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!
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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.
I believe that they're thinking of the 3rd Edition rules for natural weapons, which let you attack with every different natural weapon (claws, horns, bite, tail etc) every round.
I've always played barbarians, this is really helpful and cool!
So, I'm curious. How would the Form of the Beast abilities work with a druid's Wild Shape?
Eg. A dire wolf already has a natural bite attack. It does 2d6 and can knock it's target prone. Would it be within the rules to add the barbarian bite healing factor effect onto the bite attack when raging but retain the other mechanics?
For the Barbarian bite's healing to be in effect, you need to rage and choose the beast's bite option. If you can do that while wild shaped, I'd consider allowing it at my table (although I'm pretty sure it would be a house rule).
That said, I have a vague memory that you would not be able to rage while wild shaped. If that's the case, there would be no way to activate the beast's bite and be wild shaped at the same time. You don't get the ability without activating it, so I wouldn't allow it. If you allowed that, it would be no different to allowing the Barbarian to just bite someone with his normal mouth, without rage or with claws/tail active, and get the healing from it.
It would normally work fine, as Wild Shape isn't a spell, and it doesn't require concentration. I'd let you use either bite on each attack, but not both at once. Stacking effects is the shortest path to munchkin land.
So if you choose Bite, you just literally eat your enemies? Okay. Now I’m thinking of a frog-themed Simic Hybrid Beast Barbarian with Grappling Appendages flavored as tongues, who just swallows their enemies whole after killing them.
I'm stealing this, but he grows/shrinks tiny t-rex arms
I've been racking my brain on this one line:
Slasher. This new feat from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything makes you a ferocious mauling beast when paired with two, three, or even four claw attacks per turn.
Can someone explain how you can have four attacks?
Only two ways I've seen fleshed out is taking the Shifter Longtooth race, which has a bonus action bite and it's piercing damage. Big caveats: You must bonus action "shift" on your turn, which means if you rage you don't get your first bite until the 3rd round. It's also only once per short rest, for 1 minute.
The second way is with a very special weapon, the Double-Blaed Scimitar.
But neither of those would give four Claw attacks: shifter gives 3 claw and one bite, and DBS gives 2 claw and 2 DBS.
I suspect this is left over from when Dual Wielder was in this article.
I don't think James realised that two-weapon fighting wouldn't work the with claws; he's already corrected parts of the article that made that assumption but must have missed this one. Only three are normally possible, though you could get four if a fellow party member casts Haste on you.
That's what I was thinking! Thanks for that!
I prefer the idea of the tail being a strange giant tongue that deals bludgeoning damage. A frog path of the beast barbarian would be so hilarious, and yet so terrifying.
When it comes to the whole debate of "can you make an attack as a bonus action with the claws similar to two-weapon fighting" I'd think about it like this. Can you do the same with unarmed strikes? By rules as written no, but with two empty hands, it just makes sense that you'd be able to. You've got two hands after all. Why couldn't you punch with both? I mean, what changes between wielding two handaxes and being able to attack with both and just having your two fists and for some reason only being able to attack with one? I'd still treat it like a normal two-weapon fighting attack where you don't get to add your modifier to it simply for damage number balancing reasons but that's unimportant. What's important is simply being able to make the attack in the first place. Primarily because you still get to add your rage damage, you still get advantage on the attack with reckless attack and it increases your chance to land a crit even more. Which, as a barbarian, crits are important. This debate is mainly just about rules-lawyering and what makes sense. So in the end it's up to your DM, but this is my two cents.
However, if you want to talk from a game balance standpoint then another thing comes into play. Without the extra off-hand attack on average, you'll deal (3.5 x 3) + (Str Mod&Rage damage mod x 3). Assuming you've got 18 strength and you've got 5 levels in barbarian then it's (3.5 x 3) + (6 x 3). That's 28.5 damage per turn if you land all your attacks. It's even better because you have more chances to crit and barbarians get empowered crits. If you were using a great sword and were level five then you'd deal (3.5 x 4) + (6 x 2). That's only 26 damage on average. So you deal a little more damage on average. Of course, the great sword means you also get to actually make use of the great weapon master feat for even more damage but that comes with its own risks and isn't super comparable. You can technically still take the great weapon master feat and benefit from it because when you do crit or kill you still do benefit from being able to take an attack as a bonus action. That and if you use something that isn't claws then you still have the great weapon master feat to utilize. It's also better in hordes because you can attack three different enemies instead of only two.
All in all, it really depends on what you end up feeling about it. I'd say it's one of the more balanced subclasses out there. It doesn't need that extra bonus attack action to be viable but it would help with even more damage.
Beast Barb with a longtooth shifter gets you 4 and 5 with haste
You don't even need to be a long tooth, just play whatever, dual wield two hand axes, attack with one hand axe, bonus action attack with the other, free action sheath one handaxe, then attack twice with claw. Sure you don't get to add your strength mod without multiclassing into fighter and picking up the two-weapon fighting style and you use up your free action each turn but who gives a shit. If you go as half-orc and use reckless attack every single time then you've got a 40% chance to land at least one crit. But your race really doesn't matter, just play whatever. Min-maxing isn't everything. Just have fun.
The wording does not allow that. You have to attack with a claw before you can attack with a claw a second time.
Claws. Each of your hands transforms into a claw, which you can use as a weapon if it’s empty. It deals 1d6 slashing damage on a hit. Once on each of your turns when you attack with a claw using the Attack action, you can make one additional claw attack as part of the same action.
Once you hit with one ax and then hit with the other, your attacks are done.