We’ve now completed a third rotation of the Player’s Handbook, meaning that almost every class has had every subclass from that book examined in the Class 101 series! Two classes with lots of subclasses—the cleric and wizard—will need a little extra time to cover. Starting this week, however, we’re moving away from the Player’s Handbook and taking a look at the brand-new subclasses that you’ll find in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything!
The second new subclass from Tasha’s a beastly chap indeed: the Path of the Beast barbarian. Equipped with a monstrous, transformative rage, this subclass invites your character to be descended from archdruids or lyncanthropes, or possessed by a fey spirit. Join us as this beginner’s guide shows you the basics of how to play this wild warrior!
Check out the other articles in the Barbarian 101 series, like the broad overview of the entire class in Barbarian 101: A Beginner's Guide to Relentless Fury, or the deep dives into specific subclasses in Barbarian 101: Path of the Berserker, Barbarian 101: Path of the Totem Warrior, and Barbarian 101: Path of the Battlerager.
Story of the Path of the Beast
“Look upon her gleaming face, my son.” A woman with silver streaks running through her black hair, creases upon her pale face that spoke of many years of hard living and a jawline that hinted at her strength and bullish perseverance, perched on a clifftop beside her son. The sound of shouts echoed from the forest behind them, and red, flickering light danced in the distant heart of the woods. One of her rough hands rested upon her son’s shoulder as she looked up at the moon. His gaze followed hers. His build was lanky and thin, for he was only barely a teenager, but his mother was sure that in time he would grow into the power that both she and his father possessed.
Blood dripped from her lips, her fingertips, and from a raw gash across her chest. Her simple, green tunic hung open, and her wolf-gray undershirt was spattered with a dark splotches of blood mixed with sweat and mud. She spoke in a voice as cool as the night air around her and as unwavering as the moonlight that shone from above, yet the undercurrent of fear was as palpable as the iron scent of the blood upon her body.
“The moon is mother to all of our family,” she continued. Her son knew what was going on. Why the fires were burning in the forest, why the roar of battle echoed in the distance. He hung on her every word. He couldn’t take his eyes off his mother’s scarred face, even as she stared at the distant moon. “She keeps us strong. We pray to her for guidance, as our foremothers did—even in the times when we called our gift a curse.”
“Why is this happening?” the son asked his mother, tears welling in his golden eyes. His mother’s hand pressed harder against his back as she took a deep, painful breath in. Tears had begun carving a path down her stoic face, too.
“The people of the south, in their castles. Do you remember the stories I told you before bed?”
“When I was young.”
“When you were young,” she repeated. “Remember them. They have come for us. They don’t understand our family’s ways like we have come to.” She paused for a long time, savoring what she knew might be the last moments she would have with her child. A scream rang out in the night, and she turned to look upon her son’s face. He was crying. So was she. “Run. Run until you reach the town on the woods’ northern border. Pretend to be one of them, and run again when they learn. I will meet you again, in the mountains of your father’s country.”
She stood, and growled deep in her throat. Her eyes flashed in the moonlight and thick gray fur sprouted along her arms as her nails sharpened into jet-black claws. The barbarian turned once more to her son. Though her form had begun to change, her voice was the same. “The moon blessed our people. It is not a curse. I love you.” Then she was gone, vanished into the woods’ blazing shadows.
Path of the Beast Features
The Path of the Beast grants you a number of features that make you a flexible, hardy combatant skilled in unarmed combat. The barbarian gains access to four subclass features in addition to their barbarian class features, gained at fairly regular intervals at 3rd, 6th, 10th, and 14th level. You can read all of the Path of the Beast features in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. In summary, your subclass features allow you to:
- Gain a special, bestial attack while you rage by transforming your teeth into fangs, hands into claws, or growing a tail.
- Bypass damage resistances with your bestial weapons
- Gain a unique benefit to climb, jump, or swim with primeval power
- Curse the targets of your attacks with rabid fury
- Lead your party by granting them additional damage while you rage, and grant yourself temporary hit points for each member of your pack.
Benefits of the Path of the Beast
The Path of the Beast’s greatest strengths are—in addition to its well-balanced offensive and defense power—its versatility. Like many other subclasses in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, the Path of the Beast often grants you several options when you gain a subclass feature, and doesn’t lock you in to any one decision. Other subclasses in earlier books, such as the Path of the Totem Warrior barbarian, require you to pick a benefit and live with it for the rest of your adventuring career, but this subclass allows you to change up the combat benefits granted by your Form of the Beast feature whenever you rage, and alter the exploration benefits granted by the Bestial Soul feature whenever you finish a short rest.
The Path of the Beast is a strongly offense-focused subclass, with most of its abilities making it easier for you to deal more damage—sometimes in interestingly roundabout ways, such as forcing an enemy to attack one of its allies. Beyond this, the Path of the Beast is one of the barbarian’s most party-focused subclasses. While it’s not a particularly potent tank per se, since it lacks a way to discourage foes from attacking the barbarian’s allies, the subclass does grant you features that buff your allies and debuff your enemies, making it easier for your allies to fight with the same ferocity as you.
Drawbacks of the Path of the Beast
There’s a lot to love about the Path of the Beast, from their versatility, to their reliable damage output and their enduring physical durability. But no subclass is without their weaknesses. As with most barbarian subclasses, the Path of the Beast’s greatest drawback is their lack of options when it comes to out-of-combat actions. The exploration buffs granted by the Bestial Soul feature are useful, but when compared to the broad utility of spellcasters who have access to spells like charm person, disguise self, and other abilities that give them an edge in noncombat situations.
Of course, there’s something to be said for the pure simplicity of a barbarian. It’s the class for you if you want to fight, or if you prefer on-the-fly ingenuity to pre-determined magical tricks, and the Path of the Beast does it in an interesting and fresh way, with several new tricks to play with.
Suggested Build
Like most classes in D&D, the barbarian doesn’t choose their subclass until 3rd level. If you’re playing a barbarian from 1st level and think you want to follow the Path of the Beast later, consider working with your Dungeon Master to figure out the source of your power early on. Why does bestial power linger dormant in your soul? Or perhaps you might ask your DM to come up with an event in the campaign that will grant you these remarkable powers.
A Path of the Beast barbarian should place their highest ability score in Strength and their second-highest in either Dexterity or Constitution, depending on whether you think more hit points or a higher Armor Class is more important to you. Thanks to the new “Customizing Your Origin” section in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, you don’t have to let your character’s race dictate their ability scores; you can reassign your racial ability score bonuses to any score you see fit. If you’re playing without these rules, the half-orc and mountain dwarf races grant useful bonuses to Strength and Constitution, as well as other useful mechanical bonuses. However, the best way to create a character is to choose the race suits your character best, and build outward from there.
Choose EQUIPMENT instead of GOLD at the end of character creation. You’ll need a weapon to work with until you gain the ability to manifest bestial claws, fangs, or a tail, and a greataxe is a perfectly useful heavy weapon—but you have the choice of any other martial weapon, if you prefer. Having two handaxes is always useful, since a barbarian without a way to fight foes at range is a barbarian stymied by the first crevasse or cliff they find.
Feats
Once you’ve improved your Strength score to 18 or 20, you can increase your power with a few useful feats. The following feats are good picks for Path of the Beast barbarians, and will improve your reliability in your own desired area of expertise:
Mobile. You already get expanded movement speed from your class, and movement options from your subclass. Double down and tear across the battlefield with ease by taking this feat!
Sentinel. When you’ve got your tail out, the extended reach of your tail synergizes quite well with this feat, which wants you to make plenty of opportunity attacks.
Slasher. This new feat from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything makes you a ferocious mauling beast when paired with two or three claw attacks per turn. The Crusher and Piercer feats are also good if you prefer to fight with fangs or a tail instead, but Slasher is head and shoulders the best of the bunch for you.
If you want more advice for building an barbarian, check out Barbarian 101. Have you ever played a Path of the Beast barbarian? What advice would you give to players that want to play this subclass? Join us next week as we dive deep into the contents of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything with Bard 101: College of Creation!
Create A Brand-New Adventurer Acquire New Powers and Adventures Browse All Your D&D Content
James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, and the Critical Role Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, a member of the Guild Adepts, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and other RPG companies. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his fiancée Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.
Third Edition was a bloated monster of rule mechanics that had terrible balance when just using the core books and rapidly went downhill from there as splatbook after splatbook got published with no double-checking to see the way feats and prestige classes interacted with each other. It was hardly "peak" D&D.
The tail only boosts your AC against 1 single attack per turn.
The Feat says nothing about needing to wield it with two hands.
Great Weapon Master
You’ve learned to put the weight of a weapon to your advantage, letting its momentum empower your strikes. You gain the following benefits:
yep just like crossbow expert some of the feats can benefit you in different ways. The first bullet has no limitations other than melee weapon.
He is credited on published books by several major companies. Stop trying to defend you opinion by trying to discredited the people who think you're wrong and belittle someone doing their job.
Stop arm-chair designing Phil. Go show us your work. I rarely get upset at people for correcting and showing mistakes. That is fine. But, to try and talk trash about a person?
You need to seriously re-read what you wrote and think about it.
Thats what is written.
It means 4 Attacke yes but with 4d6 exactly like 2 greatsword hita. The bonus damage of the subclass now comes with the multiple strengh and rage bonuses
Its a pretty chill path
I strongly disagree with James's point about the Beast being "one of the barbarian’s most party-focused subclasses".
The Beast's level 3 feature is about buffing his rage with either more damage or more survivability; his level 6 is about buffing his own exploration capabilities; his level 10 is about him personally doing more damage again. Only his level 14 feature, the very last one that you get in the twilight hours of a long campaign, does anything for your allies.
Even on the scale of barbarians one party-oriented feature as your capstone does not make you a support king. In fact it doesn't even get you in the top half. If you want to be a support barbarian, Ancestral Guardians, Tundra Heralds, Wolf Warriors, and Zealots are all superior choices to the Beast.
Agree overall. Ancestral Guardians is amazing party support, not sure about Zealot, though.
its perfectly fine to use RAW here and not allow this.
Nobody mentioning the absolutely absurd jump heights you can get out of this class yet?
Even with just Step of the Wind, advantage on Athletics during raging and Step easily nets you multistory jumping reliably
Since you also get advantage to grapple you can roll up, grapple, jump max height, and suplex enemies for fall damage. Shifters or Manta Glide Simic Hybrids can definitely take advantage of this.
interesting :)
Arm-chair designing? I'm not sure I made any design suggestions so I don't think my statement can be accurately characterized that way but... alright I guess.
I also wasn't talking trash. I never insulted anyone or made unkind remarks. If anything, I was explaining that while the author did clearly make some mistakes, there was no reason to expect perfection. He's a blogger, not a super-human-spell-check hybrid.
I personally think that 5e is meaningfully less polished than 3e. I don't think that statement is controversial. You are welcome to enjoy 5e - I do as well. It's the only way to make use of the digital content like DNDbeyond, which 3e simply predated. I can enjoy 5e (warts and all) and still know that 3e was the better version of the game. Was 3e perfect? Of course not, it was just more polished and contained fewer rules contradictions than its peers.
The overall "mission" of 3e was to be "definitive". Meaning it was intended to provide as much resource to the players and DMs as possible. It had some silly rules to be sure, but it did a good job at what it set out to do.
The overall "mission" of 5e was to be "quick". The folks at WoTC looked at Twitter and TikTok, and understand that their target demographic now consumes content in smaller packages. Rather than watching movies in theaters, they watch Vines and YouTube shorts. The impetus on their end was to make the game simpler, shorter, and in their own words "more digestible". This meant making combat fast, and placing less emphases on shaping narrative and engaging in out-of-combat world building and exploring. The cost of this was quality. Yes the game is faster - but it's also less fun. There is an inherent contradiction in D&D at this point. It's a game that demands a certain investment of time from both the DM and the players - trying to make it work in 15 minute micro-sessions is damaging.
I got derailed there - sorry.
FB
I love this game! This article proves that the player base is so wonderful. I play DND with my friends every week, and DND beyond makes this game more organized. :-)
Love this sub-class; my group has that one player who only wants to play as a Barbarian, I'm currently trying to get them interested in the Armorer sub-class of Artificer to see if they'd at least consider a different type of tank (Guardian model armour) but failing that I think Path of the Beast will be fun and different.
It's a great sub-class though it has some weird parts with it's basic mechanics:
I feel like it should allow the natural weapons to use Dexterity, as this would make it a lot easier to build for Unarmored Defence straight away which would fit a beast barbarian really well mechanically IMO. You might still want decent Strength for grappling and such but Rage helps with that (advantage). I believe you can do this using a single level dip into Monk, but it's weird to have to do that.
Secondly I find it a bit odd you only get to choose a single weapon; personally I'd have just had the sub-class gain all three, as ultimately you're still choosing between two bite/tail attacks, single bite/tail attack plus two claw attacks, or three claw attacks.
But on the whole it's a great addition; lots of fun abilities that can work with a group in interesting ways.
I know I'm very late to this party, but the part about the dual wielder feat is very unclear to me:
There's nothing in the dual wielder feat that allows you make a third attack as a bonus action. Anyone can hold two weapons and attack with their off-hand.
It doesn't even allow you to add your strength modifier to your rolls, because that's the two weapong fighting style. Am I missing something, or is this just a mistake? Maybe Mr. Haeck meant the new fighting initiate feat?
It's because the Path of the Beast's claws aren't listed as being a Light weapon. Two-Weapon fighting requires Light weapons by default, the feat lets you use any one-handed weapon.
Thank you. I get it now, but I feel like the word "light" in this context is confusing.
To be useful to a barbarian, the claws need to add the strength modifier, but this kinda suggests that the claws are heavier than a shortsword lol. Now I'm thinking, would giving them their off hand attack with the modifier included without the dual wielder feat really break the subclass? Guess I'd better figure that one out quickly, one of my player is about to get his third level in RotFM.
Regardless, your claws aren't "in your hand", something "that you're holding in one hand", nor something "that you're holding in the other hand", so no using Two Weapon Fighting (and therefore, no Dual Wielder feat) with the claws. Beast already gets 3 attacks per Attack action at level 5, with full modifiers, every single turn of raging, and without using your Bonus action or Reaction. People trying to get another attack as part of TWF are just being greedy IMO, and simply ignoring any rules that get in the way of that.
You're not holding it in a hand because it is your hand, and a lot of players are going to come up with that argument. I don't believe calling them greedy will settle that argument. Nonetheless, I believe that 4 attacks at level 5 with no feat investment, with full modifiers, rage bonus and no feat needed will break the build. With no feat investment, they can even take the slasher feat, that's simply too much.