Path of the Beast with 5.5 weapon mastery rules

Quote from CharlesThePlant >>

Quote from Ophidimancer >>

Quote from CharlesThePlant >>

I wouldn't say claws gives you enhanced nick. It's basically just nick as written if you have the two weapon fighting style.

Yes, it's a Weapon Mastery enhanced by a Fighting Style. That's more than what Nick gives by itself. Thus enhanced Nick.

Quote from CharlesThePlant >>

Again, it's not really breaking new ground, it's just flavoring what other weapons can do as "claws".

You do realize that this also stacks with Nick, right? If you have a Nick weapon and claws you can make four attacks without even using your Bonus Action, and only one of those attacks will lack your Str mod in damage. The Beast Barb weapons don't really need anything they're just fine.

 Don't you need to not be using a weapon for the claws to work? I wasn't really planning on using weapons while raging anyways to play into the wolfman aspect

It's easy enough to have hands free to use both claws and dual wield with 2024 weapon rules. If you're not using weapons you're giving up some functionality and I don't see why you should be getting that functionality for free. There's always reflavoring daggers to claw weapons if you want that. 

I feel like if the subclass was updated to 5.5 they would limit the extra attacks to one per turn like Nick so it's a bit of an exploitation of the gap between 5 and 5.5.

Quote from CharlesThePlant >>

I feel like if the subclass was updated to 5.5 they would limit the extra attacks to one per turn like Nick so it's a bit of an exploitation of the gap between 5 and 5.5.

This is entirely conjecture on your part. Currently Path of the Beast Barbarian as published is still legal and valid for 2024, and it works just fine. Nothing is broken about it and none of this conjecture helps your case.

The natural weapons granted by Path of the Beast already have extra effects. Feel free to homebrew them if you want, but I personally would just adjust the numbers of the healing from Maw and clarify the duration of the defense from the Tail.