Path of the Wild Heart Barbarian: D&D 2024 Optimisation Guide - Dungeon Mister (2024)

Barbarians that take on the traits of animals to enhance their combat capabilities and develop some utility and scouting outside of combat.

At a glance

What’s changing?

As mentioned, the path of the wild heart is just a reworked version of the path of the totem warrior from the 2014 Player’s Handbook. Mainly, the subclass sees some quality of life improvements rather than large-scale changes including:

• Some players thought you had to take powers from the same animal trait when getting new features, so each feature is now named after a different animal to make it clear that you can mix and match
• Your versatility is increased allowing you to change the animal traits you use either each time you rage, or each time you take a long rest

Path of the wild heart features

Animal speaker – Level 3

How it works

You can cast beast sense and speak with animals as rituals using wisdom as your spellcasting ability.

Tactics

• Mainly useful for scouting and investigation. Connect with flying animals or tiny creatures to scout out enemy lairs. Or to get more information, speak with animals. Your mileage here may depend on the generosity of your DM though and their willingness to allow access to lairs for critters and for them to have knowledge they can communicate.

Rage of the wilds – Level 3

How it works

Each time you rage, you can use one of the following powers:

• Bear: Gain resistance to most damage types
• Eagle: You can disengage and dash using a bonus action (including on the turn you activate rage)
• Wolf: Allies have advantage on attacks against any enemy within 5ft of you.

Tactics

Handily, you can change your power each time you rage making you more adaptable in combat. Here’s some ideas on when to use each aspect type:

• Bear: Good for when you need to absorb more damage than usual from magic users and creatures that cause damage that isn’t the standard bludgeoning, piercing or slashing. Avoid using against the likes of undead, necromancers, celestials, mind flayers or anything else that will consistently use damage types you can’t resist.
• Eagle: Use when you need to maneuver round the battlefield a lot. Could be useful in encounters with enemies that are very far away. You could also use it for escaping if you’re getting really battered (yes, this is an acceptable tactic for a barbarian!) but that’s hard to anticipate at the beginning of combat.
• Wolf: Great for pack tactics against large groups of enemies. I wouldn’t bother with this when engaging single enemies, but against crowds, is a great source of advantage for your allies. It’s not exclusive to melee attacks either so helps your ranged buddies out in ways that flanking can’t.

Aspects of the wild – Level 6

How it works

Grab some more passive animalistic traits by taking one of the following options which you can swap each long rest:

• Owl: Gain/increase darkvision by 60ft.
• Panther: Gain a climb speed.
• Salmon: Gain a swim speed.

Tactics

• Darkvision is perhaps the most universally useful so if you don’t have this, make it your go to option until you have a specific need for something else.
• If you have darkvision, I’d make climbing your go to option as it’s likely to be useful more often. This is mostly useful for exploration purposes, but accessing high up enemies can be really important in combat too. With little in the way of ranged options, barbarians don’t want to be bogged down by obstacles in their path to destruction.
• Swimming is hugely useful, but highly situational. You don’t often need to do much swimming, and when you do, there’s often warning (for instance, you’re going to sail on a ship). I’d just take this when the need arises.

Nature speaker – Level 10

How it works

You can cast commune with nature as a ritual using wisdom as your spellcasting ability.

Tactics

• This is basically a scouting spell. Sadly, exploration of this type isn’t often overly useful, though it can depend on your campaign. Still, has some use occasionally for getting the lay of the land.

Power of the wilds – Level 14

How it works

When you activate your rage, you can activate one of the following options (this stacks with rage of the wilds):

• Falcon: You gain a fly speeds, but only while not wearing armor.
• Lion: Any enemies within 5ft of you have disadvantage on attacks rolls against creatures other than you.
• Ram: When you hit, you can cause large or smaller creatures to have the prone condition.

Tactics

• Flight is excellent and gives you another reason to use rage outside of combat. Flight is great in combat if you need to access high places, but otherwise, use your climb speed as you want to be in the thick of the action, not hurling javelins from the skies so other options will usually be better (unless you need to fight flying enemies).
• Lion is a great way to keep attacks focused on you instead of allies. A great way to protect less durable martials like monks, artificers and rogues. Just beware that you will draw a lot of attacks this way and may want to combine this with bear.
• Ram can semi-replace wolf by knocking enemies prone and frees up your weapon mastery for other types of attacks.

Building a path of the wild heart barbarian

Below is some guidance on making an optimal build for your wild heart barbarian.

Ability scores

Recommended options

• Strength: Important for dealing damage. Depending on whether you want to go heavier as a tank or a damage dealer will determine whether this or constitution is your most important ability. Dealing lots of damage is fun though!
• Constitution: You’ll need to be really resilient, especially if you take wolf or lion which will likely cause you to draw even more attacks than usual.
• Dexterity: You can’t access flight at level 14 while using armor so by that point, you’ll want to have a strong enough dexterity to make unarmoured defense better than medium armor. Before then, you can get by with 14 dexterity.

Options to avoid

• Wisdom: Your spellcasting ability is wisdom for the few ritual spells you get, but this is deceptive. Wisdom has zero impact on how well you cast your wild heart spells so you can easily afford to dump this ability other than for the skill and saving throw benefits.
• Intelligence: Dump, you don’t need this.
• Charisma: You’re going to need to be at least a little convincing when you speak to animals, but you need your focus elsewhere when it comes to ability scores. Not necessarily a dump stat, but not one to invest in either, especially as you can use strength for intimidation with primal knowledge.

Skills

Recommended options

• Athletics: Great if you want to do a lot of grappling

• Perception: You’ll may play the role of scout as a wild heart, especially in the absence of a ranger or rogue, so very worthwhile investing in.
• Intimidation: Primal knowledge lets you use strength for this ability check now (while raging). And those big muscles really are intimidating! You could even intimidate animals into doing what you want.

Options to avoid

• Nature: Used far too little to be of much use.
• Survival: Used far too little to be of much use.
• Animal handling: Used far too little to be of much use.

Species/race

There are a couple of things to consider when choosing a species for a path of the wild heart barbarian:

• Resilience: Damage resistances will protect your tank even more, especially if you’re planning on dragging a lot of nasty martials away from your allies and into arms reach.
• Innate spellcasting: Innate spellcasting can be useful for out of combat spells, but is pointless for spells you might use in combat (as you’ll likely be raging and not have a great spellcasting ability).
• Flight: You don’t get flight till level 14 and can only use it when unarmoured. If you want to be using medium armor or have flight earlier, species with this trait could be worthwhile.
• Dealing damage: Any species that can enhance your damage dealing will help. You’ll likely be in the thick of combat so AoE damage can certainly help as barbarians naturally don’t really get this.

Recommended options

• Aasimar (2024): Resistance to necrotic and radiant damage increases your hardiness (and you don’t get these resistances from bear) and extra damage from celestial revelation both work really well for any barbarian. I’d primarily look to inner radiance as your charisma will likely be a bit low for necrotic shroud. Flight can be useful up until level 14 when you get it through your features.
• Dragonborn (2024): An AoE breath weapon with scalable damage that only takes up a single attack is great if you want to deal damage to the masses (and lets be honest, you definitely do)! On top of that, you get a resistance and temporary flight which is always a useful option. Just be aware that all the Dragonborn resistances are covered by bear so if you expect to use that rage feature a lot, your Dragonborn resistances might be a little wasted.
• Dwarf (2024): An extra hit point per level is great for a protector character and for even more resilience, you have resistance against poison and advantage on saving throws against the poisoned condition. Just be aware you can get poison resistance with bear so if you intend to use this rage feature a lot, your Dwarven poison resistance becomes a little obsolete.
• Goliath (2024): The quintessential barbarian species! Faster movement makes you even better at traversing the battlefield. Your giant ancestry grants some very useful options too. You can go for extra durability with stone giant ancestry, more damage from fire giant or knocking enemies prone with hill giant (though you can knock enemies prone with a bunch of other features anyway). However, if you want to save things like weapon mastery and animalistic options for other things, hill giant could still be a good option.
• Orc (2024): Relentless endurance stacks with relentless rage to make you last even longer in combat. Adrenaline rush is good for a few extra temporary hit points and to get around more quickly.

Options to avoid

• Elf (2024): Too much reliance on innate spellcasting which barbarians are no good at.
• Tiefling (2024): Too much reliance on innate spellcasting which barbarians are no good at.

Backgrounds

Backgrounds are much more important now with D&D 2024 as the ability score increases previously tied to your race/species are now linked to your background. Remember that you can either choose to increase one of the ability score options from a background by 2 and the other by 1, or you can choose to increase all 3 ability scores by 1.

You also get an origin feat linked to your background too.

For a wild heart barbarian, you’ll want to get strength, constitution and/or dexterity increases (dexterity being the least important). Below are probably your best options :

Of these options, I think farmer is probably your best bet with strength and constitution increases and the tough feat. The skills aren’t great, but barbarians were never built for skills anyway. The savage attacker feat from soldier isn’t really that great unfortunately while criminal lacks the all important strength increase, though works well if you want to invest in defence.

If you’re not keen on these combinations, then you can customise a 2014 background instead.

Weapons

You can go for a couple of approaches when choosing your weapon:

• Damage: the biggest damage dealers are those that do d12 or 2d6 damage. These include a greataxe (d12), maul and greatsword (2d6). 2d6 edges things on average damage (7 Vs 6.5) but the difference is negligible.
• Protection: Alternatively, you can trade off that extra damage for extra protection by going the sword and shield route and wielding a one handed weapon instead. We’re looking at the likes of longswords, battle-axes, spears and warhammers here.

Weapon mastery: You’ll want to make sure the weapon you choose has a weapon mastery that fits your tactics.

Of the top damage dealers, this includes:

• Maul (topple): Knocks your opponent prone. Great for working with allies to give them advantage on attacks. You can easily accomplish something similar with wolf though, so potentially less useful for a wild heart barbarian.
• Greataxe (cleave): Hit 2 enemies in a single swing. Great for dealing more damage to crowds.
• Greatsword (nick): Good for ensuring some damage even if you miss. This feels like a typically weaker option than the other 2 though,.especially with the option to grant yourself advantage with reckless attacks.

And for versatile shield weapons, we’re looking at:

• Spear (sap): Impose disadvantage on the next attack and you can throw it if necessary. But less damage means you’re probably better off with another weapon.
• Battleaxe (topple): Similar situation to a maul.
• Longsword (sap): Since you probably don’t need to throw your weapon, a longsword is the better option for sapping your opponent with d8 damage rather than the spear’s d6 (and if you need to, you can easily swap to a thrown weapon anyway).
• Warhammer (push): You can however combine the effects of your pushes making for one heck of a launch backwards!

I’d also make sure you grab some thrown weapons for when you need to attack at range. Tridents, then spears and javelins, offer the best damage output at range. Deciding which you want will mainly be a case of working out which weapon mastery property you’d prefer (sap,.slow or topple).

Armor

You can go one of 2 ways with armor:

• Unarmoured defense: If you’re happy sacrificing damage output by investing in dexterity over strength, then you can get your best AC by maximising your dexterity and constitution and using unarmoured defense.
• Medium armor: If you’d prefer to have only decent armor and deal more damage, then go for 14 dexterity, half plate and high strength.

You may want to start with medium armor, and as you gain ability score improvements, switch to unarmoured defense once this becomes a better option. This is especially important by the time you hit level 14 so you can use flight.

You can also throw in a shield if you want to go higher on defense and lower on damage. Importantly, shields don’t count as armor for the purposes of unarmoured defense.

Other class guides

Not sure a wild heart barbarian is for you. Not to worry, why not check out one of our other class guides.

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Published by Ben Lawrance

Ben is the creator of Dungeon Mister and is an experienced dungeon master who's been immersed in the D&D universe for over 20 years.View more posts