Everything you need to know about the new barbarian for D&D 5e 2024 including rules and tactics
Wizards of the Coast are preparing to release the new 2024 Player’s Handbook which is a revision for D&D 5e (previously known as One D&D or sometimes referred to as 5.5e). Within that are some fairly large scale changes to how each class works. This article tackles the changes coming to the barbarian class.
I’ve taken a look at everything that’s changing with the new 2024 version of the barbarian and what new tactics you can use.
If you want to see the original reveal, you can check out the video below:
Why are we getting changes to the barbarian?
While barbarians have always been great at charging into combat and smashing everything in their path, there are some drawbacks to the class that the 2024 Player’s Handbook (PHB) attempts to address. These are:
- Lack of utility outside of combat
- Rages ending too easily
- Some abilities not being useful enough or offering too many drawbacks
- Too few strategic options in combat beyond just hitting stuff
Wizards of the Coast have put in a lot of work playtesting and evolving the barbarian to address these issues which I’ve unpicked below.
What changes have been made to the 2024 barbarian?
A decent amount actually. Below I’ve detailed out all the incoming changes. If an ability isn’t featured below, it’s because it remains unchanged from the 2014 rules (as with the barbarian’s extra attack feature):
Weapon mastery – lv1
One of the biggest changes is the introduction of a new set of properties available to all weapons known as weapon mastery. These properties allow certain martial classes (barbarians, fighters, paladins, rangers and rogues) to make special attacks with their weapon if they have mastery with that weapon. These abilities can be used on any and every attack made with the mastered weapon with no limits on usage.
Each weapon has a different property. Some may slow the enemy down, others might knock an enemy prone and others can do damage even when an attack misses. There are a bunch of different properties and you can check out our full guide to weapon mastery for a full explanation of the rules and tactics.
Barbarians start with 2 different weapon masteries and gain more as they level up. They can also choose to change their weapon masteries when they take long rests. These options are great for giving barbarians a greater tactical approach to combat.
Rage – LV1
Rage primarily works the same as it does currently, but more has been done to help maintain your rage when you’re unable to make an attack or take damage. This can be a frustration just because an enemy is too far away or difficult to reach for example. Instead, rage can now be maintained in a couple of additional ways:
- Causing an enemy to take a saving throw (like when using a Dragonborn’s breath weapon)
- By simply using a bonus action to maintain your rage
On top of this, a short rest will allow you to regain one use of rage (essentially making it rare that you’d ever run out of uses). Rage has also been given utility outside of combat, but that comes at a later level so more details on that in a bit. This does make a greater necessity to recharge your rage more often.
Danger sense – lv2
Danger sense gets a small buff for the 2024 revision. While currently you need to be able to see or hear the danger to get advantage on your dexterity saving throw, the 2024 barbarian has a more instinctive sense for danger. You no longer need to be able to see or hear the danger to benefit from danger sense. This means you can have your back to the danger or be blinded or deafened and still benefit from danger sense.
Primal knowledge – lv3
This is the big ability for granting barbarians utility outside of combat. Barbarians are not just rage machines. Often they’re also guardians of nature, with talents for survival and great knowledge of more primeval things.
To address these talents, primal knowledge grants a new skill proficiency from the barbarian skill list. On top of this, barbarians can use rage outside of combat (with the changes to rage mentioned previously, maintaining their rage with their bonus action). Primal knowledge will then allow a barbarian to use their strength modifier for certain skills while their rage is maintained (this is handy as strength is usually a barbarian’ best ability score). These skills include; acrobatics, intimidation, perception, stealth and survival.
In many respects, this makes sense. A strong, angry looking barbarian is extremely intimidating while strength can make it easier to move in an agile, stealthy way. Personally, I actually hoped the new rules would do more to give flexibility on the types of ability scores that can be used for different skills all the time for all classes rather than relying on a use of rage for this. Still, it’s a positive move to make barbarians more useful outside of combat (as they should be).
Instinctive pounce – lv7
Barbarians need to be on the frontlines getting straight into combat. To help facilitate this, when a barbarian enters a rage, they can pounce forward up to half their movement speed without expending any of their movement.
This makes lots of sense mechanically as initiating a rage will likely cause a flood of adrenaline, allowing a barbarian to surge forward at incredible speed. Add to this a barbarian’s fast movement, and you have a very rapid class!
Feral instinct – lv7
Feral instinct has had a slight change to adapt it to the update rules for surprised. It no longer states that you can act even when surprised. This sounds negative but the new surprised rules don’t mean you can’t act in the first round of combat now anyway, they just mean you have disadvantage on your initiative roll. This means that the 2014 explanation of feral instinct wouldn’t really makes sense with the new surprised rules.
The other part of feral instinct gives you advantage on initiative rolls, essentially nullifying the surprised condition anyway so this just feels like a rewording to accommodate the new rules.
Brutal strike – lv9
Brutal strike replaces brutal critical from the 2014 barbarian. The main issue with brutal critical is it relied on actually landing a critical hit to be of impact. This meant that some players, especially unfortunate players, would rarely see it used.
Brutal strike is a far more reliable and tactical option for enhancing a barbarians attacks. Essentially, if you have advantage (say from reckless attack or attacking a prone creature), you can forego that advantage (making your attack roll in the normal way) and instead, if you hit, inflicting an extra 1d10 damage and causing one of the following effects:
- Forceful blow – knock the target 15ft away and then move half your movement speed towards the target as bonus movement. This movement doesn’t provoke attacks of opportunity.
- Hamstring blow – Reduce the target’s movement speed by 15ft until your next turn. A creature can only have movement reduced by one hamstring blow at a time (so you can’t reduce their movement speed by 30ft with 2 hamstring blows). However, it can stack with other movement reduction abilities like the weapon mastery ability of slow.
As you may have noticed, there’s a fair bit of crossover here with some of the weapon mastery abilities. These are intended to be stackable effects with weapon mastery abilities giving barbarians the potential to really smash their foes around in fun and extreme ways! I’ll explain more about some strategic approaches to this in the tactics section below.
Personally, I think that between brutal strike and weapon mastery, barbarians sound incredibly fun to play and provide some nice elements of strategy that weren’t there before.
Relentless rage – lv11
Relentless rage gets beefed up for the 2024 barbarian. Previously, if knocked to 0HP and passing a constitution saving throw, you’d recover with a single hit point. This made it very easy for the next hit from anything to wipe the barbarian out again. It was good, but too easy to bypass with another piddly attack.
Now, relentless rage will bring you back with hit points equal to twice your barbarian level. If you were raging, this doesn’t end so effectively gives you double hit points again on top of this.
This means that a glancing hit from a goblin arrow won’t fell you again, making the ability far more impactful.
On top of this, if you continue to pass constitution saving throws, you’ll continue to regain hit points making barbarians a potentially huge source of damage absorption (which is exactly what you want them to be)!
Improved brutal strike – lv13
At level 13, you get 2 more options for your brutal strike. They are:
- Staggering blow – Force your target to have disadvantage on its next saving throw and prevent it having opportunity attacks until your next turn.
- Sundering blow – The next attack made against this creature by someone else gets a +5 to hit. I’m not entirely sure the benefits of this one are that great. You lose advantage to essentially make it easier for someone else to hit. I suppose it could work if you’re coordinating strikes with a high damage, low attack ally like a rogue, but otherwise, this feels like it does too little.
Persistent rage – lv15
This ability gets a few improvements, making your rage last 10 minutes while preventing it ending early (unless you’re knocked unconscious).
Once per long rest, you’ll also be able to recover all expended uses of rage when you roll for initiative. With rage being used outside of combat now, this is handy for ensuring you’ve always got it available for combat too (where it’s most crucial).
Improved brutal strike – lv17
Brutal strike gets even better at level 17 with the extra damage dealt doubling to become 2d10. On top of this, you can now cause 2 effects in the same brutal strike allowing you to combo effects making you even more devastating. And remember, you can still layer on weapon mastery abilities too giving you up to 3 effects on each hit!
Indomitable might – lv18
This has been improved a bit. You not only get to use your strength ability score as a minimum result for any strength checks, you can now do this for strength saving throws too.
Epic boon – lv19
Like all classes at lv19, you get an epic boon (kind of like a super feat). This will allow you to increase an ability score (even beyond the normal maximum of 20, allowing you to potentially go up to 30 in an ability score). You’ll also get an ability alongside that feat too.
To make things juicer, when you gain levels beyond lv20, you’ll get an epic boon each time making you even gnarlier!
The recommended epic boon for a level 19 barbarian is boon of irresistible offense. Essentially, it allows you to ignore resistance to bludgeoning, piercing and slashing damage. It also states that if you roll a 20 to hit, you can cause damage equal to the ability score used to cause the damage. That’s potentially 21-25 damage at levels 19 and 20. I assume this is in addition to the normal critical damage caused, but this wasn’t entirely clear from the material released so far and sounded like it replaced your damage rolls, but if that’s the case, it doesn’t feel significant enough. I expect this will be clearer when the revised PHB release in September.
Barbarian 2024 subclasses
Like for the 2014 barbarian, you get to choose a subclass at level 3 known as a primal path. You get 4 options in the 2024 PHB (The previous PHB has 2 so a big upgrade for barbarian fans) and both the options from the 2014 book are available here (though path of the totem warrior is now called path of the wild heart). We also get access to an updated version of path of the zealot from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and an entirely new subclass called path of the world tree.
Below I’ve outlined everything that’s changing in the new subclasses:
Path of the berserker
The berserker is the most barbariany barbarian available. Unfortunately, some of its features didn’t perform well enough in the 2014 edition leading to some fairly big tweaks to this subclass. The big change is with frenzy, which many players were hesitant to use due to the exhaustion levels it would inflict. Now, it won’t inflict exhaustion once it ends. On top of that, your action economy is improved so that instead of providing an extra attack with your bonus action, it simply adds an extra number of d6s to the damage roll of your first hit each turn (the number of d6s is equal to your rage bonus damage).
Beyond this, they wanted retaliation to be an earlier ability so this has become a level 10 ability swapping places with intimidating presence which becomes a level 14 ability. Intimidating presence has now been beefed up due to it being a later level ability affecting multiple enemies in a 30ft from you instead of just the 1. The frightened condition it causes now lasts a minute without needing to continue expending your action. This makes sense as a terrifying berserker is likely to be terrifying to most people near by, not just the one and means you don’t have to keep wasting an action to keep a single character in check. In terms of power levels, this feels comparable to Spellcasters maintaining a concentration spells while being able to cast their other non-concentration spells.
Finally, mindless rage now ends the charmed and frightened conditions instead of just suspending them until the end of your rage.
Path of the wild heart
Path of the wild heart may sound unfamiliar, but really, it’s just a revamped version of the path of the totem warrior from the 2014 PHB.
Some clarity has been made to the animal powers. Many players thought that they had to take powers from the same animal type each time they gained a power. In reality, players were allowed to mix and match these, but to make this extra clear, each animal power is now named after a different animal to avoid any confusion.
On top of this, in order to provide maximum flexibility, players aren’t tied to a particular power either. Instead, you can swap out level 3 and 14 powers each time you rage while the passive powers at level 6 can be swapped every time you take a long rest.
If you know you might need to swim, you can get a swim speed, whereas if you know you might need to be climbing, you can get a climb speed instead. It’s another small improvement that gives barbarians a decent bit more utility.
Path of the world tree
This is an entirely new barbarian subclass and is based on the idea of a barbarian that is one not only with nature, but with the planes themselves (the world tree being based on the Norse concept of how the planes are connected to one another).
This type of barbarian is extremely good at keeping their enemies close and getting to the places it wants to be. These barbarians tend to look outwards too as protectors. As such, you can also aid your allies with temporary hit points.
Primarily, you’ll gain abilities that allow you to move enemies around the battlefield, increase your reach, give you greater versatility with your weapon masteries and let you teleport yourself and your allies around the battlefield.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the specifics of how these abilities work just yet, but come September we will!
Path of the zealot
One of the big problems with path of the zealot was that its signature ability (warrior of the gods) relied on you dying, which is either very boring or means something keeps going wrong for your character to take advantage of it. This has now changed. Instead of being easier to be brought back from the dead, the path of the zealot barbarian now has a pool of healing dice you can roll as a bonus action (much like the revamped lay on hands for paladins, but a more selfish version that’s just for you).
In fact, the idea has definitely been to make the path of the zealot lean more into its paladin similarities (but heavily leaning into the barbarian aspects of the class). To accomplish this, rage of the gods comes in to replace rage beyond death (which had similar issues to warrior of the gods).
Rage of the gods gives you a fly speed, damage resistance and the ability to prevent yourself and your allies from dropping to 0 hit points at the expense of a use of rage. Although a use of rage is an expensive cost, the new barbarian rules give you more uses of rage making this less of an expense.
Tactics
Below are a few interesting, new ways you can approach playing as a barbarian with the 2024 update:
Javelin joy: You can attack with javelins using strength and their thrown property. By using brutal strike (which only works on strength attacks, making javelins one of the few ranged options for brutal strike), you can either slow your foe down, or push them back 15ft. If you also take weapon mastery with javelins, they have the slow feature, allowing you to effectively reduce an enemy’s speed by 25ft in one strike. You can make a second strike to push them back 15ft too. While keeping enemies away may feel like a very un-barbarian thing to do, smashing them so hard with a javelin that they’re launched 15ft backwards is a ridiculously barbarian thing to do! Use this tactic against powerful martial enemies that you want to keep away from your party.
Cleave unto many others: Cleave is perhaps the most barbarian weapon mastery available! Smash an enemy so hard that your hit passes through to an adjacent enemy and watch your foes fall before you. With extra attack, you can essentially strike up to 4 enemies a turn with some pretty solid damage output. And remember that you get additional damage from rage while the full wording of brutal strike will be interesting to read to see if it impacts a cleaved enemy in the follow up attack too… Combine this with something like staggering blow to help a wizard out or just knock them away 15ft. In fact, on that note…
Staggeringly effective: Staggering blow is great in combination with a spellcaster! Just wade into your enemies, smash a few of them with staggering blow, this will prevent them having opportunity attacks so you can wade back out of combat. Then, let the wizard finish them off with fireball (which will now be more effective as you’ve just given them disadvantage on saving throws). This works on all sorts of saving throws too. You can nullify more threats by combining this with other saving throw spells like hypnotic pattern, hold monster, confusion or loads of other spells. Again, it’ll be interesting to find out if staggering blow does affect the 2nd target of the cleave ability…
It’s raining men: Forceful blow is brilliant at heights. Just strike an enemy and push them back 15ft with brutal strike, which on some ramparts or near a cliff edge, can be absolutely devastating. It’s worth being aware that this is stronger than the weapon mastery ability of push which will knock an enemy back 10ft. Some enemies may be clever enough not to stand near an edge. That’s OK for a barbarian because you can combine forceful blow with push (if you’re wielding the likes of a great club) because these effects can stack, and in the same attack. You could even do this twice in one turn, effectively pushing enemies back 50ft if needs be in a single turn!
So there you have it, all the changes to the 2024 barbarian. Largely, the barbarian gets some quality of life improvements that make them more tactical, give them more utility out of combat and give them better battlefield control.
I’m really excited about the new tactical options from weapon mastery and brutal strike. Barbarians were never my kind of class, but I actually feel like they could be truly a load of fun with these changes!
What do you think of the changes to the barbarian? Let us know in the comments below.
Spotlight on the D&D 2024 revision
All the latest updates on what’s changing with the 2024 rules revision.
