The 12 Days of Critmas: The Barbarian

What if that artificer was a barbarian?

Again, the main factors are the race, subclass and the two ASIs. Of the barbarian subclasses, the Beserker, Wild Magic and Zealot paths can all add meaningful damage at level 8. The wild magic barb can inflict 1d12 necrotic damage on a bunch of enemies as part of entering their rage, but as we only care about killing one enemy, that won’t match the bonus action extra attack allowed by the beserker’s frenzy, which will also add damage bonuses. Zealot gives you an extra 1d6 damage on the first attack that hits on your turn, leaving your bonus action free. So a Zealot could maybe do some two weapon fighting here. However, if the beserker uses Great Weapon Master, the +10 damage will quickly outpace two one handed weapons.

This is where natural weapons come in. Longtooth shifters, centaurs, and lizardfolk can all deal 1d6 +str damage on a bonus action using natural weapons. This allows a zealot barb of one of these races to make two greataxe attacks with Great Weapon Master, a bonus action attack with their natural weapon, and either take an ASI or a different feat to further improve damage output. Without an ASI or feat, this gives us two greatsword hits while raging at 27 (1d12 +3 +10 +2) and a bonus action 11 (1d6 +3 +2), with added 1d6 damage from Zealot, totalling to 71 max damage. An ASI gives us only 3 extra damage overall, but fighting initiate (superior technique) or martial adept can get you access to another 1d6, raising this to 77. On successive crits, you max out at 119 points (2d12 +3 +10 +2 +2d12 +3 +10 +2 +2d6 +3 +2 +2d6 +2d6). Impressive, but less than yesterday’s artificer managed, and this is a barbarian build. Back to the berserker.

A frenzied berserker makes 3 attacks on their turn. If this berserker is a half-orc with Great Weapon Master and a greataxe, each of these attacks can deal a total of 27 damage (1d12 +3 +10 +2), totalling to 81 already. And one of these will also have the Orcish Fury dice, bringing us to 87. With successive crits, every hit has an extra damage die, dealing 51 each (2d12 +1d12 +3 +10 +2), which totals to 165 with Orcish Fury.

This was a pretty short post, but there really isn’t much stronger for killing things quickly than a half-orc barbarian. A human could pick up another feat by this point, or increase their strength to +4, but these don’t compare to all those bonus d12s sadly. This isn’t so much a special build as barbarians being good at hitting things hard, and it’ll be interesting to see which classes can do better than this.