Path of the Giant 5e: Barbarian Subclass Review

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobld

From Bigby Presents: Glory of Giants, the Path of the Giant offers barbarians a way to rage with the power of the giants of legend. You grow in size and strength and toss around friend or foe with the might of a creature ten times your size.

Mechanically, the option is straightforward and provides enough juice to make it reasonable in most encounters. Early on, though, it struggles to meaningfully empower characters outside of satisfying their specific fantasy and overall doesn’t quite size up to the other classes by fixing some of Barbarian’s core problems.

3rd Level: Giant Power and Giant Havoc

Giant’s Power teaches you Giant and one of either Druidcraft or Thaumaturgy. Neither of these cantrips are particularly potent in giving you a meaningful tool to contribute to puzzle solving or exploring, but both can provide you a tool to help you look like a warrior infused with giant magic.
Giant’s Havoc provides two benefits. First, you can now add your Rage damage modifier to ranged weapon attacks made with thrown weapons which honestly feels more like a quality-of-life update Rage would benefit from having. Giant Stature increases your size up to large, and gives you an extra 5 ft. reach. These two elements combined help you always have reasonable attack options in fights, but that’s not really enough to justify the feature to me. Becoming large has some other benefits, like granting advantage on contested Grapple checks made against smaller creatures, but Rage already gives you that form of advantage. Being large otherwise just tends to draw fire, which again, normally raging does just fine on its own.

With these two being the third-level features, I’m left with the tools to look the part, but not a lot of benefit for doing so. Sure, you can become large while raging, and can make tremors around your footsteps as you travel, but you’re not actually bringing enhanced utility to fights, nor a major bump in damage. At least Enlarge/Reduce bumps up your damage by a d4- Giant’s Havoc can’t even offer you that.

6th Level: Elemental Cleaver

Elemental Cleaver continues towards bringing you the feeling of harnessing the might of the giant pantheon by enchanting a weapon you rage with some cool features. First, it deals an elemental damage type instead of its normal damage and deals a bonus d6 of that damage on hit. Second, it gains the thrown property, and it automatically returns to you after you hit or miss a target with it. You can swap around the damage type as a bonus action, but that’s mainly fluff.
Elemental Cleaver probably deserved to be attached to Giant’s Havoc in some way. A bonus d6 damage is entirely reasonable for an entire feature, and giving any weapon you’d like the thrown property with a 20/60 range isn’t truthfully that useful. Javelins are an entirely fine option you’d probably want a package of to use to engage ranged enemies anyway, and that comes with a 30 ft. range. This paired with a Greatsword or Maul does increase your damage with the thrown weapon a bit, which is nice, and by attacking recklessly you can mitigate the downside of throwing over long ranges.
Most of the time still this option wants to be up in creatures’ faces and smashing things. In those instances, this entire subclass is giving you a +5 ft. reach, non-weapon damage types on hit, and a bonus d6 damage. That’s entirely fine; it's just not bringing anything that new to the table.

10th Level: Mighty Impel

Mighty Impel is the main reason you’d consider this option. Now, every turn as a bonus action while raging you can pick up and throw allies and enemies around, and that’s sweet. You can use it as a pseudo-extra attack by throwing enemies upward to damage them with fall damage or combine it with allied areas of damage to get cheap and reliable bonus damage off of Blade Barriers and Wall of Fires.
My biggest gripe with the feature is it requires you to be raging to use it at all, making it a lot harder to use as a utility feature out of combat. There aren’t great ways to throw your halfling rogue buddy onto the roof if you expect you’ll need to rage a few times before your next long rest. Every feature you’ve gotten up to this point outside of a cosmetic cantrip requires you to be raging to work- you can’t justify going into fights without rage when so much of your core character requires it.
Another small hiccup is you can’t throw creatures the turn you start your rage, which does hamstring its total uses as the game progresses. Instead of being able to use it every round, you can use it every round you don’t enter your rage, which means at least one round in all fights won’t be able to take advantage of this feature.
All of that being said, a bonus action for this simple and long-ranged throw is excellent. You can have a ton of fun with this in dynamic environments; outside of the look, this is the main reason to consider this Path.

14th Level: Demiurgic Colossus

Demiugirc Colossus rounds out the Path with passive improvements to Giant’s Havoc, Mighty Impel, and Elemental Cleaver. My favorite text here by far is becoming huge in combination with being able to toss around large creatures; having that as a passive rage feature is going to impact a lot of fights, and truly help you embody the top end giant fantasy. The bonus d6 damage is a needed upgrade for your weapon attacks to help you try to keep up with Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers who are getting more attacks, higher level spells, and other tricks and tools to enhance their damage round to round. The bonus reach is a fine addition on top of that, and primarily benefits Polearm Master builds looking to cover as wide an area as possible.
I do think there was room in all of the prior features to include this text while giving them a utility-focused capstone. Rune Magic would have been an easy direction to go towards to give this subclass something to bring to the table out of combat; a single use of a 3rd through 6th level utility spell once per long rest would have made a world of difference here in helping Giant barbarians function outside of fights. All of the upgrades are meaningful at least.

All Together

Path of Giants 3rd level suffers the most, as it's not a major improvement out the gate that will leave you feeling pretty far behind stronger barbarian subclasses at that point. It helps you look the part, but you won’t have great tools to feel like a Giant up until 6th and 10th level. If you aren’t raging, this subclass boils down to a single cosmetic cantrip, which basically means outside of fights you’re as good as a commoner bodybuilder when it comes to participating and bringing tools to aid the table when conniving and scheming. So much of this didn’t need to be locked behind Rage.

I think at tables with character appearance being the main focus of gameplay, this option can be a blast. Growing to a large size and tossing around your enemies as a top end fantasy for shorter games will absolutely look and feel great. At tables where you’re expected to bring more to the table than a mediocre combat number and a fun bonus action throw, you’re going to struggle to keep up with even 3rd to 5th-level spellcasters.

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Barbarian 5e