Best Feats for Zealot Barbarian 5e
by Prince Phantom
The Zealot comes swinging out of the gate as the clear winner of the Barbarian subclasses if all you care about is damage. Our primary 3rd level ability adds a decent chunk of radiant damage (don’t choose necrotic) to one attack per turn.
Our other features are actually mostly defensive in nature, with our 14th level ability being the best ability any Barbarian gets. If you just want to play a pretty box-standard Barbarian that hits hard and doesn’t go down easily, this is a great choice. This also means that feat selection is really simple for us.
Best Feats for Zealot Barbarian 5e
Polearm Master/Great Weapon Master (ASAP): These two feats form the core of our main attacking strategy. Take Polearm Master at level 1, then GWM at level 4. These two feats represent such a massive damage increase over not taking them that it’s really not possible to build an optimized Barbarian without them, and with how weak the class already is, you need all the help you can get.
Sentinel (Lv 8): So at this point, assuming you have someone in the party who can cast Revivify, you can actually play pretty fast and loose with your life. This means keeping opponents close to us isn’t quite as bad as it usually is. There’s also the combination with Polearm Master, which makes this feat worth taking alone. I would like to take a moment to warn you to not throw all caution to the wind however. You dying is still quite bad for your friends. It means you’re useless for the rest of the encounter, your body may become impossible to recover if the circumstances don’t work in your favor (like a building collapsing), and it means someone has to use a higher leveled spell slot that they wouldn’t have had to use otherwise. Be considerate and view your free revivals as a safety net, not a parachute.
Resilient Wisdom (Lv 8): So you might have noticed that both your 6th and 10th level features give you advantage on saving throws. This might make you wonder if you even need this feat at all like most Barbarians do. The answer is a resounding yes, yes you do. To explain, say an enemy has a save DC of 18, a reasonable number that you could expect to see in these mid tier levels. If you have a Wisdom of +1, you’d need to roll a 17 on the die to pass. Tell me, how much does rerolling that die help you pass that save? You’re probably just going to fail it multiple times. Let’s not discount that this is an incredibly generous example. You will consistently be facing enemies with a save DC higher than 20 at high levels, meaning it doesn’t matter how many times you roll that d20, you will never make the save. By increasing our bonus, we make those rerolls much more impactful and reliable.
Lucky (Lv 12): So I heard you like rerolls and advantage, so I gave you rerolls for your rerolls so you can reroll your reroll. Also protect yourself from crits.
Ritual Caster (Lv 16): If you have the Wisdom to take this (which I really hope you do), this is a neat trick to pull out late game when you really don’t have anything to do out of combat as a Barbarian. Learn to read so you can copy down all the rituals from your Wizard friend’s book, and shock the whole party when you ride into the next encounter on your Phantom Steed with your owl familiar by your side, speaking to all of them telepathically before jumping off your steed to run across that river and find out what type of magic that loot chest is armed with. Rituals are cool guys, I swear.
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.
