Wild soul barbarian. Issues and ideas

[stoutstien]

*it's UA which mean that it could never move to print but it's still good fun to tinker*

The more I read over the wild soul the more I like it but the more apparent the flaws come out. The three biggest are:

-the way it slows the game down with rolls. Mostly exploring flumphs
- the magic reserve feature. Needs a lower cap and some limit
-the chaotic fury feature becoming redundant once the barbarian gets unlimited rages. Didn't see this one the first time but a classes capstone shouldn't completely over ride one of the other high lv features.

So some ideas I have
-Give wild surges some control at some point(lv 10) roll 2X pick one.
- give barbarian the ability to grant immunity to allies from surges (lv14)
- rewrite roll(3) to act like proximity mines. Player places the spirits and first time someone moves with in range they go off.
- magic reserve needs a cap of once per target a long rest. At lv 14 you roll 2d4 pick one vs upgrade to d6.
- chaotic fury adds 2 more options to the wild magic Tables
9- you gain a fly speed equal to half your walking speed.
10- no solid ideas yet. Maybe just a

Anyone come up with anything yet?

[Damon_Tor]

-Give wild surges some control at some point(lv 10) roll 2X pick one.
That would be a fine replacement for Chaotic Fury at level 14


give barbarian the ability to grant immunity to allies from surges
Eh, that seems contrary to the spirit of the class and subclass.


rewrite roll(3) to act like proximity mines. Player places the spirits and first time someone moves with in range they go off.
My problem with the feature as it stands is that it's pretty clearly supposed to be the "conjuration" result, but it just turns into a way crappier evocation result with a sort of "conjuration flavor" with an unnecessarily memey flair ("FLUMPHS! So random!" bleh)

I would replace it with something like the following:

You conjure 1d4 semitransparent force constructs in unoccupied spaces within 30 feet of you. You decide what they look like. Each contruct is 5 feet around and 10 feet tall and occupies its space. These objects have 10 AC, hitpoints equal to your constitution score, and last until your rage ends or until destroyed. If a construct is destroyed it explodes, and creatures within 10 feet of it must succeed on a dexterity save or take 2d8 force damage.


- magic reserve needs a cap of once per target a long rest. At lv 14 you roll 2d4 pick one vs upgrade to d6.

Alot of people have suggested this sort of thing, but this just weakens it too much, and it penalizes a barbarian with just 1 caster in the party as compared to a barbarian with several.

Alternative suggestion:

At 6th level, you can channel the magic surging inside you into other creatures. You gain a number of spell slots as shown on your Wild Soul progression table [1/3 caster slot progression: 3 first level slots when you get the feature at level 6, 4/2 at level 7 and progressing from there the same as an Eldritch Knight or Arcane Trickster]. As an action, you can touch a creature and expend a spell slot. You take an amount of force damage equal to 5 times the level of the spell slot, and the creature you touch recovers a spell slot of the same level or gains a number of temporary hitpoints equal to 5 times the level of the spell slot.

This removes the random element (there's still plenty of random elsewhere in the subclass) and gives you a hard cap on how often you can do this and at which spell level, though you could multiclass into a full caster class to improve your ability to act as a magic battery if you like.


- chaotic fury adds 2 more options to the wild magic Tables

The problem here is that these are thematically based on each of the schools of magic, and there are only 8.

[stoutstien]

You make some good points.
I have a player wanted to play this already and I'm going to tweak as we go to see how it plays.
Off the cuff it looks like it needs more damage but it's going to be a blast I think.

[Protolisk]

One additional change I would make is that since the Wild Magic Surges don't scale damage and are save for no damage, is to make it save for half damage instead. Especially since many are 1 time only and the ability to reuse the table during a rage comes online so late at level 14.

Reason being is that the features come across as weaker than a Storm Barbarian, as they deal either automatic damage or save for half damage on their bonus action, and they get that ability from level 3. Wild magic is already uncontrolled as it is with the difficult terrain already possibly hurting you, as well as other effects hurting allies.

[stoutstien]

One additional change I would make is that since the Wild Magic Surges don't scale damage and are save for no damage, is to make it save for half damage instead. Especially since many are 1 time only and the ability to reuse the table during a rage comes online so late at level 14.

Reason being is that the features come across as weaker than a Storm Barbarian, as they deal either automatic damage or save for half damage on their bonus action, and they get that ability from level 3. Wild magic is already uncontrolled as it is with the difficult terrain already possibly hurting you, as well as other effects hurting allies.

Some of the effects are quite powerful if you can get in the middle of group of foes but yes they either need a way of activating more often or scale a little.
1d10 of thp per target in a 30 range could be crazy.