Homebrew Subclass: Barbarian (Path of The Wild Fury)

[acoustic wren]

Primal Resilience
Starting at 10th level, your bond with the wild grants you extraordinary resilience. You gain resistance to one of the following damage types: acid, cold, fire, poison, lightning, or thunder. You can change the chosen damage type whenever you finish a long rest. Additionally, you have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned and diseased, and you gain immunity to the poisoned condition.

Nature's Retribution
Starting at 14th level, the fury of nature retaliates against those who dare to harm you. When you are hit by an attack or a spell while raging, you can use your reaction to cause the attacker to make a Dexterity saving throw (DC = 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Constitution modifier). On a failed save, the attacker takes 4d12 damage of a type you choose: acid, cold, fire, poison, lightning, or thunder. On a successful save, they take half as much damage. You can use this feature a number of times equal to your Constitution modifier (minimum of once), and you regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

[glass swift]

i actually love this, the only thing i'm tentative abt is the 14th level feature. namely bc it's very limited in use, but also uses your reaction, which means no sentinel or attack of opportunity, which is a huge thing for barbs. it's a good feature, it's just, hrm... something i'm not sure i'd use if it meant sacrificing an attack of opportunity and my enemy leaving my range to go hit one of the squishies unless it did more damage or something along with the damage (knocking prone would work since then they still have difficulty getting away from me and to the squishies)

basically it works against the tank aspect of the barb, ur job is to frontline and not let them get away from you; doing damage as a reaction is always nice but if it compromises me doing my job as a tank i'm not sure it's worth it

[acoustic wren]

it's actually a really good ability once you a realise that it can be used to target ranged enemies and spellcasters that you can't get to one way or the other lol

i added one extra line that i somehow missed for level 14 was that you can use this reactions against attacks and spells

but i only had written down attacks so that's my bad

[glass swift]

OH that does actually make it a lot better - that amount of damage against a caster would be really nice. can this be used as a reaction to non-damaging spells?

i.e. hold person, use the reaction. it would be really nasty if they have to immediately roll a con save on the spell they cast on you lmao

[acoustic wren]

spells

so any spells

[glass swift]

that is really nice then! definitely an interesting subclass!

[maiden pendant]

Okay overall this looks great, I think it just needs some limiting in a couple places.

• 3rd
  natures wrath, the damage is a lot especially at higher levels, hexblade gets this 1 use per day on only 1 target (at higher level they can switch the target) so this is much stronger than you think. You could limit it the same way hexblade is limited.
  Enduring spirit is good
  Storms fury should be a reaction and remove the con mod from the damage imo (check out hellish rebuke spell for balancing)

• 6th
  30ft around you is a huge radius and the damage seems like a lot, I'd suggest 3d6 and 15ft around you.
  On top of the crazy damage you fear creatures too, which also is incredibly strong. At the very least that needs a secondary (wisdom) saving throw, which they make at advantage if they succeed on the earlier con save.

• 10th
  Cool feature, no feedback

• 14th
  I think this just needs a range, probably 30ft, but if you want a longer range you could maybe lower the damage a to like 4d8

Just needs to be limited a bit imo, overall tho great flavor

The way 14th is written now, a ranger with sharpshooter 600ft away will get hit by it

[acoustic wren]

that was the idea lol

as long as you can see, then your enemies will bleed

that's the essence of the 14 level feature lol

[acoustic wren]

also genie patron gets proficiency damage for free by the way

[acoustic wren]

hmm regarding storm's fury i think adding reaction to that is not really needed because its biggest limitation is it should be a melee attack, so this feature cannot benefit from being hit with a spell or a ranged attack. This is a purposeful design to punish enemies who decided to take this guy in a melee fight and get punished for it, so i think it being an automatic damage is more than enough, aside from that this ability doesn't scale so you don't get more damage out of it in higher levels but it can still be used as an option to quickly clear a mob of enemies that can be made to focus on this one target.

[acoustic wren]

regarding nature's wrath's its basically a free duelling fighting style at the beginning, and even when you scale the damage it actually stays consistent and is just a bit free damage that doesn't really trivialize an encounter but still makes the barbarian feel stronger when they make hits

also these rage features are interchangable so depending on the barbarian they might straight up not use one or the other part of the feature most of the times when they enter rage or just focus on using only the same feature all the time 🤔

[maiden pendant]

If you want it to be autodamage on melee hits the damage should be very very low, like 1d4 low. Like i said hellish rebuke, costs a spellslot, is once per turn, does 2d10 damage and half on a dex save

This is insane xD

Natures wrath just go 3 levels into this, rest fighter and you're doing dice+modifier+prof in damage on every attack

Even if you dont multiclass its too much damage to not have a limit to it

Nobody would ever take the temphp feature if those 2 exist, temphp is worth literally nothing if you can do that much extra damage per hit or just for free hit anything that hits you for 1d12+con

[acoustic wren]

i don't know maybe the encounters that i run makes me feel that it doesn't feel too much damage

but yeah regarding multiclassing i don't really balance my subclasses my for multiclassing, i instead balance the encounters with players instead

in the games that i run usually the players only multiclass due to story moments or if they feel it makes sense narratively

but yeah just talking about gameplay wise then yeah the subclass is strong lol

[maiden pendant]

But do you want this to be only used in your games, or to be used in other games as well?

[acoustic wren]

and i can see your point about it as well lol

[maiden pendant]

Because those are 2 very different types of feedback you need

[acoustic wren]

nah i was just posting things to see what people feel about it besides if anyone feels they like the flavour of the subclass then i'm sure they can always tweak around it lol

[maiden pendant]

Ohhhh yeah in that case, as long as you can balance around it its fine

I can even see intelligent enemies just not targeting this barb at all

[acoustic wren]

exactly lol

i run encounters a bit differentely so when see these numbers i always think about the players first and see how i can challenge them, and i have run really straight forward encounters and i have seen people struggle lol

with intelligent enemies i go all out and make sure that if the players just try to bum rush the enemy in hopes of defeating it they realise how big of mistake it was lol

[maiden pendant]

Hahahah yeah kinda force your players to think about the actions they take in combat

[acoustic wren]

yeah lol

but yeah there are also enemies that yeah you need to bum rush them because they act on instincts rather than sense lol

aside from that i have recently started using an alternative win condition

basically instead of just fighting and defeating enemies in the encounter there are multiple and sometimes different win conditions

aside from just defeating the enemies

if the party successfully runs away from an encounter too tough for them then i consider it a victory for them and mark it under their levelling milestone

when there is a combat with hostage situation like an village under attack from monsters than evacuating as many villagers as possible is the winning condition in my books

not just defeating the monsters