Dungeons & Dragons: How To Build A Path Of The Wild Heart Barbarian

The path of the wild heart barbarian in Dungeons & Dragons offers a primal and untamed connection to nature, granting players the ability to unleash powerful, spirit-driven rages. This subclass, inspired by the raw power of the wild, provides barbarians with unique abilities tied to spiritual animals, enhancing their combat prowess and granting magical effects.

Building a path of the wild heart barbarian requires thoughtful choices to maximize their feral strengths while staying true to the character's wild essence. In this guide, we’ll cover essential strategies, from optimal ability scores to key features that make this barbarian truly formidable.

Path Of The Wild Highlights

There are many types of barbarians, and they aren’t limited to jumping into the heat of battle with blind rage. The ones that attune themselves to nature follow the path of the wild heart, fighting like animals would without a heavy alteration of their bodies.

The subclass is ideal for people that want that raw communion with nature without the long lists of spells. Unlike druids or rangers, you don’t transform into animals or alter their behavior; instead, the animal kingdom sees you as one of their own, all while still being able to wield a mighty battleax.

Differences In The 2024 Player's Handbook

Strength is your go-to ability score for any barbarian, with Constitution close behind. Strength doesn’t really need explanation, but Constitution is important for barbarians due to their unarmored defense, letting them add their Dexterity and Constitution modifiers to their armor class.

This means that raising Dexterity is also beneficial, but not as much as it may seem. As a barbarian, you have a large enough health pool to largely ignore dexterity, although you don’t want the modifier to go into the negatives.

As for the mental ability scores, the one you should care about is Wisdom, not only for possible saving throws, but also because it is your spellcasting ability. You don’t make any attacks with it, but your Dungeon Master might deem that you can’t do something if your Wisdom is too low.

Best Wild Heart Options

As a barbarian following the path of the wild heart, you gain several animal aspects to channel when you rage. You don’t have to fully commit to any choice, since you can often swap them when you rage or after a long rest, but some of them have more general uses than others.

Rage Of The Wilds Options

At level three, you get three animals as options: bear, eagle and wolf. Your default should always be bear, since it gives you resistance to all damage except force, necrotic, psychic and radiant, making you a tank that is hardly ever put down.

If you’d rather focus on damage, then wolf is better, since it gives your allies advantage on attacking enemies adjacent to you. Eagle is all about mobility, not something you always need, but you should keep it in the back of your mind; it is ideal to chase enemies down.

Aspect Of The Wilds Options

These level six options are always active, and you can swap between them when you long rest. Owl gives you darkvision, panther gives you climb speed and salmon swim speed, so the obvious choice for most players will be panther.

It is always useful to have darkvision, but you are better off picking a species that already has the ability. You will rarely need to use salmon, and even when you think you do, your Dungeon Master will probably give the whole party some way to circumvent underwater travel, like a boat or giant seahorses.

Power Of The Wilds

At level 14, you gain three new options for you to use when you rage, which works in tandem with the animals you already had. This means that, whenever you rage, you now activate two animals: one from rage of the wilds, and another one from power of the wilds.

The three animal options are falcon, lion and ram, and they all have very specific but fantastic uses. When in doubt, falcon is always great, since it allows you to fly. This makes falcon the animal you’ll use the most when out of combat, since you can just rage for ten minutes and fly to solve puzzles or avoid traps.

Lion is perfect for tanks, making adjacent enemies have disadvantage when attacking anyone but you. The best damage and disruption comes from ram, allowing you to make enemies fall prone by hitting them. Remember that this isn’t beneficial for your ranged-focused party members, so use the ability wisely.

Best Starting Equipment

The starting equipment given at level one is ideal for barbarians, since you don’t really need any armor. Your only ranged option is four handaxes, but as a path of the wild heart barbarian, you’ll mostly focus on melee combat anyway.

You might be tempted to later buy a bow, but you are better off ignoring Dexterity-based weapons in favor of throwing ones. At most, a few javelins will do nicely, particularly when you need to finish off a fleeing enemy.

Best Feats And Backgrounds

Backgrounds for barbarians tend to be the ones that give ways to raise both Constitution and Strength. The two options that do that are soldier and farmer, both perfectly viable, but for the path of the wild heart barbarians, farmer is the better choice.

The origin feat they gain, tough, is great for barbarians, but the choice has more to do with the skill proficiencies of animal handling and nature. Granted, barbarians can already be proficient in these things, but since they are so core for barbarians, they get to have them as part of their background, choosing instead things like intimidation or survival.

If you don’t have a species with darkvision for whatever reason, a great feat is athlete, since it gives you climb speed. That way, you can use your aspect of the wilds option on owl and gain darkvision that way, always keeping both benefits.

For players looking to deal raw damage, great weapon fighter is the perfect feat. It raises your Strength by one, lets you do extra damage with heavy weapons, and after a critical hit you can attack again. The critical hit portion is perfect for making the most out of all your reckless attacks.

Best Multiclassing Options

The path of the wild heart barbarian is a very tight build, gaining little benefit from spellcasters due to an inability to concentrate while raging, and not much from martial classes that a barbarian can’t already do; two levels into fighter just for an extra action seems like a steep price.

A thematic choice is druid, particularly at two levels in the class. You gain spells that can benefit you outside of combat, as well as the ability to shapeshift into animals; you can even use all your class mechanics while transformed, making a combination of moon druid and wild heart barbarian a tempting one indeed.

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