Best Feats for Ancestral Guardian Barbarian 5e
by Prince Phantom
We’ve arrived, my personal favorite Barbarian subclass and also my pick for the most mechanically powerful. The real crazy part is that I only say all of that because of the 3rd level ability. In fact, every other ability of this subclass is dreadfully bad, so much so that I’m likely to just take 5 levels of this and immediately multiclass out, never looking back for a second.
True taunt abilities are almost unheard of in 5e, with the only other one that is repeatable and accessible early enough being the Guardian Armorer. Unlike that Artificer subclass, this only affects our first hit of the turn, but it does have the added effect of halving the damage our enemy deals if they do hit someone other than us. This means we want to hit the biggest, meanest looking dude in the combat every round and keep them focused on us. Let’s see how feats can enhance this playstyle.
Best Feats for Ancestral Guardian Barbarian 5e
Crossbow Expert/Sharpshooter (ASAP): Put down your pitchforks, let me explain myself. Our 3rd level ability doesn’t care if it’s a ranged attack, so we’re fine on that front. Rage only cares that we make an attack every turn, so we’re good there. Let’s go over the pros and cons of forgoing melee combat. Cons: we loose out on our extra rage damage (2-3 damage per hit), we cannot use Reckless Attack, we cannot grapple or shove enemies effectively. Pros: when we stick a target with our taunt, they probably cannot attack us, forcing them to make attacks with disadvantage and only do half damage if they hit, we can choose our targets more freely, we aren’t dead weight against flyers, we still do great damage thanks to Sharpshooter, enemies have a much harder time getting away from us, we can be a SMALL RACE (gnome barbarians unite!), and we can take better advantage of cover, even making ourselves entirely untargetable if we can get behind full cover. The other big benefit is that we can leave our Strength at a 13 (just high enough to multiclass) and devote the majority of our ability score allotment to Dexterity, Constitution, and maybe even have a not-awful Wisdom score! Hopefully I’ve convinced you that going for a ranger character is the most optimal choice for this subclass, but if you are determined to play melee, take Polearm Master, Great Weapon Master, and Sentinel, in that order.
Alert (Lv 8): Our taunt ability works a lot better if we move before our target in the initiative order, as it means they won’t even get the first round to attack normally. Yes, Barbarians do get advantage on initiative checks at level 7, but I’m never taking this past level 5 before multiclassing. The other benefits are great too.
Resilient Wisdom (Lv 8): Hopefully with our lack of a need for Strength, we can get a decent Wisdom score. This feat bumps that decent save and makes it actually reliable. This will be very important at higher levels when enemies can have save DCs well above 20.
Ritual Caster (Lv 12): The flavor of our spiritual ancestors helping us cast these spells is just extraordinary, and I’ll leave how exactly you do that to your imagination. Tons of rituals are great for us like Phantom Steed, Find Familiar, Telepathic Bond, Water Breathing, Unseen Servant, Detect Magic, and plenty more.
Lucky (Lv 16): A good defensive feat to round out a build, Lucky lets us reroll failed saves and avoid crits by forcing the enemy to reroll their attack. Nothing wrong with a feat that’s just generically good.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
