Path of the Battlerager 5e: Barbarian Subclass Review

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobld

A four-foot tall ball of metal and spikes turns, wide eyes peering out through the slot in their helm. They lock onto the ogre that broke into the shop who broke pieces of smithing equipment in the process. A fury matching the intensity of the forge’s fires burns in the dwarf’s heart, letting out a vicious yell as they charge like a bowling ball at the ogre’s stomach, goring it with their spiked shoulder pauldron.

The Path of the Battlerager is from the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. It is centered around dwarves weaponizing spiked armor in combat, with some abilities tacked on that have nearly nothing to do with their namesake Battlerager Armor. It is an option that requires you to want a very specific fantasy, then takes 14 levels to actually deliver on that fantasy.

3rd Level: Restriction and Battlerager Armor

Path of the Battlerager is restricted to just dwarves, with a small caveat that DMs can waive the restriction to better suit their campaign. Beyond theme, I can see no reason why this option is restricted like this. Path of the Battlerager has almost nothing to do with being a dwarf. It doesn’t reference or improve dwarven abilities, and frankly actively makes many dwarven racial abilities worse. Because the barbarian class already gets the weapons and armor proficiencies some dwarves get, doubling up makes them a wasted element of the dwarfs power budget. Duergar tend to make excellent barbarians, though, as they still get the Strength score bump alongside some decent magic enhancement. Hill dwarves' bonus HP does lead to decent barbarians, but if you’re not using custom ability score improvements, the Wisdom and Constitution bumps are often not where you want your ability scores to be bumped.

If you want to play this option and aren’t a dwarf, if you’re not limited by setting, I can see no reason why you shouldn’t be able to use this option. Still consult your DM, of course.

Battlerager Armor is the 3rd level feature that’s supposed to define the subclass. What you get is mediocre medium armor that offers you a bonus action spike attack for 1d4+ Strength mod damage, plus a free 3 points of piercing damage when you successfully grapple something. A bonus action attack for 1d4+ Strength mod isn’t revolutionary, but it is a fine addition to the base barbarian class attacking with a two-handed weapon. Addinging onto that a 3 piercing damage reward for grappling at least sets this up as a lock-down option in the early tier set up to get in the middle of a fight and keep creatures there.

Unfortunately, none of these words are really better than any other subclasses offering at this tier, and my goodness does this scale terribly. The 3 damage never improves. The d4 damage never improves. You don’t get this to scale well with multi-attack, you don’t get upgrades down the road in the subclass for this, you get no other payoffs for being a pokey grappler.

6th Level: Reckless Abandon

Reckless Abandon could be a regular barbarian feature and nobody would bat an eye. If you weren’t already constantly recklessly attacking, this gives you all the more reason to. The temp HP benefits from your rage resistances, and it scales with increasing your Con mod. To get there, you have to commit to improving your Constitution score over feats and other Ability Score improvements, which you probably don’t want to do, but if you do you can be ridiculously thick.

This will absolutely add up to a huge amount of bonus HP every fight, and can actually feel really great to play with in practice. Its not necessarily the most exciting ability on paper, but watching enemies hit you for 20 damage, halved to by your resistance 10, then reduced by 3-4 to 6 makes you feel invincible.

10th Level: Battlerager Charge

Battlerager Charge is entirely fine. It’s not particularly interesting, nor does it play that nicely with your Battlerager Armor as it competes with the bonus action, but if you need to get into a fight, this alongside the quality of life updates barbarians get from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything to empower their means of getting into melee combat, you can consistently be where you want even on the largest battlemaps. If it did anything more I’d rave about this; as it’s just a dash, this compares poorly to almost all of the other rage empowered mobility options you can find from Totem Warrior.

14th Level: Spiked Retribution

Spike Retribution deals three damage back to attackers while you’re raging and wearing your spikey armor. I can’t fathom why you have to wait fourteen levels before you get the actual fantasy of impaling regular attackers on your armor. When you get it, three to nine piercing damage for free every round is fine, but not particularly riveting gameplay for you. Barbarians tend to really suffer from running out of options, just having to fall back on the same play pattern every single fight, and Spiked Retribution just empowers that play pattern passively.

All Together

Battlerager has a bit of an identity crisis. On one hand, it wants you to engage a single entity, grapple them with a bonus action, and win most duels by shrugging off incoming damage with Reckless Abandon. Spiked Retribution shifts your aim to be a tank dedicated to taking as many attacks as possible, which isn’t really where Battlerager Armor or Reckless Abandon want you to go. You can dive a back line, grab a caster, and proceed to shrug off most of the nearby little lackey’s damage, which seems fine, but I really don’t see any of these abilities being so engaging I’d pick Battlerager over nearly any other option. Battlerager Charge is about as generic an ability as you can get, and you can get better versions of it elsewhere. Battlerager Armor isn’t great when you get it and just falls off a cliff in the upper tiers. Reckless Abandon and Spiked Retribution are both great abilities, but again, not particularly compelling on their own for varied gameplay.

If you want to be a barbarian in spiked armor that otherwise just does what a barbarian is expected to do, this is perfectly fine past 6th level. It's definitely not standing out from the others as far as the primal paths go, especially when compared against some of the newer options and path of the Totem Warrior. I’d stick to one of those instead.

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