to me when we played basically a half-session of doing the first level of Dungeon of the Mad Mage, where I think we had one combat and even that I think I only got one turn in.

I've long wanted to play a werewolf Barbarian - Rage feels like a great way to represent a lycanthropic transformation. But the subclass that most suits that archetype is the Path of the Beast, which honestly has some design problems that make it a little underwhelming.

I've also, more recently, had the idea inspired by Scratch from Alan Wake II, of a kind of emergent shadow archetype that arises when a Barbarian rages - likely the character would be a pretty unassuming figure until they got covered in a silhouette of shadow (I've always visualized this like someone taking a Sharpie and blacking them out in every frame... except that you see this in person). While the Berserker, despite being ostensibly the "generic Barbarian" subclass, actually fits this surprisingly well, the one major downside is that you really still need to fight with a weapon.

There's no really great unarmed Barbarian. So I decided to make one.

Now, caveats: I do a fair amount of homebrewing of monsters, but I don't do as many with subclasses (let alone classes, though this is just a subclass,) and none of my homebrew subclasses have ever been playtested.

I'm very aware that as an amateur designer, there's a tendency to over-engineer things. I'm aware that the final version of this would have to be pared down a little. There might be one or two many bells-and-whistles to this thing. But I think the overall concept could be really cool.

I'll provide some commentary here like I would when commenting on a UA or recently published subclass, but to explain my reasonings and also concerns about the design. As usual, these will be marked by indenting before them.

Thus, let me present you with the first draft of...

Path of the Inner Shadow

Undergo a monstrous transformation, tearing foes apart with your bare hands.

All Barbarians channel their primal rage, but sometimes, the rage becomes too volatile to control. Rarely does a Barbarian choose to walk the Path of the Inner Shadow - the subconscious monster inside chooses it for them. As rage consumes you, your body shifts into a monstrous beast, becoming a whirling nightmare of blood and death.

Level 3: Monstrous Claws:

Empowered Fists: When you attack with an Unarmed Strike, you can now deal 1d6 damage plus your Strength modifier rather than the normal damage.

    This is achievable with something like the Unarmed Fighting style, but this ought to be baked into the subclass to make it clear this is "the unarmed Barbarian."

Flurry of Claws: When you make an Unarmed Strike as part of the Attack action and are not wielding a weapon or shield in either hand, you can make one additional Unarmed Strike as a bonus action. You do not add your Strength modifier to the damage of this attack.

    The intent here is to basically give your unarmed attacks the "light" property. This is one of the really odd things about the rules, that you can attack faster with some light weapons than you could with actually no weapons (and I think is comparable to the logic of giving Monks a free bonus action unarmed strike).

Practiced Rends: Choose Graze, Cleave, Push, or Topple. Your unarmed strikes benefit from the chosen mastery when you make an attack with them. When you finish a long rest, you can choose a different mastery for your unarmed strikes.

    One of the pitfalls of an unarmed Barbarian is that now that weapons have Masteries, you're really leaving a major part of your power on the table by choosing not to wield a weapon. The selection here might need some revisions - to bring it closer in line with light weapons you'd be using while dual-wielding, we might need to swap out something like Graze or Cleave for Vex, though I kind of like getting these heavy-weapon-only masteries here.

Level 3: Shadow Manifestation:

When your Rage is active, you take on a monstrous form. This might be a hulking, vaguely humanoid silhouette, a beastly hybrid creature, or a fiendish embodiment of chaos. When you take damage, your Rage damage bonus is doubled until the end of your next turn (the damage bonus cannot exceed twice your normal rage bonus).

    This is the real aesthetic headliner here - but I wanted to find a way to boost damage for the class in a different way than Berserkers or Zealots did. If we assume you're "dual-wielding your fists" you're probably making three attacks per round after level 5 (though only two on round 1 in order to go into a rage,) and assuming you do get hit (you are the Barbarian,) you'll thus be able to add 6, then 9, then 12 damage if you hit with all of them. By comparison, a Berserker will, once per turn, assuming they're always going Reckless, get 7, 10.5, and then 14 extra damage. So, this is slightly less and won't benefit from crits, but it might be ok because I think that the later benefits should make up for it. We could just change the values here to adjust it

Level 6: Nightmare Claws:

You can deal your choice of bludgeoning, piercing, slashing, psychic, or force damage when you deal damage with your unarmed strikes.

    This is a standard thing you get with subclass weapons and the like to ensure that you don't get screwed over if a monster is immune to normal physical damage (which is rarer in 5.5, but if you're facing monsters from 5.0, for example, this will help a lot, and there are still some creatures with resistance to those damage types). I decided to put in the other damage types to let you flavor your attacks in a way that feels right to your monstrous form (and if you wanted to pick up something like the Slasher or Piercer feat).

Level 6: Raging Hurl:

When you take the attack action, if you are grappling a creature that is your size or smaller, you can replace one of your attacks to hurl the creature a number of feet equal to ten times your Strength modifier. If the creature hits another creature or object, both must make a Dexterity saving throw with a DC equal to 8 + your Strength modifier + your proficiency bonus. On a failure, the creature takes 1d6 damage for every ten feet they traveled, or half as much on a success. If the creature is hurled upward and does not hit anything, they instead take falling damage as normal.

    Of all the features I have for this, this is maybe the most over-engineered one, and probably first on the chopping block if needed. I just really feel like it'd be a fun subclass feature to be able to throw monsters around. It's also there to subtly hint to you that, hey, you might want to really invest in grappling with this subclass. A possible alternative would be to give foes disadvantage on their saves against your grapple attempts if you're raging, which would kind of come back around to the way that Barbarians used to be great at shoving and grappling when it was an Athletics check, and thus they got advantage on it because of rage. We could make this work for both shoving and grappling, actually, which gives us some of the flavor of this but in a far simpler rule. Also, the damage might be too high.

Level 10: Vicious Claws:

The damage of your unarmed strikes is now 2d6, rather than 1d6.

    It's possible this is too much. But while Wraps of Unarmed Prowess finally give us a way to boost the attack and damage of unarmed strikes with a magic item, we still don't get something like a Vicious Weapon, which can be a real important damage boost to martial characters. Maybe we could tone this down a little, like making it a d10, but honestly, I think I'm fine with this (2d6 isn't that crazy).

Level 10: Secrets of the Id:

Grappling with your inner monster has given you greater understanding of your own and others' psychology. Your Primal Knowledge feature now allows you to apply its benefits to Insight and Persuasion checks.

    I think one of the best philosophical shifts in 5.5e was to give very combat-focused classes more out-of-combat utility. While Primal Knowledge isn't going to do as much as an entire spellbook full of Wizard spells, it's a feature with real utility and I think adding these skills to it (Insight in particular) feels very thematically right for the subclass. After all, confronting and integrating our Shadow can lead to greater empathy, and you could flavor this subclass as a healing journey.

Level 14: Metamorphic Manifestation:

When you enter a Rage, you can choose between a Creeping, Fathomless, or Juggernaut form, enhancing the monstrousness of your Shadow Manifestation.

    I think we need a splashy thing for our capstone, and I also really like giving players more flexibility. Indeed, these three forms kind of correspond with three of the modifications Reanimator Artificers can give their companions.

Creeping Form: You have a climb speed equal to your speed and can move on vertical surfaces and upside-down without an ability check and leaving your hands free. Additionally, the reach of your Unarmed Strikes is increased by 10 feet.

    I think this one is probably fine as-is. Maybe we'd nerf it to a 5-foot reach extension (bringing it down to just 10 feet total) but otherwise I think this isn't going to be game breaking (but still will be cool when we grapple a foe and then climb up a wall).

Fathomless Form: You have a swim speed equal to your speed and can breathe underwater. Additionally, creatures you are grappling cannot speak of perform the verbal components of spells.

    I actually don't think that the silence effect here is that powerful - after all, Silence is a 2nd level spell, and also, most spell-casting monsters have plenty of non-spell magical effects like Arcane Burst that this doesn't affect. It's no worse than a Wizard or Sorcerer keeping several spell slots in reserve for Counterspell. And it gives the the form utility outside of those rare underwater fights.

Juggernaut Form: Your size becomes Large when you rage, unless it is already larger. Your speed is not reduced by difficult terrain. You deal double damage to objects, and you can now choose a second Mastery option for your Unarmed Strikes. The second option must be either the Push or Topple Mastery.

    It's possible that the double mastery thing should be its own separate feature. But I think we needed just a little more utility for the form that doesn't get a new movement type. Is it too many things? Possibly. Maybe we remove the Siege Monster aspect, or, again, we separate out the bonus masteries. But I think this could probably work as is.

Overall Thoughts:

    I think this would naturally push players toward the Grappler feat, which I'm totally fine with. Arguably it might even need a little more of a damage boost given that you'll be missing out on major martial feats like Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master, and Dual Wielder.

    Most importantly, though, I think that this subclass could actually fulfill both of my Barbarian class fantasies better than any existing options. I think I'll do a "vs Death Knight" calculation to see how it actually compares to my Berserker build.

    Another note: perhaps it's odd not to really interact in any way with the Frightened condition. Here, I feel a little penned in by the Berserker's design, which gives both immunity to Charm and Fear, and also allows you to inflict Fear on foes at higher levels.

    That said, there are other subclasses that have overlapped in the past. I could see giving some kind of fear immunity (possibly at level 6) and then a way to inflict fear later on (likely one of the Metamorphic Manifestation options at 14). But for now, I'm going to stick with the design as I have it now.

Berserker v Death Knight

 So, I've been having fun figuring out what a fairly straight-forward single-class build of various sorts (arguably the Armorer and Eldritch Knight had a lot of moving parts, but weren't that complicated - the Rogue was the tough one because of how complex Vex makes things).

Of all D&D classes, Barbarian might be the one I've played the least (Druid is also there - both were basically partial one-shot characters).

That said, after playing Alan Wake II - a game that might have my favorite narrative and overall artistic ambition of all time - I started getting kind of excited about the idea for a Barbarian character. The premise was that the character had been trapped in the Shadowfell for over a decade. During that time, in order to survive there, he either manifested a dark alter-ego or perhaps in truth, some actual entity from there possessed him. Either way, when he rages, he becomes a terrifying shadow-monster (the visual would be like if you were watching a film and someone had taken a black sharpie and colored over a character frame-by-frame, but scratched a rough, grinning face out of the sharpie with a needle).

While the flavor of the character is highly supernatural, looking at the various subclasses, I actually felt that the Berserker wound up being the best fit - even if the Berserker is, in theory, the "basic, mundane" Barbarian, every subclass feature seemed to play into the fantasy of this character - you can't be frightened or charmed because the shadow-monster has already taken control, for instance.

And don't get me wrong: I really like the flavor of the World Tree Barbarian, not to mention its mechanics. I would also love the Path of the Beast if they fixed the "this subclass gives you special weapons but no obvious way for them to scale" problem, and can really imagine a kind of Werewolf Barbarian (guess I should play a Stormwight Fury in Draw Steel). But Berserker, heavily reskinned, feels the best option here.

Ok, so, as I've been doing with the other builds, this is going to be assuming a 10th level Barbarian versus a Death Knight as our really scary tier 2 boss monster (either a campaign boss or the hurdle we need to clear to get into tier 3). Likewise, I'm going to assume no magic items (which would be DM malpractice, but it makes the theorycrafting easier). We're doing a straight-class build, and we're assuming we've got a background that boosts Strength so we can get a 17 in Strength at level 1 with Point Buy.

I am also, perhaps unfairly, going to ignore Origin Feats - Savage Attacker would boost our damage, but I think (and maybe I need to do the math on it) it's not terribly significant (though as someone who often does the math here to like four decimal places, it's certainly more significant than that). Anyway, we're going to ignore it. Likewise, I'm ignoring Species features - I'm sure that a, like, Fire Goliath is probably optimal, but whatever.

So, let's talk about our build and then we'll get into our damage output.

    Weapon Choice and Feats:

This is going to tie pretty closely into feats. Barbarians are arguably better-incentivized than most to make lots of attacks, because we get to add our Rage Bonus each time. But does that make up for the lack of a big heavy weapon, which both has bigger damage dice and also allows us to get Great Weapon Master? Not to mention Polearm Master?

I think (I think) that I did the math back in 2024 and found that basically every Strength-based character will do better with a two-handed weapon than Dual Wielding - even when you have Paladins getting Radiant Strikes. Barbarians don't get a Fighting Style, so they wouldn't get Two Weapon Fighting without sacrificing a chance at bumping their strength, which cuts into the potential benefit of getting one (or after turn one, two, if we're using a Nick weapon) extra Rage bonuses. GWM is just so powerful - 4 damage added to two attacks at this level is going to be better than adding 3 damage on two additional attacks. And if we're thinking damage dice, if we use a 2d6 weapon, we're basically getting the same number of d6s per turn making two attacks as we would making four attacks with 1d6 weapons.

Thus, I think we're going to stick to a big heavy weapon. But which one?

Mathematically, the best weapon of this type is the Greatsword, which edges out the Maul (the only other to share its dice) because Graze is just that powerful, especially against a high-AC monster like a Death Knight.

I know some people have underestimated Graze because it only does anything when you miss with an attack, but except when dealing with extremely low-AC enemies, it still winds up doing more. However, I will concede that its effect is pretty boring - it doesn't reshape the battlefield at all, except more efficiently killing your foes.

But, also: the math is easier.

That being said, there are two weapon types with Graze - the Greatsword and the Glaive. The latter will do less damage, having a 1d10 rather than 2d6 as its damage dice (5.5 versus 7). That being said, the Glaive will open up Polearm Master for you, which lets you get another hit in with a bonus action - kind of giving you that benefit of dual-wielding but without having to actually dual-wield.

But... uh...

Ok, look, the Glaive approach is probably the most "optimized" one, taking GWM at level 4 and PAM at level 8.

But we sort of just did that with the Eldritch Knight.

So, instead, we're going to stick to a Greatsword. While it's tempting to just cap Strength at level 8 with an ASI (unlike the Fighter or Rogue, we only have two General Feat levels by 10) I think we'll instead take something like Mage Slayer. To be fair, this might be less important on a Berserker who's already going to be immune to fear and charm, but it's still pretty good. Beyond that, there aren't a ton of really appealing General Feats here.

    Game Plan:

Ok, this will be relatively simple:

We're going to start off our first turn by Raging. And then, we're going to use Reckless Attack every turn.

We'll start off with an attack that has advantage from Reckless, because we have a higher crit chance and will prefer to use our Frenzy damage on this one.

Next, we forgo advantage to do a Brutal Strike. The secondary effect will vary - we can use the push effect if we need to maneuver them into a position, or default to slowing them if we like where they are. 

Then, if we get a crit on either of these, we'll do our Hew attack.

Finally, if the Death Knight strikes back against us, we use our reaction for Retaliation (this one's DM/monster dependent).

    Calculating:

Ok, this should be relatively simple. Brutal Strikes has to be called out on a particular attack, so unlike Sneak Attack, we'll only factor it into a single attack with hit and crit chances we already know. The non-damage effects of Brutal Strikes won't affect our damage output.

Now, unlike our previous builds, we only have a +4 to Strength at level 10, so we'll have a total of +8 to hit, meaning that we only hit on a 12 or higher against the DK's 20 AC - meaning we have a 45% chance to hit, without advantage. With advantage, we'll have a 57.75% chance to hit, and a 9.75% to crit. But we also know exactly when we'll have advantage or not (assuming something isn't giving us disadvantage).

The one complexity here is that our Frenzy bonus (which is part of why we're committing to always recklessly attacking) does have the Sneak Attack thing of potentially coming on different attacks. So we'll deal with it separately from the attacks themselves.

First Attack:

With advantage, we have a 57.75% chance to hit and a 9.75% chance to crit. Our damage on this attack with a Greatsword will be 2d6+4, but then we also add 4 from Great Weapon Master, so it's really 2d6+8. (Actually, had to go back and change this because...) And, of course, we have our Rage bonus, which is +3 at this level, so really, it's a total of 2d6+11, so we're talking an average hit damage of 18.

That said, we can slice out the 4 from everything because of Graze and add it in later. So, we have a 57.75% chance to do 2d6+7 (or 14, as we're just cutting the 4 from Strength) and 9.75% to do an additional 2d6 (or 7). So, that's 8.085 plus .6825, or 8.7675, and then we add the guaranteed 4 back in to give us 12.7675.

Second Attack:

Now, we're forgoing advantage, but getting to add a d10, so our hit damage is 2d6+1d10+11, and our crit bonus damage is 2d6+1d10, but the chances are 45% and 5%. Graze is still in effect, so we'll slice it out. 2d6+1d10+7 on average is 19.5, and then multiplied by 45% is 8.775, and 5% times 12.5 (the crit damage bonus) is .625, so the average damage for this is 9.4. Add that 4 back in and we get 13.4.

Mystery Bonus Attack:

We won't be able to get this on our first turn even if we do crit, but if we get Hew from Great Weapon Master, we'll have a chance to get another attack in at advantage. It won't get our GWM damage bonus, though. So we're talking 2d6+7 on a hit and an extra 2d6 on a crit. Graze applies to any and all attacks with our Greatsword, so we can once again slice out the 4, though because of our rage bonus, we can't just lump hit and crit damage together. However, we're still enjoying our advantage from Reckless, so we'll be at advantage. It's almost like our first attack, but we have to cut out the GWM bonus. So, we have 2d6+3 (the 3 is the rage bonus) or 10 on a hit, and a bonus of 2d6 (or 7) on a crit. 10x57.75% is, pretty obviously, 5.775, and then our crit bonus of 7x9.75% is, as before, .6825, so the average damage for this is 6.4575. And then, we add back in the 4 from our Strength, which we'll always get, so it's 10.4575.

But how often do we get this? We're assuming this is a solo monster fight, so we won't get Hew from downing an enemy. Thus, it has to be from a critical hit. With our two normal attacks per turn, we've got two chances for that crit, but the chance of getting one is different because one is made with advantage. To figure out the chance of getting a crit on either of two attacks, we're basically taking the inverse of the chance of not getting  a crit on both. So, if we have a 9.75% chance on the first attack to get a crit, that's a 90.25% chance not to. On the second attack, the 5% chance for a crit means that we've got a 95% chance not to get a crit. Therefore, the chance we have to not get a crit on either attack is 90.25%x95%, which winds up being 85.7375%, and therefore our chance to crit on either one or both of our attacks is 14.2625%.

Therefore, we multiply that damage of 10.4575 by 14.2625%, and we get, roughly, 1.49 damage per turn - though notably, only on turns 2 onward, because we needed our bonus action to rage on turn 1.

Retaliation:

Berskers at this level will get to respond to taking damage from a creature with an attack made as a reaction. This does mean that the Death Knight does have to attack us, but we are making ourselves a prime target (and this is often the Barbarian's role in a group).

If the Death Knight attacks us every round, we can reliably make this extra attack. Again, it should still benefit from Reckless Attack, but doesn't gain our GWM damage bonus, and so the damage is actually the same as our Hew attack (when we get it). We might not get it on the first round if the Death Knight goes before us (which is plausible) but if we're their primary focus, we should get it consistently.

The damage and hit/crit chance, again, are the same as our Hew attack, so we can just carry that forward: 10.4575.

Frenzy:

Ok, now we have the Frenzy bonus. At this level, our Frenzy bonus is 3d6, or an average of 10.5 extra damage.

We don't get to choose when our Frenzy goes off - it's the first hit we land when we make Reckless Attack on our turn (with a Strength-based attack, but duh). We'd probably choose to roll it that way anyway, especially because we're making our first attack the one with genuine advantage.

3d6 is an average of 10.5. On our first attack, we have a 57.75% chance to hit and a 9.75% chance to crit. Because this is all dice and thus all doubled on a crit, we'll just lump the hit and crit chances together for our total damage on this first attack, so it's 10.5x67.5%, or 7.0875.

Now, if we miss on the first attack, we'll have a 45% chance to hit and 5% chance to crit on the second. This means that we can just take 50% of the Frenzy damage, or 5.25. However, this only goes off if we miss on the first attack, so we take 5.25 and multiply it by the 42.25% chance we missed the first time. That's 2.218125.

What about Hew? Well, we sure as hell ain't getting Hew if we didn't hit anything with our two primary attacks, so we can ignore it. And we also ignore Retaliation, because Frenzy only works when we hit on our turn.

Thus, our Frenzy damage just sums those two earlier values, which comes to 9.305625 (too many decimal places?)

Totaling It:

It's a bit of a judgment call as to what, of these, we should count in the full calculation. Most reliably, we can count the two main attacks and the frenzy damage, which would total 35.473125. On turn 2, we can also reliably add in the 1.49 from Hew, giving us 36.96 (yeah, we're rounding, and frankly we can probably just round to one decimal place).

Retaliation is the one thing that is really dependent on the DM. We're presenting ourselves as a tempting target (actually, if we took Sentinel at level 8, we could basically ensure that we can get a reaction attack every round as long as the target isn't casting an AoE spell or something) by giving them advantage on attacking us (if we knew it was an undead-heavy campaign, being an Aasimar or Cthonic Tiefling could help us with the necrotic damage,) so I think it's not unreasonable to think that we could add it in. And if that's the case, that means that after round one, we'd be putting out 46.27 damage per round.

Honestly, that's actually quite good, and kind of surprising me by beating the Eldritch Knight even with a cooperative Death Knight. (Now, I think the EK will start outscaling it the next level with their third attack, but still).

I'm tempted, then, to look at a spellcaster next. I think it's nigh-impossible to beat the simple combination of Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray (real quick, with a 50% hit chance and both cast at base level, we're talking 26.4 damage. Blowing 5th level spells for both, it becomes 67.65 damage on round two, and then casting at 4th on rounds 3-5 it's 56.375, so once it gets going, it's freaking nasty). I'd like, instead, to see how a Warlock could do with a simple Eldritch Blast and summoned creature, maybe a GOO-lock with Summon Aberration.

UA: Path of Lament Barbarian

 The Path of Lament is, in a word, the Banshee subclass. You are the victim of some powerful anguish and grief, and you turn to that grief to fuel your rage, inflicting fear, psychic damage, and some other specifically Banshee-like effects at higher levels.

From the start, I'll mention that this is certainly one of the "villain" subclasses that feels less outright villainous and more just dark and associated with a kind of monster - more like the Circle of Titans than the Hell Knight. You could easily play a sympathetic, good-aligned version of this. But let's get into the mechanics!

Level 3:

Banshee's Wail:

When you activate your Rage or as a bonus action while Rage is active, you can let out a doleful wail. Each creature in a 30-foot emanation of your choice makes a Con save (DC based on your Con). On a failure, they're deafened for 1 minute and take Psychic damage equal to a number of d12s equal to your Rage bonus.

You can use this Con times per long rest, and you can expend a rage to get an additional use.

    This is conceptually cool, but given that this is everything we get at level 3, I think we need more. Initially I was going to complain that a Berserker or a Zealot can get bonus damage every turn, while this is likely going to be only 3 times a day until very high levels. However, it is an AoE, which most Barbarians don't get at all. The damage is decent for what it is (3d12 is going to be 19.5, which is actually ok for a bonus action from a non-caster). The ability to regain a use from a Rage does sort of mean we can get one back on a short rest, as long as we don't need all our rages for the day.

    Still, I'd have liked something, even a ribbon feature, at level 3, beyond this.

Level 6:

Commune with the Dead:

You can cast Speak with Dead as a ritual, using Wisdom as your spellcasting ability.

    Hey, question: for spells without an attack or a DC, does a spellcasting ability ever come into play? As a feature, this is decent and thematic, and importantly is not alone at level 6.

Horrifying Strike:

Once per turn when you hit with a Strength-based attack while raging, you can try to horrify the target. The target makes a Wisdom save (again, DC based on your Con) or be Frightened until the start of your next turn.

    I think this should swap with Banshee's Wail. This makes a lot of sense as a level 3 feature, as you'll nearly always have it. Is it too powerful at level 3? Maybe. But truly, this feels like the banner, headlining feature of "the fear Barbarian." Again, it would be nice to base the DC on your Strength, but Barbarians will be pushing Con pretty heavily, so at level 6 we're probably talking a DC 14 or so.

Level 10:

Otherworldly Anguish:

You gain the following:

Deathly Wail: If a target fails its saving throw against Banshee's Wail and has HP equal to twice your Barbarian level or lower, it drops to 0 HP instead of taking damage.

    Ok, this is probably not as insane as it appears, but it's still decent. At this level, they need to be at 20 HP or below. At level 10, that's pretty close to dead anyway, but might still take more than one hit to do so, meaning that you could clear out some weakened foes (though you're unlikely to fight anything that starts off that low at this level). Consider that at this point, your Rage bonus is 3, so we'd be doing 19.5 average damage anyway, meaning there's a good chance that you'd be killing them with the psychic damage. That said, this will scale up faster and by more than your Wail's damage (which caps out at 26 on average). Again, great to use if a big AoE spell just took a lot of foes to low HP (though the damage also works well in that situation).

Impenetrable Sorrow:

You can't be possessed.

    Man, how often does that come up? Like the Circle of Pestilence giving you immunity to magical contagions (after 5.5 got rid of the idea of "diseases" as a mechanical thing) this feels extremely situational. I know that Ghosts do this, but does any other creature in the Monster Manual possess people? We can treat this like a ribbon.

Resistance:

You have resistance to Cold and Necrotic damage while raging.

    This is pretty good, though of course situational. Still, both damage types are fairly common, especially in an Undead-heavy campaign. The lack of Poison resistance is actually sort of fitting with this very incorporeal-undead theming, though maybe they could get psychic resistance?

Level 14:

Sorrow Form:

When you activate your rage, you become empowered with undeath. You gain these benefits for 1 minute or until you drop to 0 HP, and cannot activate this again until you finish a long rest:

    First off, weird that it only lasts 1 minute but is tied to Rage. And once per long rest "modes" like this in 5.5 usually have some alternate cost to reactivate them, though what might that be, "2 Rages?"

Immunities: You become immune to the Charmed and Frightened conditions and end those conditions if you have them when this is activated. You also cannot gain exhaustion levels.

    The Charm and Fear element, of course, is something Berserkers get anyway. We'll need to see more monsters that impose Exhaustion for the second part to be relevant.

Life-Draining Strike: When a creature fails its save against your Horrifying Strike, they take 2d10 Necrotic damage and you regain HP equal to the Necrotic damage taken.

    The damage here would be underwhelming if you didn't get the healing. Given that Barbarians are (at least in theory) more about soaking damage than avoiding it, healing is very good for them.

Undead: Your creature type is undead for the duration.

    I think it's actually notable here that this does make you immune to some spells, like Hold Person. It does make you vulnerable to Turn Undead, and while you won't be Frightened, you will become Incapacitated, and the "have to move away from you" element is independent of these conditions. So, just coordinate with your party Cleric, and maybe hold off on this when fighting undead (the bonus necrotic damage won't be very useful against a lot of them).

Overall Thoughts:

    I think there's a solid thematic idea to this, and the idea of tying Grief to Rage is a really potent one for roleplay opportunities. I don't see this character as being necessarily villainous, but that's fine - honestly the villain book will probably be more popular if the character options don't necessarily force you down the villainous route.

    Mainly I think that the subclass could use some "always on" feature at earlier levels - swapping Horrifying Strike and Banshee's Wail might do that (while limited by rage, 5.5 Barbarians almost never run out of Rages, so I think we're ok).

    Of all classes, Barbarian is one that I've spent the least time playing, so I'm always a little hesitant to proclaim with any great certainty how powerful this that or the other feature is. I suspect that this one won't do quite the damage of a Berserker, but the fear effect could be really powerful as a crowd control/defensive ability. And while limited, Banshee's Wail is a pretty hefty burst of AoE damage for a class that normally doesn't get to do any AoE.

    So much of the Barbarian class is about being this thick-skinned raging maniac, and I think that there's something really compelling about leaning into the emotional aspect of the class in a way that requires some vulnerability.

Which Subclasses Should Get a Revision: Barbarian

I tried putting this all in a single post, but realized it was getting really unwieldy, and I think this subject probably deserves a more thorough examination.

Last year, we got a revised Player's Handbook (and DMG - the Monster Manual came out earlier in this interminable year). To mark both the 10th anniversary of 5E and the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons as a whole, WotC released this revision not as a full new edition of the game, but as a modular add-on that could sort of phase-out outdated rules, class designs, and subclasses. 

Emphatically, though, the revisions were not a true new edition, and again and again it was repeated that old content, from adventures to subclasses to species, could still work with these new rules, and to a large extent be mixed-and-matched (though with a certain hierarchy - old subclasses could work with new versions of the classes, but you couldn't play, say a Path of the World Tree 2014 Barbarian. In some cases, new subclasses just wouldn't work with old classes, as they reference features that didn't yet exist.)

To me, this backwards compatibility comes with the implication that we shouldn't expect to see everything get updated. If it ain't broke, it doesn't need a fix. You can play an Order of Scribes Wizard or a Rune Knight Fighter using the 2024 versions of those base classes (just wait until level 3 to get the Wizard's first subclass features).

However, what we have seen WotC do to a large extent has been to introduce a whole lot of revisions to existing subclasses in their Unearthed Arcana playtests as well as actual published books.

For certain, some of the revisions we've gotten, like the Warrior of Elements update to the terrible Way of Four Elements Monk, have truly rehabilitated options that were once nigh-untouchable. There are some subclasses that I think could stand to be reprinted in a revised form.

A few notes:

WotC has shown itself not to actually be that great at doing this. The Banneret Fighter in Heroes of Faerun is only questionably better than the old Purple Dragon Knight (its 2014 predecessor) and is still probably the worst Fighter subclass in all of 5E. (Likely due to the initial playtest version being a radical redesign that gave you an actual amethyst dragon companion, which might have been way different from the lore of it, but would have almost certainly been a better subclass, and no subsequent playtest of the more-in-line-with-the-old-version we got).

The way I intent to evaluate the subclasses is this:

First off, if the mechanics of a subclass are fine, we don't need to touch it. This is going to mean leaving some of my favorite subclasses behind in a lot of cases, like the Undead Patron Warlock (which I honestly would have preferred seeing in the 2024 PHB over the Celestial, as I think it's a more "core fantasy" idea). The Undead Patron was always pretty decent, mechanically, and so I don't think it needs an update (though a setting-agnostic reprint wouldn't be out of the question. Maybe this was a bad example.)

Second, the concept has to be interesting enough for us to revisit it. If the core idea of the subclass is kind of dull, I don't see any need to return to it.

In other words, it needs to have Bad Mechanics and a Good Concept.

We'll be looking at all WotC-published subclasses that have not gotten a reprint already (or aren't known to be getting one in an upcoming project). That does mean skipping the Artificer entirely, as we know that all four existing Artificer subclasses are being published in Forge of the Artificer, which was meant to come in August, and is now coming in December. We will be including those with a revision that made it into Unearthed Arcana, though.

With that preamble out of the way (which I'll skip in subsequent posts,) let's look at the Barbarian subclasses: The Battle Rager, the Ancestral Guardian, the Storm Herald, the Beast, Wild Mage, and the Giant.

Battle Rager: No

    The concept for this is so weird - a Barbarian who must wear armor, and specifically a special kind of armor that functions as a bad weapon. Now, I think that perhaps there is a place for subclasses that go against the grain of their class - the Kensei Monk, for example, made the class that doesn't need weapons now actually want to use weapons. Perhaps an armored Barbarian subclass is an area worth exploring. I think at best, they'd need to build this thing from the ground up, and if you're doing that, probably just come up with something new.

Ancestral Guardian: No

    On the flipside, this subclass actually works just fine. I don't really see any reason to revisit it. Having one of these in my long-running Ravnica campaign, it's a subclass that does frustrate me a bit as a DM, because it really nearly forces you to focus on the Barbarian, but that's the whole point: this is a tank subclass. But it already works fine, so we don't need a new version.

Storm Herald: Yes

    This subclass always seemed very cool, but it was very limited by its design. Not only are its damage bonuses anemic, but the need to pick your storm once and stick with it also meant that the variety and choices it seemed to present weren't actually there. Storms are a classic metaphor for chaos and primordial power, which is core to the Barbarian fantasy, and it would be really great to see this one done justice (which means a better revision than what we've gotten in the UA).

Beast: Yes

    First off, I think they could lean into this subclass as a horror-themed one, really emphasizing a lycanthropic motif. Like any subclass that grants natural weapons, it also really needs to get some kind of scaling with magic items (I really wish they'd designed Wraps of Unarmed Prowess to buff not just Unarmed Strikes, but also natural weapons).

Wild Magic: No

    Don't get me wrong, I like this subclass. It's the most whimsical Barbarian by far. But I don't know that we really need an update to it. This isn't a subclass that I think was every considered overpowered or anything, and I'm sure you could find some way to redesign it for more power. And conceptually, it's fun. But I just don't think we really need to re-do it. Again, the bar to reprinting should be a pretty high one.

Giant: No

    While the World Tree Barbarian has overtaken this one as the "hey, a Bugbear with a Polearm would have an insane reach" subclass, I think that this subclass already works just fine as it is. We've got a decent concept and pretty good mechanics, so there's no real need to return to it.

And unless I'm forgetting something, that's our Barbarians for pre-2024 5E that have not gotten reprinted already. Next, we'll look at the Bard.

UA: Storm Herald Barbarian

 In my previous post, I argued that while the new Spiritual Guardian Barbarian might not be a wholly necessary revision to the already-fine Ancestral Guardian, the Storm Herald is one that I'm actually really eager to see another take on. Conceptually, I love the Storm Herald, but the version we got in Xanathar's was pretty weak. It was also a subclass that seemed to present lots of cool options, but ultimately the subclass itself was three less versatile subclasses, as you needed to pick one kind of storm and stick to it.

I will also say that this is one of the subclasses that feels thematically most similar to my oldest World of Warcraft character, who is an Enhancement Shaman.

The new version, notably, lets you pick a new storm each time you rage, which is already a huge bonus. But are the effects powerful enough? Let's look at it.

Level 3:

Storm Aura:

When you rage, you choose Desert, Sea, or Tundra, and a stormy aura in a 10-foot emanation extends around you for the duration of the rage.

When it first appears, and again as a bonus action on each of your turns, you can activate the storm and get one the corresponding effect. If it calls for a saving throw, the DC is based on your Constitution.

    First, before we get to the storms: why not make this Strength? It would give you a better DC in most cases, and given that things like Primal Knowledge suggest that Strength represents a Barbarian's primal connection to their power, it would fit. I will say that picking a storm type each time you rage is an enormous improvement over the old version of this feature.

    I will also say that because activating the aura requires you bonus action, this is going to be a bit of a pain for those with the Dual Wielder or Polearm Master feat, and even potentially with the Great Weapon Master feat. I'd change this to just have it happen at the start of each subsequent turn, no action required.

Desert: Roll d4s equal to your Rage damage bonus. Each creature in the aura must succeed on a Dex save or take fire damage equal to the amount rolled. You can choose one creature you see within the aura to automatically succeed.

    I'd rather that this just let you damage creatures of your choice, rather than getting a single carve-out.

Sea: Roll d6s equal to your Rage damage bonus. You can hurl a bolt of lightning at one creature within the aura. They make a dex save. On a failure, they take that much lightning damage, or half as much on a success.

    It's not a huge amount more than the fire damage, but I think the save for half element here does make it a genuinely better option if you need to burn down a single target.

Tundra: Roll d4s equal to your Rage damage bonus. You can choose a creature within the aura. They make a Strength save, and on a failure, they subtract the number you rolled from the next damage roll they make.

    I think I'd bump up the damage reduction: this is going to provide less damage prevention than the damage of either of the other options, and on top of it, they can save out of this, so you might get nothing out of it.

Level 6:

Storm Soul:

You gain a persistent benefit based on the environment chosen the last time you rage, which lasts indefinitely (obviously changing if you rage with a different storm).

Desert: You gain resistance to Fire damage, and as a magic action, you can touch a flammable object that isn't being worn or carried and cause it to start burning.

    Fire resistance is good, though it very much depends on the situation. If you're on the elemental plane of fire, it's great for both combat and avoiding exhaustion, but you'll also probably not want to use that storm in such a location. The burning things aspect is fine, but if you have a Tinder Box you've basically already got this capability.

Sea: You gain resistance to lightning damage, and can breathe underwater. You also gain a swim speed equal to your speed.

    While lightning damage isn't super common (though not unheard of,) this is going to be fantastic if you have any underwater combat, and is a great option to have (also, lightning damage can still hurt a lot of underwater creatures, so the rage effect isn't wasted).

Tundra: You gain resistance to cold damage, and as a magic action, you can touch a 5-foot cube of water and turn it into ice for one minute, as long as there aren't creatures in that area of water.

    Cold damage isn't terribly uncommon, but it's not as common as fire (my level 9 Triton Wizard just took cold damage for the first time in a years-running campaign last week). The ice cube thing could actually be really fun as a way to create a temporary barrier or make a stepping-stone.

    This will require you to keep an account of what storm you used last, which could be a slight hurdle. I wonder if this could just be something you pick on a short or long rest?

Level 10:

Shielding Storm:

Each creature of your choice within your storm aura gains the resistance granted by Storm Soul.

    This makes sense, but given that the Desert Aura encourages you to avoid getting more than one teammate inside of it, it's a bit of mixed messaging. I really think that they just need to make the Desert aura be "creatures of your choice."

Level 14:

Raging Storm:

Your storm auras gain new effects:

    I will say, I'm shocked that this doesn't expand the aura to a larger radius.

Desert: Once per turn, when a creature fails its save against your Storm Aura effect, you can cause them to start burning for 1 minute or until the rage ends. The burning creature takes 1d4 extra fire damage (on top of the normal 1d4 for the burning condition, so 2d4) at the start of each of its turns.

    At level 14, this isn't a ton of damage, but I suppose it adds up. I don't think more instances of burning adds d4s here.

Sea: Whether a creature succeeds or fails against the lightning bolt effect, a bolt of lightning leaps from your initial target to another target within 30 feet of the first target. The new target makes a Dex save just like the first target.

    This is pretty good as long as you do actually have a secondary target - you're sort of hitting two targets with a half-powered lightning bolt each turn as a bonus action.

Tundra: Once per turn, when a creature fails its save against the damage reduction effect, you can cause them to take 2d4 Cold damage and their speed is halved until the end of its next turn.

    Again, kind of pitiful damage. The speed reduction is situational.

Overall Thoughts:

While this is an improvement over the Xanathar's version of the subclass, I think that the subclass as a whole suffers from a fear that the many options will make you overpowered. But I just feel like each effect we get is not really enough to make it worth it.

I know there's a danger of power creep, but it's just a shame because conceptually, this subclass feels like it should be awesome. If they're worried about power, I might take a look at how the damage of the subclass is routed - maybe our attacks are instead imbued with elemental power, and then we get more exciting effects like a fly speed while raging - or perhaps we get something like teleporting as fast as lightning with a sea storm, flying with a desert cyclone, and maybe blinding foes with a tundra storm?

Unlike the Ancestral/Spiritual Guardian (which again, was fine), this is a subclass I do want to see a revision for, because it's one that always seemed like it had a lot of potential that it failed to live up to. But I feel like they're just too gunshy to go back to the drawing board with it.

UA: Spiritual Guardian Barbarian

 So, for context, one of my players in my Ravnica campaign is a Loxodon Ancestral Guardian Barbarian (part of the Selesnya Conclave). It's been a fun character, who's a total himbo, and tends to keep it light, while also being a really powerful tank character in combat (he's also the one that has the party's artifact weapon, which, among other things, gives him angelic wings with a 90 foot flying speed).

This subclass, from Xanathar's, is one of the best "true tank" subclasses, largely because it causes foes you hit to both get disadvantage on attacks against other targets and also gives those targets resistance to their damage. In other words, the monsters are strongly incentivized to keep attacking the character who can take the most punishment.

The revision appears to actually slightly nerf this capability, though it also grants some new options.

Level 3:

Spiritual Protectors:

When you are raging, if you hit a creature with a weapon or unarmed strike, the spirits cause one of the following effects of your choice:

Distract: The creature has disadvantage on attack rolls against targets other than the Barbarian until the start of your next turn.

Protect: The next time the creature hits a creature other than you with an attack roll, its target has resistance to the damage of that attack.

Strike: The target takes an extra 1d6 of your choice of Acid, Cold, Fire, Force, Lightning, or Thunder damage.

    So, notably this nerfs the old version's protective capabilities because you don't get Distract and Protect combined. Also, protect now only affects one attack. That being said, you'll note that there's nothing here saying a creature can't take different effects from different attacks - if you hit them with the first attack, you can Distract, and if you hit them with the second attack, you can Protect, which nearly gets you back to the old version. The damage bonus isn't huge but isn't nothing either, and especially at low levels can potentially let you finish something off (which would make the other effects irrelevant).

Level 6:

Spirit Shield:

While your rage is active, if you see a creature within 30 feet of you take damage, you can use a reaction to reduce the damage by an amount equal to the rolls of d6s equal to your rage bonus (so 2d6, 3d6, and eventually 4d6).

    I think the scaling here is a different than the old version, but it's the same idea. The difference is that at higher levels, you don't get to then reflect that damage back upon the target, as that later feature has been replaced. Again, though, this continues the trend of letting you really defend your allies effectively. (Now that I actually have Xanathar's open:) the scaling is similar, but the old version had the dice go up at different levels, not tied to your Rage bonus.

Level 10:

Consult the Spirits:

You can cast Augury or Clairvoyance without a spell slot or material components, with Wisdom as your spellcasting ability for them. Once you cast either spell, you can't do so again until you finish a short or long rest.

    This is unchanged. This doesn't see a ton of use in my game, but I think the rest of the subclass is still quite strong.

Level 14:

Vengeful Spirits:

When you attack with a melee weapon as part of the attack action and roll an 18 or higher on the d20, you can make one additional attack roll with the same weapon as part of that action. Once you do this, you can't do so again until the start of your next turn.

    So, this totally replaces the old one, which allowed you to reflect back the Spirit Shield damage reduction as damage to the attacker. With two attacks made at advantage, you have a roughly 48% chance to get this third attack. A roughly 50% chance to get another attack in each turn means roughly a 25% damage increase - though only if you're being reckless.

Overall Thoughts:

    It's a bit of a question of interpretation: I think that this is overall a bit of a nerf, but not enough to make it a bad subclass. The overall idea of it remains in place, but notably, if we want to forgo our protective capabilities and focus on pure damage, we have options to do that.

Does this need a reprint? I'm not convinced - I think the Xanathar's version is actually fine. But if it were reprinted in this way, I don't think I'd complain about its new form.

Can We Build an Unarmed Barbarian?

 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.

Some Experiments in D&D Tank Damage Mitigation

 So, usually when I'm playing around trying to evaluate the general damage potential or whatnot of various classes and builds, I do my amateurish attempt at coming up with averages - averaging out damage, but also hit and critical strike chances.

However, sometimes, raw data can be helpful as well.

I wanted to get a sense of how well the 2024 version of the Monk, with the change from Deflect Missiles to Deflect Attacks, compares with other classic tank characters, namely the Barbarian and the heavily-armored Fighter/Paladin.

What I did was imagine typical examples of each character class, built to be somewhat tanky (though I didn't give the Fighter - what I'll be calling the Fighter/Paladin just to save on letters typed - the Defensive fighting style or take into account things like the Sap mastery). The Barbarian and Fighter in both of these cases is using a Shield.

I made a couple assumptions: first that, via point buy, our Monk is starting off with +3s to both Wisdom and Dexterity so that their AC at level 3 (when they get Deflect Attacks) is 16. Our Barbarian has a +3 to Strength and Con, but took a slight hit to Dex with a mere +2 so as not to have to utterly tank all mental stats, so with a shield their AC is 17. Our Fighter, of course, could have basically any stats and it wouldn't matter, starting with chain mail and a shield for an AC of 18.

I used the Knight stat block from the recent free Scions of Elemental Evil adventure, which has several monsters from next year's new Monster Manual. The Knight has a +5 to hit, and gets two attacks with a Greatsword (or Heavy Crossbow, but we're assuming melee here) and deals 2d6+3 slashing plus 1d8 radiant damage on a hit.

Here's how things would go:

The Monk gets one reaction each time to deflect an attack that hits them, reducing the damage by, at this level, 1d10+6. The Barbarian is assumed to be Raging, so they will take half damage from the slashing, though full damage from the radiant. The Fighter then will take all the damage when an attack beats their AC.

I then simulated ten rounds of attacks against the characters - naturally, this would be way longer than any fight was likely to last, but the idea was that we would hopefully smooth out the hit chance and damage to be closer to the average.

The Monk was crit 3 times and hit 5 times, which was a high number of crits (in 20 attacks, they'd normally take a single crit) and a low number of hits (the Knight had a 50% combined hit/crit chance, but only landed blows 40% of the time). Some of these hits were fully reduced to 0, though a lot of damage slipped through because two of the three crits landed on the same turn, meaning while one got reduced to just 3 damage, the other came through as a full 25. The Monk wound up, over 10 rounds, taking 58 damage.

The Barbarian was hit only 5 times, and never crit, which meant things skewed pretty low for them. Also, I seemed to roll terribly on the d8 of radiant damage, only once rolling above a 4. The Barbarian wound up taking a total of 40 damage.

The Fighter, despite having the highest AC of the group, wound up getting crit once (which is right in line with probability) and hit 6 times (the Knight had a 40% combined hit/crit chance, so even in this case, it was slightly less damage than they should have taken). And the total damage taken? 123.

Yeah, this surprised me a bit, though I suppose that the difference in AC is pretty small, while the ability to mitigate damage is non-existent for our Fighter/Paladin. Now, my main experience playing a Fighter has been as an Eldritch Knight, and as long as he had a spell slot left, his AC was much higher (he had gotten Adamantine Plate and a +1 Shield, along with the Defensive fighting style, which meant that against a Knight like this, they would only be able to hit him on a critical, which would then be downgraded in damage.) But I think that if you don't have some way to push your AC up into the stratosphere, the lack of further damage mitigation actually makes you, weirdly, not as good of a tank (again, having a Sap weapon might make up for this, though the Barbarian can also take advantage of that).

Then, because my Wizard in my longest-running campaign is level 7, I tried this out at that level as well. Here, the Monk is getting higher Dexterity, which increases their AC to 17 and also this and their level means their Deflect Attacks is now mitigating 1d10+11 damage. The Barbarian actually doesn't get really any further mitigation (as they probably boosted Strength with their ASI) while I'm allowing the Fighter to have upgraded to Splint armor (I think 8 is usually the level where you can finally afford plate armor).

Again, we're just using actual rolled dice, and so this isn't 100% indicative of how the average results would go:

The Monk took 8 hits and 1 Crit, and after Deflect Attacks, they wound up taking a total of 56 damage. (They probably should have taken a bit less as I was rolling pretty low on the d10 for Deflect Attacks). Still, the number of hits and crits here matched the expected numbers - they took 8 hits and 1 crit.

The Barbarian took 7 hits and no crits, which was a bit low, as they should have taken one more hit and one crit in there somewhere. They wound up taking a total of 56 damage, exactly equal to the Monk, but arguably with better luck (which means I give this to the Monk, actually).

The Fighter took 5 hits and no crits, again, both one fewer than expected. However, across those 5 hits, they took 75 damage.

    Now, there is one factor we haven't talked about, which is that Monks will generally have fewer hit points than Fighters and Paladins, and them fewer HP than Barbarians. I think the Monk, in this scenario at least, will wind up taking the least damage of them all, but the Barbarian is still a viable and possibly still supreme tank.

But, my major takeaway is that if you want a Monk as a front-line tank, it's actually very viable. The key, here, though, is that we're also in an environment where each of these characters is getting attacked only twice per round. While Barbarians and Fighters/Paladins (even an Eldritch Knight, because the Shield spell will last until the start of your next turn) will mitigate damage proportionately regardless of how many attacks are made, the Monk really prefers to face a single foe with one or two bit attacks, thus allowing them to use DA on proportionately more of those attacks. Against a big swarm of enemies, they're not as effective at tanking that damage.

Also, the Monk really does need to reserve their reaction, while the others are free to use theirs when appropriate.

Still, I think a Monk tank is quite capable.

Dual Wielding vs Great Weapon Master for Fighters (and maybe Barbarians and Revisiting Paladins)

 The Nick weapon mastery property is a bit of a game changer, and a big part of that changed game is that it will allow you to stack off-hand hits with the extra attack granted by the Dual Wielder feat.

Since the 2024 PHB has come out, I've been champing at the bit to try out a few new character builds - among others, I've made multiple versions of my old dragonborn Eldritch Knight, and while I'd love to be able to customize my ability score bonuses from the Sage background (I'll take Intelligence, but I really need a +2 for my Strength, unless I want to go back and do a crazy Shillelagh build, but then I'd need to take the Guide background, which doesn't boost Intelligence either, so... Essentially, until we get customizable backgrounds or just giving origin feats of the player's choice with old backgrounds, you're going to be a little stuck except perhaps if you play a human) for now I might just pick up a similar old background like the Cloistered Scholar so I can have my freedom of boosts.

Anyway, while dual-wielding has become a lot better, the Great Weapon Master feat has also become a lot better. While the boost to damage is lower (it's now your PB, rather than a flat 10) the massive upside here is that you no longer take a -5 penalty to your hit. Now, as long as the attack is part of the attack action (and this is something I got wrong with my earlier look at it when talking paladins) you just get to add your proficiency bonus to the damage.

And, according to some hypothetical ranges of AC, in basically all cases except against targets with extraordinarily low ACs like Zombies or Gelatinous Cubes, the fact that you're not taking a penalty to your hits makes you ultimately deal more damage (and you hit more often, which frankly just feels better).

The question, though, that I had, was how it compares to dual wielding.

For a Fighter, my initial guess is that it'll do better. The reason for this is that, while classes like Barbarians and Paladins (and Rogues, but they're not likely to be wielding heavy weapons unless they somehow get proficiency in longbows or heavy crossbows) tend to add damage to their attacks, while Fighters tend to get more damage simply by doing more attacks.

In other words, bonuses like Rage and Radiant Strikes really benefit a lot from getting additional attacks, while Fighters' level 11 feature is an additional attack. And again at level 20 (though essentially we can say that the number of attacks per attack action a Fighter has for the most levels is 3).

So, here's what we're looking at:

Dual Wielders - using two light weapons (presumably d6 weapons if we're not pulling Shillelagh shenanigans) we get effectively five attacks per turn by level 11, unless we need our bonus action for something. Three primary attacks with our attack action, and then we get our Nick attack with a scimitar (I think that's the only d6 light weapon with Nick?) still as part of the action, and then finally our dual wielder feat attack with our bonus action. If we take the Two Weapon Fighting Style feat, we're adding Strength (or potentially Dexterity, as Scimitars and Shortswords are also finesse weapons) to the Nick attack, but not to the attack granted by Dual Wielder.

Now, the math gets way more complicated thanks to the Shortsword's (or Handaxe's) Vex property. There are a lot of ways to get advantage on attacks, so I'm tempted to be lazy here and just ignore it and go for potential damage rather than looking at hits and crits.

If we assume a +5 to Strength by level 11 (which might not be such a safe assumption given all the half-feats - still, we could start off with a 17 in Strength, boost it to 18 with Dual Wielder and then grab two other feats that boost Strength at levels 6 and 8 - the only reason I'd feel skeptical is if we wanted to get War Caster on an Eldritch Knight) we're looking at 4 attacks that hit for 1d6+5 (we're also not assuming we get any magic weapons) and then one more attack that deals 1d6 flat.

This brings the potential damage to 5d6+20, or about 37.5 damage per turn.

With Great Weapon Master, again, we're only relying on a single feat here, and can have the same Strength progression. Aesthetically, I love the Maul, but I also think that the Greatsword's Graze mastery could be really, really good (always be damaging). Still, the math starts to get a bit hairy, and I'm lazy. So we'll talk just potential damage. You could also take a Greataxe of course, but I think this might be more appealing to a Paladin or Barbarian, because I think you do get to add bonus damage to the cleave attack, the only thing you're not adding being your Strength. Of course, it's also a bit situational.

The math here is relatively simple: our Maul or Greatsword hits for 2d6+5 (our Strength)+4(our proficiency bonus at this level). So, 2d6+9, or an average of 16 damage per hit. With three attacks, that's 48 damage.

I think my instinct was right.

I really think you can't ignore the power of adding your proficiency bonus to your damage - something that is fully multiplied thanks to your third attack.

Essentially, if Dual Wielding and Great Weapon Master are balanced against each other assuming you have two attacks per action (which is true for Paladins, Barbarians, Rangers, and Monks - as well as Fighters at levels 5-10) our third attack upsets this balance. (Indeed, if we rewind to level 10, we're essentially subtracting 1d6+5 from the dual wielder, for a total of 29 damage, versus subtracting a full 16 from the GWM, for a total of 32 - still better, but closer.)

Getting magic weapons can shift things toward the Dual Wielder - it becomes another one of these bonuses multiplied by the extra attacks. But assuming that if the dual-wielder gets a pair of +1 weapons, we should also assume the GWM gets a +1 weapon as well, meaning that we're just adding the bonus a number of times equal to the difference in number of attacks to see the difference in damage potential - which is two. Even with +3 weapons, the Dual Wielder's total is only going up by 6 compared to the Great Weapon Master, when the GWM was already 10.5 damage ahead.

Now:

How does layering Polearm Master on top of that look?

What we gain from Polearm Master is a bonus action attack that deals 1d4+5. Unfortunately, and unlike my post about paladins, because this is a bonus action, you don't get to add that proficiency bonus to this damage, so it really does sit at 1d4+5 (though if you have a +1 polearm, it should confer this bonus to both the regular attacks and the Pole Strike.

And, you know, we get reach if we're using a Lance, Glaive, Halberd, or Pike. (And thankfully Lances now only get the good part of their special properties).

What we give up is a bit of damage from downgrading from 2d6 to 1d10.

Our level 11 Fighter who took Polearm Master as one of those feats at level 6 or 8 and who is fighting with any of those 1d10 polearms will be doing 1d10+5, then an additional 4 for GWM, so 1d10+9 for each of these hits, or 14.5, which then comes to 43.5, and then slap on that 1d4+5 (which averages to 7.5) and we're looking at 51 damage.

So it definitely looks worth it to downgrade our damage dice for that additional attack, though again, it costs a bonus action - the pure GWM will only have to worry about using their bonus action for their Hew attack, leaving their bonus action free on many if not most turns. That said, it's only 3 points ahead of not getting that attack at all.

And I think it should be obvious that GWM is still contributing more damage here than PAM - to look at what this would be if you only had Polearm Master, just subtract 12 from the PAM's total damage potential, putting it closer to the Dual Wielding set-up.

Also, as a minor note: GWM is the only version of these for which Action Surge is truly multiplicative - Dual Wielder and Polearm Master both use a bonus action, which doesn't get replicated by action surge.

So, my recommendation if you want to really push your damage as a Fighter is to go with Great Weapon Master as soon as you can pick it up, and then possibly Polearm Master if you want to push things further (nicely, these can both boost Strength).

Ok, now let's look at Barbarians.

Barbarians don't really get a clear damage boost feature at level 11 like Paladins and Fighters do (Brutal Strikes does come online at 9, but it's fairly weapon-agnostic given that you can only use it once a turn and its damage dice don't care what you're swinging).

The big, key thing here is that they will get a +3 bonus to damage thanks to their Rage (and I think Barbarians are very unlikely to run out of Rages now).

Here, my instincts are pointing toward Dual Wielding probably being the way to go. A Handaxe or Shortsword in one hand and a Scimitar in the other will let us take advantage of Nick. That said, we don't actually get Fighting Styles, meaning outside of going to old sources for Fighting Initiate or the like, we're going to have to lose that 5 on our off-hand attacks. We will still get our +3 Rage damage bonus, though.

So, with the Dual Wielder feat, we're going to be making two fully-functional attacks with our action, each dealing 1d6+5+3, or 11.5. Then, our Nick attack will do 1d6+3, or 6.5.

Now, here we do hit a bit of a jam - we can't make the Dual Wielder attack on our first turn, because we need our bonus action to rage. We're only 1d6+3 damage on that turn, but depending on how long combat goes, it might not be totally fair for us to assume that we'll get plenty of turns after that with our full complement of attacks.

On the other hand, Rage now lasts 10 minutes, and if we're in a combat-to-combat situation, we might still be raging from a previous encounter (or from Rage-stealthing to sneak up on these fools).

So, screw it, we'll assume you're already raging.

Thus, it becomes pretty simple - two attacks that deal 1d6+8 and two that deal 1d6+3. So, 4d6+22, which comes to 36 average damage.

With GWM, we're looking at just two attacks that are hitting for 2d6 (or 1d12, in which case we'd have to dock it a single damage point over the two attacks) +8. That's 15 damage per hit, for a total average of 30. Actually at this point quite a bit behind our dual-wielder (doing 5/6 of its damage).

Now, if we use Polearm Master alone, we're looking at two hits for 1d10+8, or 13.5, doubled to 27, and then our Pole Strike is hitting for 1d4+8, or 10.5, putting us at 37.5.

Fascinating! So, in this case, the Barbarian's best damage comes with Polearm Master.

If we're worried about going into combat without raging, we'll need to subtract the bonus action attacks from the DW and PAM builds on the first turn, pushing their first turn (and only that, most likely) down to 29.5 and 27, respectively.

Now, I suspect that a combined PAM and GWM build will be our best by a long shot.

Here, we're looking at two attacks for now 1d10+12 (5 from Strength, 3 from Rage, 4 from GWM) each for 17.5, combined to make 35 damage (only one behind our dual-wielder when they're already raging) and then getting to add that same 10.5 once we're raging as a bonus action, for a total of 45.5.

My Bugbear World Tree Barbarian with the insane reach on his attacks is looking better and better.

Again, there are nuances here that I'm 100% breezing past. The constant advantage granted by Vex (and once you get to level 13, you're basically always going to have advantage between Vex and Studied Attacks) might really make a difference. On the other hand, Graze from Greatswords and Glaives might actually wind up adding more damage (especially against foes with high ACs).

Given the lack of nuance here, I think we can actually use the Barbarian as a model for the Paladin - instead of a rage bonus we're adding our 1d8 Radiant Strike damage - which on average is actually better than the Barbarian's bonus. Paladins can also take a Fighting Style, and while Great Weapon Fighting is actually pretty much useless (2d6 goes from an average of 7 to an average of 8 - worse than when it just you re-roll 1s and 2s, which got you an already-pitiful 8.33) the Two-Weapon Fighting Style feat actually adds a decently hefty chunk of damage - basically 5 at this level.

So, if we're adding 1.5 to each attack (as 1d8 is 4.5 on average and that's 1.5 higher than the flat rage bonus of 3 - and we're not even touching on the fact that it can crit) and also adding 5 to the Nick attack (the Dual Wielder attack doesn't benefit from this fighting style) we're essentially getting 6 extra damage from Radiant Strikes and 5 from the TWF feat, so the Paladin's dual-wielder damage is 47 (before we get into potential additional boosts like the excellent Divine Favor - which we might genuinely have to consider if DW still comes up short of GWM).

In the case of our pure GWM character, we're just adding that 1.5 to two attacks, so we're only really looking at 3 more than the Barbarian, so 33.

A pure PAM build will add 1.5 three times, or 4.5, which puts us at 42.

Finally, a combined PAM and GWM build will give us 1.5 three times, but is otherwise the same as the Barbarian, so we get 49.5. Ah-ha! We've finally outpaced the dual-wielder.

But, what about if we add Divine Favor?

This just adds 1d4 per attack. Our dual-wielder is only making one more attack per turn than our GWM/PAM, so the difference just comes to 2.5.

And wouldn't you freaking know it? That's precisely the difference between our Dual Wilder and our GWM/PAM before accounting for Divine Favor (because both are reliant on a bonus action for their full damage, they'll both be held back slightly on the first turn - the dualwielder loses 1d6+1d8 damage on turn 1 compared to the GWMPAM (or "Gwimpam") losing 1d4+1d8+5, meaning dual-wielders have a slight edge here.

    So, what's my takeaway here?

Well, first we've got to acknowledge again that some masteries might really make a huge difference while others might not - Cleave is awesome if there are two enemies next to one another, but does nothing if there aren't. Vex could be enormous, but if you're, say, a Vengeance Paladin, you might have advantage already thanks to Vow of Enmity.

There are also other, non-damage things to consider. Reach weapons have the very helpful advantage of not forcing you to get into melee with foes with a normal melee range. If you're persnickity about things like somatic components, using a single two-handed weapon might be better than dual-wielding, as one of your hands will be free when you're not in the middle of attacking (though the new rules on drawing and stowing weapons might make this less of an issue).

And then there's which weapons you actually find. In the Curse of Strahd game I played in a few years ago, I'd been intending to go Polearm Master with my Paladin at first, but then we got a +2 Greatsword and I was the only one who could reasonably use it, so instead I took Great Weapon Master at level 8 (very shortly before the campaign kind of fell apart).

As a DM, I'd generally try to ensure that if someone took a feat for a particular weapon type, I'd try to ensure that there were such weapons to acquire (I'm really hoping we get more non-sword magic weapons, because it feels like 90% of the magic weapons in the 2014 DMG are swords). But if someone is running a published adventure strictly by the book, it might be easier to take some of these feats than others.