Barbarian Druid Multiclass - Ultimate Guide for Dungeons and Dragons

barbarians are rage monsters able to deflect blows and crush skulls through sheer muscle and fervor druids are masters of nature and primeval magics capable of transforming into beasts put them together and you can harness the powers of nature and pure anger together to make for some of the most dangerous wild shapes possible if you're looking to make a barbarian druid multi-class and you want to get mad on nature's behalf you should stick around for today's episode so why would one play a barbarian druid combo well as my wife and her character miko will attest the wild shape focus strategy for 5e druid builds is powerful but can lack the resilience and damage output needed to be viable at later levels with a few levels dipped into barbarian a druid's wild shape is a force to be reckoned with a damage sponge and damage dealer that just won't go down the rage ability and unarmored defense function perfectly well while in wild shape serving to seamlessly make your wild shapes tanky and brutal with extra damage this is fundamentally the best way just to play as a wolf or whatever other beast you've got your sights on you can spend every combat situation transformed into your animal of choice and you'll still be a linchpin of your adventuring party as your rage ability functions in beast mode the build also sits in a rather unique and odd place regarding ability scores as it really doesn't care about any of them this means all those asis are free to apply towards feats for your entire run of first level all the way up to 20th level now obviously there are downsides to this the druid is a powerful class already and dipping into anything pushes you a bit down that curve we're also essentially ignoring the entire spell casting half of the druid taking a class with wide utility and essentially making it work like other martial characters you can't use spell casting abilities while raging but you'll still have those options in your back pocket if you really need them but anticipate a very simple party role 99 of the time multi-class options are automatically forgoing the higher-end features you would otherwise gain as a single class a multi-class character takes longer to get to key features and in general will feel a bit lagging compared to a single class character especially when it comes to ability score increases as a side issue you're also planning on spending most of the adventure in wild shape which depending on how your dm rules it means you won't be talking much not an issue if you're shy to role playing anyway but get used to pantomiming using wolf barks or bear growls when you speak up in character i hope whoever's building this kind of barbarian druid combo is a dedicated role player because i actually imagine this could make for some very interesting sessions so when does a barbarian druid start to kick in the short answer is class level 3. two levels of druid and a single level of barbarian is all you need to make the class kick in there are still plenty of features to gain later on but you can rock a rage bear as early as third level and the power increase is significant compared to just three levels of druid or three levels of barbarian now let's get into the class features that we most care about each barbarian and druid class feature lines up well in some very strange ways that will take a little bit of detailed explanation let's start with the significant barbarian features and obviously we're going to start with rage this class feature is 100 the reason the multi-class works at all rage functions perfectly well while you're in wild shape giving your bear wolf and other assorted creatures resistance to all physical damage advantage on strength checks and saves and a few points of additional damage you can't cast or concentrate on spells while raging but wild shape is specifically not a spell and you can't cast spells in wild shape anyway so they mesh perfectly next up is unarmored defense and this works but it works in a weird way normally as a barbarian you'd want to maximize your constitution and dexterity scores to get your unarmored defense score as high as possible however you lose all your physical scores when they're replaced by the animals the unarmored defense feature can still be used in wild shape it just uses the beast physical scores instead this means that with some wild shapes you'll be improving their ac by using unarmored defense and with some you're better off using their existing ac the druid won't wear metal armor anyway so your unarmored defense even just in humanoid mode is still likely to be better than any medium armor or light armor and then we have danger sense advantage on deck saving throws is a nice extra way to make sure your giant wolf doesn't die to fireballs and with reckless attack some of the beasts attack bonuses are a bit lackluster so reckless attacks can push those natural weapons through by giving us advantage on attack rolls and then with primal path there are a few options but i'd argue there is enough in their initial third level feature to justify the third level dip i'll go into each one in a bit more detail in a second but for now know that getting up to three levels of barbarian for the primal path is absolutely worth doing and then we have extra attack and before you start salivating at the idea of extra multi-attack from beasts know that mechanically a multi-attack does not use an attack action so they don't mesh with your extra attack feature however you can totally use it to make another attack if you just use one attack this means that there are some wild shapes where having extra attack is completely useless and for others it basically doubles your damage output an extra attack at level 5 is sketchy considering how many druid levels we have to forego in order to do that so while this can be a viable option that you should be aware of i don't necessarily recommend it though if anyone down in the comments has a way to make that work better for you i would love to hear it now let's move on to the significant druid features starting with of course wild shape now i could probably do a whole video on wild shape and all of the weird applications it could have and if you would like me to please let me know down in the comments but for now just know that wild shape is the primary feature we're going to be using for the multi-class build normally wild shape damage scales terribly but with rage adding an extra two to four damage every round you can keep on that curve your magical abilities and spell casting are going to well fall by the wayside but we're doing beast forms here today and then we have combat wild shape we're doing a wild shape focused multi-class and to do it we really need the wild shape focus circle of the moon druid archetype this initial feature we get at second level provides us with two essential features the ability to wild shape as a bonus action and the ability to sacrifice our spell slots for healing while in wild shape and then with circle forms as we get to higher levels with the circle of the moon we get even higher challenge rating wild shapes right at the start we get a challenge rating one wild shape and then it improves all the way up to a challenge rating 6 at our 18th level and then with primal strike at sixth level the circle of the moon lets our natural attacks count as magical overcoming the non-magic resistance that crops up often on high challenge rating monsters and then with elemental wild shape at 10th level you gain the ability to become powerful elementals and with our rage active they're downright deadly as the elementals are challenge rating five these elementals essentially let us skip ahead since we'd normally be stuck at challenge rating three creatures at this level so some of you barbarian veterans are probably curious what primal path you should take while we're dead set on circle of the moon for our druid archetype the barbarian archetype has several options that all mesh very well with our strategy here firstly i don't advise taking your total barbarian levels past three since we have some pretty bad diminishing returns past three barbarian levels so really we're only shooting for those initial third level primal path features such as path of the ancestral guardian this one essentially forces your targets to focus and waste attacks on you rather than attack your much squishier allies a valid pick if your priority is party protector there's also path of the storm herald and this one gives you an elemental aura that you can activate in your rage as a bonus action and since you will regularly be large huge or even gargantuan sized that aura is going to be big desert is great if you're the only frontliner in your party and just applies a little bit of direct damage output to everything near you c is nicely targeted but it has pitiful damage at higher levels out of the three i actually recommend tundra the most as two temporary hit points to essentially your entire party every turn can add up quickly to negate quite a bit of damage and then there's path of the totem warrior and you've probably seen this primal path on plenty of builds and it's still great here picking path of the totem warrior and specifically the bear totem will turn your physical damage resistance into resistance to every damage type except psychic damage now getting into ability scores we're spending all or most of our time wild-shaped and unable to cast spells so we really don't care about our mental scores here and because wild shape replaces our physical scores we also don't care about our physical scores we aren't wearing light armor or medium armor and we don't care about heavy armor proficiency we're gaining our ac using unarmored defense using beast forums so it's their ability scores dictating our ac not our own this puts the barbarian druid class in a bizarre position where none of our ability scores really matter for our core combat plan even our hit dice don't matter all that much this frees up our asis for feats some of which can be pretty helpful and we'll go through those in just a second but it still begs the question of what to do with our initial stats even though we won't be relying on spell casting there will still be situations outside of combat where utility casting or healing could come in handy and if you're a role play heavy party this is definitely something you don't want to skimp on really therefore a decent wisdom score is in order we also keep our mental stats in a wild shape so having a passable intelligence and charisma score just for skill checks and saves is a reasonable idea and for communication and other things you know we reference pantomiming and stuff for role playing earlier this is definitely something that's going to help you out on a more mechanical based level finally in situations where we get caught off guard in our normal form it makes sense to have a decent constitution for some buffer hit points it also is worth noting that due to multi-classing requirements you'll need a minimum of 13 in both strength and wisdom as mentioned this build doesn't need its ability scores for much which leaves them wide open for feats what feats exactly benefit us is another question though our natural weapons don't count for a lot of feats since natural attacks aren't quite weapons and anything spell related like extra spell slots won't work well for us there are a few sneaky feats that fit the bill for druid barbarian multi-class options though such as lucky lucky is always a tempting option and since we likely have some freed up asis there's no reason we leave lucky behind be the luckiest barbarian you can assuming you don't you know have one of those boring dms that likes to ban this feat for some reason there's also mobile as extra movement is always nice and avoiding attacks of opportunity is very useful for a frontline fighter and the idea of a giant moose nimbly sidestepping through combat makes me just fills me with joy sentinel is a favorite tactical option for all sorts of junk builds and is still good here so if you want to make sure that someone fighting you is stuck fighting you definitely go with sentinel savage attacker is always a decent offensive option that's flavorful and raises our average attack damage output by letting us toss bad rolls given that ability scores are not really vital to a druid barbarian multi-class at least not the kind that we're building here today that leaves us to prioritize races that have some sort of ability that is non-physical enough to carry over into our wild shapes gaining natural weapons from other races or class features is useless as you lose them all in wild shape wild shape specifies that you keep racial features as long as your new form is physically capable of doing so let's go over some races with some powerful options that transcend the use of hands and can synergize with both wild shape and barbarian rage there is of course the azimar but this one is tricky because your dm may or may not let you use your angelic transformation feature while in wild shape and there's understandable reasons for both i suppose if they do though a holy flying bear sounds amazing and can make your wild shape that much more scary with the elegrin there's nothing in the elegant face step ability that should stop it from working while in wild shape how does being a misty-stepping bear sound admittedly not as cool as the flying angelic one but this one is more than likely actually allowed it also fits nicely with the wrath of nature vibes thematically speaking and then there's the obvious pick the i don't know why i thought this would be maybe it's just obvious to me because i associate them with nature anyway the gnome spells can be a weakness in our otherwise impenetrable meat shield and the gnomish cunning feature can patch the armor right where we need it to advantage on all intelligence wisdom and charisma saves means that along with our barbarian rage feature granting advantage on strength saves and our danger sense feature granting advantage on dexterity saves you'll basically always make your saves at advantage now this one is actually more obvious than the gnome at least because of the barbarian kind of thing the goliath stone endurance feature still works well in wild shape we're doing a tanky frontline build here and reducing damage taken is always welcome it doesn't scale up though so i wouldn't take this option if you're planning on running a very long or high tier adventure but thematically it's still also pretty cool and then with the halfling nothing really to say here except that halfling luck is always useful and it's still a fine option here with half orc relentless endurance will let your wild-shaped beast get right back up once per long rest and savage attacks add that much more damage to your critical hits a very strong contender for the barbarian druid race of choice now kalashta are technically setting locked into eberron but if your dm allows them and again i can see reasons as to why they would or wouldn't they essentially patch a lot of holes for our build if we go the bear totem route the only damage type we wouldn't resist is psychic damage which kalashtar neatly grants resistance to they also can talk telepathically which solves the whole growl growl roleplay problem we were talking about a bit earlier though that could be a pretty cool creative constraint to work with so you can see how this uh you can see how picking a kalashar would fix a lot of convenient issues now seder is pretty cool just on the basis of representing the chaos of nature and all that but anyway similar to the gnome but restricted by setting the seder has full resistance to all spells and magical effects i'd argue this is a pure upgrade for the build so take it if your dm allows it but default down to the gnome if they do not for this build we're focused on damage output and resilience over utility options particularly we want to favor creatures with multiple attacks that can get more value out of our rage damage bonus than a single hit 5e druid limits our access to these wild shapes by challenge rating and again at earlier levels anyway by swim and fly speeds for ease of reference we'll categorize the optimal forms by your druid levels at only two druid levels you'll still have access to comparatively quite powerful challenge rating one beasts but you're still limited by swim and fly speed the following beasts are likely your best options at two druid levels and for those of you curious what this is it's basically a smaller velociraptor this dinosaur is a bit more fragile than the direwolf but has a much higher damage output it has the insane ability to make four attacks three with multi-attack and one extra as a bonus action if you manage to successfully pounce on someone just keep it in mind uh i i think it's probably one of the coolest ones to get at this level uh but no one knows what it is offhand so uh just wanted to give it a special plug at this level as a fourth level druid we don't get any higher in challenge rating but we do get to finally take beasts with a swimming speed mostly our best options are the same at two druid levels but with a couple nasty additions obviously if you know me i'm my favorite here is definitely the giant octopus um it's got 52 hit points uh their attack has a 15 foot reach yeah um even if i didn't think octopus and kraken and all that stuff were cool uh yeah i i'd still pick it now at our sixth druid level we finally get up to challenge rating two beasts which radically increases our damage output and survivability though we still can't take anything with a flying speed for a couple more levels honestly though we have one of the coolest assortments here in terms of i mean just a giant elk that's kind of that's not even the coolest one on this list i just think it's cool again we're a lot of my personal preferences seeping into this video i'm sorry everybody as an eighth level druid we don't improve in challenge rating but we do finally gain access to flying beasts which drastically improves our mobility and gives us one juicy option in particular yes i'm talking about quetzalcoatls this flying dinosaur stats don't look great at first with only 30 hit points and an ac of 13 i get it but since it has a flyby feature and an insane 80 foot fly speed you'll be able to harass anything that can't well fight at range with impunity each dive attack bite will do a nasty 66 plus 4 damage making this my uncontested top pick for your flying beast of choice as a 9th level druid we finally get to take a challenge rating 3 beast which gives us a damage increase and upgraded hit points yet again found in the tomb of annihilation i would have to say my favorite at this point is the giant snapping turtle this big snappy boy has a finally decent ac of 17 and a solid 75 hit points so this is definitely the go-to tank option and was something my wife transformed into quite a bit so i can attest to its effectiveness as where the mighty circle of the moon druid we get the elemental wild shape feature with our 10th druid level and access to incredibly powerful elemental forms each of the four elemental forms have their own ups and downs so let's go through those very quick the air elemental has the least hit points out of the bunch with only 90 but unarmored defense pushes it up to a hefty 17 ac well past their normal natural armor bonus the big draw here is the 90 foot fly speed which is obviously amazing in any situation where maneuverability is important you can even move through narrow pinholes and enemies the whirlwind attack is interesting but not great against most solid targets you'll be fighting at this level take this when the fly speed is needed or you're facing a mob of weaker foes with the earth elemental easily the sturdiest of the bunch it gets a 17 ac and 126 hit points but the big draw here is the earth glide ability it only counts non-magical and non-worked stone but that still leaves a lot of situations and caves that you can stroll right through the fire elemental is arguably the best damage dealer of the bunch as your touches will do 2d6 plus 5 fire damage but will also light them on fire for another 1 d10 every round sneakily your unarmored defense also pushes this to a 16 ac and with the 102 hit points you're also still quite tanky take this form if you're just interested in doing as much dps as possible with the water elemental unarmored defense gives us 16 ac and with 114 hit points this is a solid tank option functionally similar to the air elemental this is your best choice in an underwater environment it also vises for the best damage dealer as the whelm attack can potentially hold enemies down and keep them down dealing 2 d8 plus 4 every round as long as you keep grappling them as a 12 level druid we gain access to challenge rating 4 but since we already gained access to the challenge rating 5 elementals a couple levels ago i was hard pressed to find any animal form that came close to competing with our existing options i dug deep though and found one option that gives the elementals a run for their money a two-headed plesiosaurus bet you didn't see that coming i found this guy squirreled away in the total package and it's exactly what it sounds like a plesiosaurus with two heads it has a hundred hit points and with our unarmored defense it gets a solid 15 ac you get one attack with each head giving us two bytes each dealing three d6 plus six we also get advantage on a ton of conditions due to the two heads of course and a decent swim speed i'm not saying it's better than any of the elementals mechanically but uh it's definitely cooler in every other way now at 15 druid levels the upgrade to challenge rating five beasts is likely our final increase if we're running the build that dips three levels into barbarian and in our final tier of play we get some even nastier monsters to deal with now obviously we have another cool dinosaur here on the list but i'm actually going to give the special spotlight to the creature that out evolved it that's right the giant crocodile with 14 ac and 85 hit points this is a bit of a fragile option compared to the elementals but the damage potential may just be worth it uh with the tail multi-attack uh combined they're doing two d8 plus three d10 uh plus 14 around with a grapple and a trip chance attached if you're not too worried about getting hit yourself this is one of the best options for raw additional damage and it's a giant crocodile is no one else as excited by that as me we might as well pay lip service to 18 druid levels this is the tip top of our beasts at challenge rating six but you'll only be getting this far if you only take the one level dip into barbarian which is not exactly recommended most campaigns aren't getting to 19th or 20th level anyway so it's unlikely one way or the other that you'll get up to this but it will be time to mammoth it up yes as my wife will attest there is a reason to get this high level with a druid and that's to play a mammoth weirdly i think there's only ever been the one challenge rating six beasts the one the only the mammoth the mammoth is a strict upgrade on the charge in and stomp beast that occupy a lot of slots 126 hit points and our unarmored defense does manage to pump the ac up to 14. it has a trampoline charge move with a very high dc 18 so you should reliably be able to get off its big charge and stop combo at least once per fight for 4 d8 plus 4 d10 plus 18 damage the big question is if playing a mammoth at the tail end of your campaign is worth losing that sweet primal path buffs for the rest of yes yes it's it's worth it my wife will say it's worth it there are two main options when approaching how to level up using this multi-class strategy one barbarian level three barbarian levels but they both start basically the same your first level and second level should be in druid druids gain additional skills and features early on and we want those extra proficiencies and to get to that moon druid bonus action wild shape as soon as possible your third level should be in barbarian now we pick up the all-important rage feature and our build really starts to kick in the question is how deep of a dip are you willing to take for barbarian features before taking the rest of your druid levels the one level gets us the most important feature rage three levels gets us the primal path feature danger sense and savage attacks one extra level of barbarian to gain an asi has some merit but as ability score increases don't really matter much i wouldn't recommend it there is some argument to be made in advancing barbarian all the way to fifth level for extra attack but most every wild shape form we care about uses multi-attack anyway and wouldn't gain any benefit from it personally i really like the three level dip here but in either case once you've gotten the barbarian levels you wanted all your future levels should be druid levels so you've built everything up taken those levels pick those feats and your battle ready for the next dungeon now what how do we actually play this character very simple select a dangerous wild shape and become it before initiative is even rolled you're in this for the long haul in animal mode after all and you should only be in humanoid form well away from combat or in fringe situations where you need to do some utility spell casting or skill checks we want to do this not only because we're optimized for fighting as a beast but also because both wild shape and rage take a bonus action for us and we don't want to be stuck taking a turn to build up due to action economy wild shape lasts a number of hours equal to half your druid level and these two wild shape recharge on short rests there's no real reason you can't be using your shape shifting ability essentially 24 7. and since you can rage three times per day you should be able to use your rage power in practically every combat situation as well once you hit combat activate your rage and go beast mode whenever anyone dares stand in your way which you're a big scary animal so or even just a little mean animal i mean even if you're a small one yeah point is get angry start fighting you'll resist practically all damage and dish out extra rage damage then whenever you start edging closer to zero hit points crack one of your spell slots as a bonus action and recover your hp first level spell slots are cheap and easy regular healing while those higher level spell slots should be reserved for when you're about to die i myself have honestly only ever had one druid barbarian uh come across my table and they built like i said the three classes into barbarian and the rest into druid and we ended up getting that character up to i believe it was it was something right before the mammoth but i remember it being extremely viable and they like to laugh in my face that they could just never die and i don't consider myself an adversarial dm but seeing him escape death so many times definitely made me understand the appeal of being an adversarial dm thank you guys so much for watching i really appreciate it be sure to like and subscribe because we put out new videos like this every week i know you guys are big fans of the multi-class videos that i've been doing recently so if you want us to do more weird out there kinds of builds or anything like that please let us know down in the comments and if you have made a barbarian druid character i would definitely like to hear all about them down in the comments my name is patrick ferguson from skull splitter dice and until next time farewell

Channel: SkullSplitter Dice

Views: 43,378

Keywords: dnd, d&d, dnd5e, dungeons and dragons, 5e, barbariandruid, barbariandruid 5e, 5e barbariandruid, d&d 5e barbariandruid, d&d barbariandruid, barbariandruid d&d, barbariandruid dnd, dnd 5e barbariandruid, the barbariandruid, barbariandruid 5e stats, barbariandruid stats 5e, pathfinder barbariandruid, multiclass, barbariandruidmulticlass

Id: Q0QOtzlIGm0

Length: 27min 5sec (1625 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2022