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A Guide to the Best Feats for Barbarians in Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) 5E

A Comprehensive List of the most Optimal Feat Choices for Barbarians

By Theo James TaylorPublished 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago 4 min read
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A Guide to the Best Feats for Barbarians in Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) 5E
Photo by Gioele Fazzeri on Unsplash

Barbarians are an excellent melee character with the great ability to tank fights and deal high levels of damage. Barbarians excel in terms of sheer survivability and their ability to bring the fight to the enemy. Depending on the kind of character you want to play and the subclass you choose, certain choices might be of more value to you than others as each character and play style is always going to be different. Nevertheless, this list should give you insight into why each choice is of value to you, and help you determine which you want to use.

Resilient:

Resilient is at the start of this list because Barbarians truly have very very few weaknesses, but the weakness that they do have, low Wisdom and no proficiency in Wisdom saves is huge. This means more likely than not in early levels you’ll be hit with things like Hold Person and effectively taken out of the fight. At higher levels, abilities like Dominate Person or even Plane Shift will immediately nullify your character, and that’s never fun. I’d highly recommend using this feat to grab proficiency in Wisdom around 8th level. You’ll find yourself in a more advantageous position than not.

Mage Slayer:

Mage Slayer is good as a barbarian because it gives your enemies disadvantage on concentration checks when you hit them, and you deal a good amount of damage. With Barbarians improved movement, getting across the field and quickly nullifying powerful spellcasters can be extremely useful. This feat is niche in that a lot of DMs don’t use spellcasters a lot in their campaigns. But in the case that they do, having this feat is extremely useful.

Durable:

While you shouldn’t be going into low hit points very often, and your Con should be high to begin with. Durable allows you to automatically count hit dice rolled during a short rest as equal to twice your Con bonus minimum. Meaning if you have 18 Constitution with a +4 bonus, when you roll hit dice, your dice can’t count as lower than 8. This means your healer has to spend a lot less spell slots getting you back into decent shape. Instead you can simply take a short rest and nearly automatically shoot yourself back to full HP. Very effective for the party tank.

Lucky:

This is probably the most banned feat per table for a reason, but it is also extremely good. Taking this feat gives you 3 luck points that allow you to roll an extra d20 when you make an attack roll, ability check or saving throw, or to make an enemy reroll. It’s like having the ability to give yourself advantage or an enemy disadvantage, because of this it is extremely handy. You have to decide to use Luck before you know the outcome of the die, but after you roll it, so if you have a shitty roll or an enemy has a good one, it is very easy to assume the outcome and use Lucky.

Sentinel:

As the party tank and a frontliner, it is your job to make sure people don’t get past you and hurt your healer or your wizard. Taking Sentinel means it is much harder to avoid you, and no longer are enemies able to simply run away with Disengage. Instead, when you hit an enemy they can no longer move and you can continue hacking away with your massive axe.

Great Weapon Master:

Essentially the archetypal Barbarian and Fighter Feat, Great Weapon Master lets you sacrifice accuracy for damage, just the way god intended. With Barbarians having high strength, and hopefully a good magical weapon as soon as possible, you won’t be sacrificing as much to hit to lay out huge swathes of damage. This feat is best used against larger enemies with lower Armor Class.

Slasher:

A nice stat boost and a bonus effect to your Greatsword or axe, you also get to slow an enemy’s speed, hopefully making it even harder for them to escape you. In addition your critical hits will hit even harder, which is never bad with a Barbarian.

Tough:

This one is mostly a joke, considering that you already have more HP than a small truck, but taking this feat can shoot you up to the standards of a large truck, and for that it is worth considering. I wouldn’t grab this feat until higher levels when you have taken other options and maxed out your Strength and Constitution. But at 12th or 16th level when you have nothing better to take, 24-32 extra hit points in a level isn’t nothing.

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About the Creator

Theo James Taylor

Writer, MCU lover, and HUGE RPG nerd (but especially D&D). I have been a ghostwriter for blogs and other publications for 5 years now, but love the freedom Vocal gives me. You can find me DMing an outrageous Homebrew Campaign every Monday!

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