Ultimate Guide to Barbarians in D&D 5e

Guide by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Barbarian is a simple joy. It's the class for picking up a big stick and hitting things very hard. Brain off- only rage.

This mechanically has translated to a class that struggles a bit to differentiate itself meaningfully past the stereotypes. Most barbarians, agnostic of archetype, are going to look like beefy people with a short fuse. On top of that, they don’t get a lot of opportunities to do things beyond smashing. In the early tiers, smashing stuff is a great solution to plenty of problems. As magic users start changing gravity and conjuring portals to summon otherwordly beings, smashing isn’t exactly as relevant, even though you can smash slightly better.

Still, if you’re in the market for an accessible class that gets to make a few fun choices per combat and otherwise run at enemies and hit them with a maul, Barbarian is a blast in shorter campaigns. If you’re committing to a 1 to 20 campaign, I might advise considering a different class, as your relevance will dwindle in the mid and upper tiers.

Using This Guide

New Players to Barbarian will want to stick to the proficiencies, ability score assignments, and first few levels. What subclass you pick, when to Recklessly Attack, and how Rage works are all central elements of playing Barbarian. Having a grip on the fundamentals will lead to success at the table.

Experienced Players looking to enhance their barbarian are probably going to want to investigate feats and build options toward very specific abilities. You have to bend over backward to make Barbarian comparable to its other martial counterparts as the game progresses; if you want improvements to help your barbarian feel like they’re keeping up, there honestly aren’t a ton of options to help.

Barbarian Basics

Making a Barbarian involves selecting from the list of weapons your preferred loadout while assigning your abilities scores to best use the features you’re going to be working with from now until you die.

Ability Score Assignments

Barbarians are frontline damage dealers that want to leverage their massive hit dice to soak damage for their team. This makes Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution the obvious choices to maximize.

You’re usually making every attack roll using your Strength modifier, making it the default score to set to highest. Secondarily, Constitution helps keep you alive and gives you additional hit points which are supplemented by future features like damage resistances, making them a bit more valuable to you than other classes. Barbarians also can add Con to their AC with Unarmored Defense, making it even more appealing. Dexterity as your third-highest stat will further contribute to a decent AC and help you dodge more successfully in Dexterity Saving throws.

Beyond these three, a reasonable Wisdom score will help with Survival, Animal Handling, and Perception checks, which are often skills barbarians are looking to work with. Charisma alternatively fits the barbarians looking to leverage Intimidation frequently.

Starting Proficiencies and Equipment

Barbarians come with simple and martial weapon proficiencies, light and medium armor proficiencies, and shield proficiency. For weapons, you can make great use of any of the Strength-based options which qualify to receive benefits from your Rage feature.

Mauls and greatswords are the highest dice size option available at 2d6 each, and both pair can build you toward the Great Weapon Master feat.

Glaives and halberds get the Reach property and work with Polearm Master, and subsequently Sentinel, should that be a route you’d want to go.

Shields provide you an AC incentive to use a one-handed weapon, so if you want to be harder to hit, using one alongside a flail, longsword, morningstar, warhammer, or war pick can be a reasonable consideration, but you’ll have fewer opportunities for feats to support your damage.

Beyond your melee weapon choice, having some javelins on your person can enable you to attack from range with Strength, which can be valuable for engaging from a distance.

One last weapon consideration is two-weapon fighting weapons like scimitars; Finesse's switch to Dexterity is an optional replacement, meaning you can make multiple attacks with a Strength weapon per turn using your bonus action. This can stack up extra rage damage early on, and can feel pretty great up until feats start to bring other builds together or you find a better way to spend your bonus action.

Barbarian AC

Barbarians flexibility can use either Medium Armor with a +2 Dex or their Unarmored Defense 1st level feature to calculate their AC. The best medium armor is either breastplate or half plate, with half plate having the downside of imposing disadvantage on Stealth checks in exchange for +1 AC. You’re left with either a 14+2 with breastplate or 15+2 with Half plate. With Unarmored Defense, you’re going to need a collective +7 in Dexterity and Constitution to match this, making it normally a replacement in the upper tiers when you’re ability scores are growing closer to 20.

Early on, normally I’d recommend a Chain Shirt for an AC of 15, or 17 if you opt to use a shield. That requires a +2 Dexterity and outperforms a +2 Con and +2 Dexterity with Unarmored Defense.

1st Level: Rage, Unarmored Defense

Rage: Rage is the central mechanic Barbarian revolves around. Their subclasses tend to empower it in different ways, and it's how barbarians act differently in combat than monks, fighters, and paladins. I think it's a bit needlessly complicated, specifically in its duration, scaling, and uses, but it can give you the feeling of hitting harder in a mindless fury. It provides you three benefits: bonus on-hit damage, advantage on Strength checks and saves, and resistance to bludgeoning, piercing and slashing damage.
Rage empowers every Strength-based attack you’re making, rewarding two-weapon fighting or other means of getting additional attacks through reactions or other bonus actions like Polearm Master. The more attacks, the more you can use the Rage damage modifier.
Advantage on Strength Checks and Saving Throws improves your grapple capabilities in a meaningful way. Grappling still isn’t that useful of a thing to do, though, without other build components empowering it.
The damage resistance is unique in that it doesn’t specify nonmagical on its damage types, meaning while raging, you have resistance to even magical damage of the listed types. This element does most of the heavy lifting in keeping barbarians alive while taking blow after blow throughout the game.
Two rages per long rest in the early tiers feels like a Rage during the meaningful fights, which normally is plenty. The Rage damage starts at +2, and goes up by one at 9th and 16th level. Why it doesn’t just scale with proficiency bonus is beyond me.
When Does Rage End? Rage is a unique mechanic in how it ends; instead of just being activated and lasting for its duration, like most features in this game, Rage requires you to remain conscious, and forces you to either make an attack roll against a hostile creature or take damage to keep it going. This makes it tricky to use as an out-of-combat Strength ability check boost, but with a friend who’s willing to poke you with a dagger each round, you can keep it up if you need to.
Unarmored Defense: Barbarian’s armor proficiency makes Unarmored Defense a reasonable flavor consideration with some upsides if you rolled great for stats or have scaled up your Ability Scores with Ability Score Improvements. If you can get a 20 Con, a 14 or higher Dexterity makes this preferable to medium armor. Otherwise, you’ll probably want to just stick to basic medium armor.

2nd Level: Reckless Attack, Danger Sense

At level two, Barbarians are basically locking into their play pattern for the rest of the game with Reckless Attack. Danger Sense is a reasonable passive buff that further establishes Barbarian as the thickest and heartiest of tank classes.

Reckless Attack: On its surface, Reckless Attack seems pretty interesting. You’re making a trade-off between being hit more and hitting more. Sometimes you’ll want to conserve hit points as the shrink down with subsequent hits, other times you’ll want to get the chance to hit possible. Neat, right?
What tends to happen, though, is it gets boiled down to something you use every turn because you’re making two or three attacks with advantage and become a one-person murder monster or you never use it because you don’t deal nearly as much damage as the rest of the group and are stuck with the job of being a damage sponge. Being a damage sponge from five or more creatures at once usually defaults Reckless Attack to being off. If you’re not getting dogpiled, you flip it on and start hitting a lot more.
At tables where everyone is roughly playing at the same power with similar investment in their builds, if that level isn’t particularly high, I think Reckless Attack plays pretty well. The moment a DM starts throwing groups of monsters at players in an attempt to challenge the barbarian’s massive hit point pool, or when you commit to an established powerful build like Great Weapon Master and none of your friends do, the feature gets polarizing.
When to Reckless Attack. Beyond its place in the game, there will be common guidelines to keep in mind when deciding if you should attack recklessly.
- First, do you have the Great Weapon Master feat? If so, you’re probably going to want to attack recklessly as often as possible, health be damned. +10 to damage is insane, and having advantage majorly mitigates the -5 you’re taking to swing hard.
- If you don’t have Great Weapon Master, the next question you can consider is how many attacks am I making versus how many attacks am I receiving. With resistance to piercing, slashing, and bludgeoning damage, you can afford to take more hits than most enemies; generally, if you’re making at least half as many attacks as you’re receiving, I’d consider Reckless Attacking.
- The final element, of course, is how many hit points you have and how many hit points your enemies have. If you have a ton of hit points to use, you can think of Reckless Attack as a way to “spend” them for an advantage. If both you and an enemy are incredibly injured, finishing it off denies it any attack rolls, so making sure that happens will be advantageous. The only situation, then, where I wouldn’t be using it is when I’m incredibly injured, and I don’t think my attack rolls will drop whatever I’m facing. In that window, I’m more likely to want to play a bit more reserved.
Generally speaking, I’d opt to Reckless Attack most of the time. You have a giant swath of hit points, and advantage on attacks will make more of your turns meaningfully contribute towards ending a fight.
Danger Sense: Danger Sense gives barbarians a reasonable, yet somewhat niche, weaker Evasion. There are a decent amount of Dex saves in the game, and while you won’t use this every encounter, I’d expect this to come up once or twice an adventure.

3rd Level: Primal Path, Primal Knowledge

Barbarians up to this point have gotten only tools to make them fight better. They have no out-of-combat utility to speak of. This leaves your Primal Path and Primal Knowledge with the burden of providing meaningful distinctions in your in-combat play pattern from other barbarians of different paths while giving you some way to contribute out of combat besides raging for a round to get advantage on an Athletics check.

Primal Path: There are eight, soon to be nine, Primal Paths available to Barbarians to choose from as of Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons: Ancestral Guardian, Battlerager, Beast, Berserker, Storm Herald, Totem Warrior, Wild Magic, and Zealot.
- Path of the Ancestral Guardian largely fails to deliver on the fantasy it's promising. It feels like a regular barbarian that hits so hard enemies are knocked off balance, not like a person who connects to the spirits of their ancestors when raging, tapping into a collective history of rage to bring spirits too angry to stay dead back to the world of the living to strike. It still provides some meaningful defensive improvements as you go, and helps define this subclass as the protector barbarian path, but I wish it got more opportunity to look the part.
- Path of the Battlerager has a clunky armor set that doesn’t provide that much extra stuff to do that wasn’t available to a base barbarian. It didn’t even receive a reprint in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything like Bladesinger did, which doesn’t instill much confidence in me about how the designers feel about it. Battlerager isn’t unusable, but none of the features provide a cohesive or major expansion on the core fantasy Barbarian is selling. There isn’t a lift on the racial restriction either, making it limited to only dwarf characters outside of DM waving the rule.
- Path of the Beast gives you a subclass to transform into a ravenous monster in a reasonably satisfying way. The Form of the Beast is flexible, offering reasonable choices between uses, and it's passive out of combat improvements the core class is sorely lacking. It isn’t much more than an angry beastial form of the base barbarian, though, as it primarily gives you various speeds and some alternate attacks that aren’t strictly better than just swinging a greatsword. Still a neat option to consider for its fantasy, though.
- Path of the Berskerer’s core mechanic, Frenzy, has a ton of issues. If you want it to do anything, you have to take on levels of exhaustion each time you rage which are cumulative, and gut the only out-of-combat contributions you can provide. It doesn’t scale into particularly interesting no powerful features; there aren’t many subclasses that are quite as bad as Berserker. I’d avoid it.
- Path of the Giant offers the look, but lacks a lot of substance for playing a D&D giant character up until 10th level. The 3rd level features in particular don’t majorly enhance what you can do in or out of combat, and the entire subclass needs you to be raging to do anything at all, which is a bit of an issue. Being able to throw around your allies and enemies is a sweet 10th level ability to get, and their small bonuses to thrown weapons do something to differentiate it from other barbarians. If you’re fine just being better at hitting things and want to get big while you do it, this option will do just fine.
- Path of the Storm Herald definitely looks the part; every rage is coming with a literal storm around you, making you a damage-dealing whirlwind. These auras don’t scale that well and vary in application, especially in the upper tiers, and while you can swap them on level up, being stuck with just one storm type I find a bit needlessly restrictive. I’d consider it if I had a character that wanted to look like the fantasy it was selling, but I doubt I’d pick it for its mechanics alone.
- Path of the Totem Warrior is my number one recommendation to newer players wanting to explore a basic barbarian. Bear totem is outrageously strong when you get it, and the out of combat expansion options it provides meaningfully enhance the fantasy of a high-strength tracker or explorer. You’ve got a range of customization options that give you all kinds of build directions, and most of the options are stellar. Of the two options in the Player’s Handbook, Totem Warrior delivers on the barbarian fantasy best.
- Path of Wild Magic outclasses Sorcerer in every way when delivering on the unpredictable magic fantasy. Every time you rage you get a magical random effect, and each of these effects is actually fun to play with. If you want a high-variance option that provides a ton of moments to get a different play pattern in a fight, Wild Magic is a superb choice.
- Path of the Zealot’s most iconic feature, Warrior of the Gods, isn’t actually that interesting or rewarding to play with. The remaining features are solid, but really boring until Rage Beyond Death at 14th level. It can be a reasonable basic option, but I tend to want a better niche than a bit of bonus damage on hit and advantage on one save per rage.
Primal Knowledge: Primal Knowledge was added in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything to give barbarians a bit more to do out of combat, but that “bit more” is a single bonus skill. It’s a nice patch, but not solving any major core issues the class has.

4th Level: Feat Considerations

Barbarians have a fairly narrow set of builds that rely on one or two specific feats. Beyond that, feats that enhance how you engage with out of combat exploration or social navigation can majorly improve the different areas of play you’re confronting when cracking skulls isn’t the main objective.

Weapon Build Feats

Great Weapon Master paired with Reckless Attack is a recepie to deal out massive quantities of damage regularly. Advantage on attack rolls majorly mitigates the -5 penalty to hit. On top of that, barbarians don’t have great damage scaling throughout the game. A +10 to +20 damage with one and two attacks gives you a real way to keep up in damage in the upper tiers. The crit bonus also works great alongside Reckless Attack; if you have this feat, I’d recommend almost always swinging Recklessly and using Great Weapon Master for the bonus damage.
Polearm Master gives you a bonus action attack to get extra rage damage and ample opportunities for attacks of opportunity. You can combine this with Great Weapon Master when using a glaive or halberd, and Polearm Master’s bonus action attack works with the -5 to hit, +10 to damage.
Sentinel is the third feat this build can weaponize to create a character who can freely stab enemies and stop them from approaching on hit. Together with Polearm Master, you can indefinitely lock a single creature you can keep hitting out from attacking you if you outrange it with the reach property, and because you’re often going to be faster than it, you can poke it to death while running it down and never leaving yourself open to rebuttal. That exact scenario isn’t particularly common, but as the third feat you get as part of the Great Weapon Master build, I’d consider it, especially if you’ve maxed out your Strength already.
Crusher, Slasher, and Piercer all are options to consider when you’re already using the given weapon and the bonus to your ability score flips an odd score to an even one for the bonus +1 to your modifier. None of the three are good enough without caring about the ability score improvement, but if you can use it, they’ll all be “free” to take, and encourage starting with a 17 in Strength if you can help it.

Utility and Exploration Feats

Fey Touched, Shadow Touched, Ritual Caster, and Magic Initiate all are excellent feats for empowering your magical capabilities. Barbarians can’t concentrate on spells in combat, nor use them when raging, which shapes which spells you’d consider taking with these, but all of them massively open up new avenues for you to contribute to other areas of play. Find Familiar with Magic Initiate or Ritual Caster is an easy choice to get a powerful ally you can use in a wide variety of scouting or infiltration missions. Fey and Shadow Touched both give you a powerful 2nd level spell with a once-per-long rest use alongside something like Cause Fear, False Life, or Charm Person to assist setting up fights or engaging better in social environments. If you want to contribute more to non-combat play, these feats all give you more the entirety of the base class gives you.
Telekinetic, even outside of the ability score bump, gives you an empowered Mage Hand with a bonus action shove, both of which are reasonable additions to your sheet. Invisible Mage Hands are incredibly useful, and if you’d rather have the bonus action 30 ft. ranged pull or push over a 1st level spell once per long rest, this option is a fantastic choice.
Telepathic, similarly, gives you a Detect Thoughts once per long rest and telepathic communication. These abilities take the otherwise vacant toolbox barbarians has to interact out of combat and put interesting and unique tools into it.
Skill Expert isn’t the most exciting feat in the world, but expertise in a single skill can make you the most intimidating force in the group, the most athletic creature you know. Paired with rage, Skill Expert can make you nearly never fail any DC of Athletics check, and makes skills you don’t even necessarily have a great ability score modifier excellent opportunities for you to show off out of combat.

Feats to Avoid

Durable enhances a feature most groups aren’t leaning on enough to justify taking. Hit Dice aren’t all typically expended between long rests, meaning the benefits Durable provides are entirely moot.
Athlete is roughly a climb speed and 5 ft. more movement pre or post-jumping. That’s not enough, even if you want the +1 to your Strength or Dexterity. You have better options than this.

5th Level: Extra Attack, Fast Movement

Barbarians get Extra Attack with Fast movement at 5th level, which is par for the course for most martial classes.

Extra Attack: Extra Attack is how Barbarians scale into the mid-game. Going from one attack to two attacks a turn is a massive deal. It doubles your rage damage output, and gives you more attacks to justify using Reckless Attack. Barbarian is all about attacking. Extra Attack means more of your features are getting to shine more often.
Fast Movement: Unlike Monks, Barbarian’s Fast Movement is locked to a flat +10 speed at 5th level. Going faster is great, especially with the added feature from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything we’ll touch on soon, Instinctive Pounce.

6th Level and Beyond

Past 6th level, you’re getting a handful of interesting new abilities while your rage quantity and damage go up slightly over time.

Feral Instinct: Advantage on initiative rolls and “immunity” to being surprised is fine, but not entirely worthy of a 7th-level feature. It does improve when you tend to go earlier in initiative, and the earlier you go, usually the better.
Instinctive Pounce: Instinctive Pounce was added in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything for 7th-level barbarians. It lets you move up to half your speed when you enter a rage. This quality-of-life update helps barbarians play better in larger and more complex environments as the game grows in complexity. With the bonus speed from Fast Movement, you’ll get to move a total of 60 feet the turn you start raging as most species. That’s almost equivalent to most creatures taking a Dash action. It’s really helpful for getting you to where you need to be to start hitting stuff.
Brutal Critical: 9th level offers you Brutal Critical which further pushes you to Reckless Attack as often as possible. An extra damage die scales slightly better with the d10 and d12 weapons over the 2d6 weapons, but that’s still not normally enough incentive to use those over their higher average damage counterparts.
It also continues to scale at 13th and 17th level for even more dice, giving you a compelling reason to find room for three levels of Champion Fighter to get these crits twice as often.
Relentless Rage: Relentless Rage reads like a powerful feature at 11th level, but I’m pretty down on it. For it to do anything, you need to be gravely wounded. Barbarians, while intending to take a lot of damage, have the tools to stay up through most of the damage with enormous hit dice and damage resistances. Relentless Rage only starts to work if things are going really badly, and in those situations, still doesn’t guarantee you’re staying up for many hits, usually not more than two extra.
Persistent Rage: 15th level for Persistent Rage, a feature that should just be tied to the core rage in my opinion, is horrendous. It only affects ending a rage early, so it’ll still expire after its minute duration, meaning this is only something to help you use it out of combat for advantage on a handful of Athletics checks. You could already do that with a small hit point payment via an ally’s dagger. This feature is a joke.
Indomitable Might: Indomitable Might changes your Strength check floor to 20. All this means is you’re not going to fail the vast majority of Strength checks ever again. Now, how relevant that is is questionable, as there are no guarantees you’re going to be breaking in doors when wizards are granting wishes and teleporting you to other worlds full of ancient demons and mystical djins, but hey, you’re really good at smashing stuff!
Primal Champion: 20th-level features need to be insane; Primal Champion is good, but not insane. 24 Strength equates to +2 to hit and damage on your weapon attacks and +40 hit points. These two effects are passive and are meaningfully enhancing everything you’re doing, but neither are particularly exciting. If you want to be literally as strong as a character can be outside of magic, this is how you do it.

Building a Barbarian

Barbarians, from 1 to 20, get five ability score improvements to bring feat builds together alongside maximizing their Strength, Constitution, and other ability scores they care about. This doesn’t leave a ton of room for exploring fun options beyond the needed core feats to get a powerful in-combat build to come together, which can be frustrating. You can get a bit more out of it with odd ability score placements with specific feats in mind, though. Considering this when assigning your ability scores can stretch out your feats selections slightly.

Great Weapon Master

The Great Weapon Master barbarian has two main builds; the Maul/Greatsword build, and the Glaive/Halberd build.
Both builds will typically want to start with Great Weapon Master as its a massive spike in damage the second you get it at 4th level. Eight level is where the build deviates, with the Maul/Greatsword build typically taking a +2 in Strength and the Glaive/Halberd build taking Polearm Master.

Ability Score Improvement three at 12th level either maxes out the options Strength score or offers Sentinel. From this point, the maul/greatsword build can take utility feats, Tough, or other defensive feats like Gift of the Chromatic Dragon, and have a bit more room to multiclass if they want three levels for a specific subclass like Champion or War Domain. Polearm Master builds tend to want Sentinel, and then are left to take Abiltiy Score Improvements to max out their Strength afterward.

If you can get a 17 in Strength to start with, you can also fit in Crusher/Slasher/Piercer into the build over an Ability Score Improvement, which is a nice little bonus.

This build focuses on taking constant -5 to hits for +10 damage on as many attacks as they can get. It is a pretty well-established build that hits like a truck when you can get on top of people.

Other Build Options

Building without Great Weapon Master on Barbarian is a bit… tragic. Forgoing the +10 damage option will seriously maim your damage numbers, especially in the upper tiers where you need to be putting out more than 20 damage a round to feel relevant. Path of the Beast offers you a cheap way to get a third attack, meaning if you stack an effect like Gift of the Chromatic Dragon gives you a non-spell way to enhance your attacks with a bonus d4 damage, making each of your three attacks hit for 1d6+1d4+Rage+Strength mod, which isn’t amazing, but an interesting option at least.

Focusing on Critical Hits could be an option, which we’ll cover more in-depth in Munchkin Nonsense, but those builds aren’t really powerful. Barbarian’s core prevents spells from synergizing with what they want to be doing with Rage, majorly limiting the option’s potential.

How to Multiclass Barbarian

Multiclassing barbarian tends to be more linear than other options. Where spellcasters can supplement paladins and fighters with weapon-enhancing spells, they can’t really work with what Barbarian is doing because Rage prevents spells from functioning. Still, there are some cool builds out there to try out.

Martial Multiclass Options

Fighter over three levels provides Second Wind, Action Surge, and an Archetype, usually Battle Master or Champion. These offer either a big boon to crits, or a suite of tools to give you more flexibility from fight to fight. Picking these levels up after 5th level can feel great at keeping new, solid features coming, with another feat obtainable at 8th level from 4 levels in Fighter.
Monk is another sweet option, but a narrow one. You have to dig deep into both options early to get this build to come together, with the core synergy being stacking up extra instances of your Rage modifier on the three or four attacks Monks get early with Flurry of Blows. The main issue tends to be budgeting Ki points, as you probably don’t want more than four levels in Monk as to not waste a level for a useless Extra Attack feature. Additionally, Raging takes your bonus action, meaning you’re going to have to forgo at least a round of bonus action attacks to enter it. Still, if you want to punch people’s teeth out, though, this build looks and plays like an enraged brawler that can be an absolute blast.
Paladin gives you an outlet to consume spell slots without actually casting spells. Nothing is stopping you from raging and Divine Smiting, and if you’re building towards critical hit builds with Brutal Critical and Champion’s Superior Critical, adding a few Smites on top of these critical hits is going to feel great. Having a handful of spells for out-of-combat play can’t go unsaid, either.

Spellcasting Options

Warlocks, in particular, make interesting spellcasting supplements to Barbarian. Their Invocations can enhance what you’re doing without specifically using spells, and while not using your concentration in combat is a bit of a bummer, options like Fiend and Hexblade provide combat tools barbarians can leverage. Adding on top of this invocations like Fiendish Vigor for extra durability or Mask of Many Faces and Misty Visions for bonus utility out of combat is excellent. Warlock covers a ton of problems Barbarian faces in just two or three levels.
Druids also are an interesting route to explore, mainly in terms of the Circle of the Moon. A 5-level build, 2 Druid 3 Barbarian, can be a raging, multi-attacking bear that gets bonus damage on hit and has a storm of energy around it to use as a bonus action. It's a sweet fantasy and an effective build in the lower tiers. It doesn’t scale that well, especially with further levels in Barbarian, but mixing these two early can be a really fun build to get to completely come together quickly. Alternatively, just supplementing your barbarian combat tools with Druid’s exploration suite will feel organic and pair well with Totem Warrior or Beast.

Munchkin Nonsense You Can Try

Barbarians aren’t the strongest martial option to choose from. Still, there are some funny little builds you can try out to maximize the potential of some specific features.

Brutal Critical Pushed to its Limit

Brutal Critical over 17 levels can add three bonus dice on an attack’s crit, quadrupling the damage dice you’d deal on crit. We can push this a bit further, though, by improving your Crit range, finding ways to reroll misses, and looking for extra ways to empower or add dice to crits. Our objective is to get the best chance of critting at least once with 17 levels in barbarian.

The biggest dice size we can multiply is a d12 with a Greataxe, so that’s what we’re going to be wielding.

We need a better crit range. Three levels in Fighter give us two crucial abilities: Action Surge and Superior Critical with Champion. These give us more attacks and double the chance of crits.

We have four barbarian subclass features available to us from a Path; we’re going with Berserker, because this build doesn’t really care about the downsides Exhaustion imposes on us. We mainly want an extra two attacks a round from Frenzy and Retaliation. If you wanted to build towards this with a better subclass for non-munchkin considerations, I’d probably go with Zealot for the bonus damage on the first hit being able to crit as well.

For our race, we’re obviously going with Half-Orc, as it gives us Savage Attacks which stacks another dice on top of the three bonus dice from Brutal Critical.

With our four Ability Score Improvements or Feats, we’re taking Lucky, Great Weapon Master, Gift of the Chromatic Dragon, and an Ability Score Improvement in Strength as opposed to the -10 speed crit payoff Slasher provides.

Setup. We start with the bonus action infusion from Gift of the Chromatic Dragon to add a d4 to each of our damage rolls. Next, we enter a Frenzied Rage, take damage, and are ready to roll on turn 3.

Crit Potential. We’re making two attacks with our action, two attacks with Action Surge, and one with our Frenzy bonus action. These all will have advantage, as we’ll be attacking recklessly, seeing a total of eight dice. With Lucky, we can add a third die to three of these, upping the total dice seen to eleven. Add on top of this the reaction attack we get from Retaliation, we have twelve dice to see a 19 or 20, with slightly better chances if you account for Lucky being voluntary if we don’t see a 19 or 20 already. Thirteen dice rolls, with a 10% chance to crit, results in roughly one crit guaranteed.

Assuming we crit with one of these attacks, we’re going from 1d12 + modifiers to 5d12+2d4+modifiers, or 38 damage + mods. We can even attack with the Great Weapon Master feature, as we auto-hit on crit anyway and are fishing for hits with tons of dice.

While this definitely isn’t the highest damage build in the world, it will consistently crit a lot, even without dumping Action Surge and Lucky points into every attack roll. Plus, it’ll still play like a regular Great Weapon Master build.

The Endless Hit Point Pool

The other feature to consider doing Munchkin Nonsense with is Totem Barbarian’s Totem Spirit: Bear feature. Resistance to all non-psychic damage while raging functionally doubles your hit points in terms of damage able to be taken, making it ripe for building a giant hit point sponge out of.

This character wants 20 levels in barbarian for their d12 hit dice, which comes with five feats or Ability Score Improvements. For race, we’re going with Hill Dwarf for a bonus +1 hit point per level. Feats are pretty easy, too; we need a 20 Con, so that’ll be two Ability Score Improvements, and we’re left with Tough and two Resilients to improve our chances at taking half damage on saves to quarter incoming damage from saves we’re not normally proficient in.

Primal Champion gives us a 24 Constitution, for a +7 hit points per level. Our hit point total is:

12+(1d12*19)+(7*20)+(1*20)+(2*20), a grand total of 336 hit points on average. With damage resistances from Bear Totem, you’re capable of soaking 772 damage. That's a lot of damage to absorb. It equates to over ten Disentegrates, or over five Meteor Swarms. Tiamat’s highest damage head’s breath weapon does 26d6 (91) Fire Damage; this can absorb its damage, failing every save, eight times in a row.

Be Dumb; Enjoy Barbarians

While it isn’t the mechanically strongest class in the game, there is a simple joy to smashing things with really big stick. Barbarian has some great subclasses, with Wild Magic, Beast, and Totem Warrior all standing out as flavorful and mechanically interesting. Beyond these, the class suffers quite a bit from a lack of ways to engage with the world. You have to work hard to get this class to feel like it meaningfully contributes to tasks that can’t be solved by kicking down a door.

I have a soft spot for barbarians. If you know you’re not committing to 20 levels, I think you can have a great time with this silly little class. If you’re at a table that asks you to put up high damage output consistently, and you don’t want to commit to Great Weapon Master, you probably should look for a different option.

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