Bearbarian Wildshape Beasts

[Setharious]

So from my understanding you can use your barbarian feature 'unarmored defense' even when you wildshape. I have seen many spread sheets and such for the different beasts, but not a concise location to sort them out with multiple catagories. So the question is, is there a beast a moon druid could turn into to take huge advantage of that barbarian feature? Possibly the full 20 dex and 20 con? Is this unaromered defense even worth it over most of the beasts' own natural AC?

[solidork]

Just giving a quick look, you'll get 1-3 AC on lots of forms but its mostly going from like 11 to 13 or 12 to 14. It's a modest improvement on all the Elementals except for Earth.

[Derges]

5e tools has filters in it's beastiry.

I can see the huge giant crab has 15 dex and 20 con but nothing has 2020 until silly crs

[CTurbo]

The unarmored defense from Monk will almost always be better than the Barbarian for the Moon Druid since it keys off Dex+Wis and you'll want your Wis at 20 ASAP anyway.

As awesome as a Raging beast is, I'd also personally prefer to be a Beast with Martial Arts too.

[diplomancer]

The unarmored defense from Monk will almost always be better than the Barbarian for the Moon Druid since it keys off Dex+Wis and you'll want your Wis at 20 ASAP anyway.

As awesome as a Raging beast is, I'd also personally prefer to be a Beast with Martial Arts too.

Yes, if AC is what you're looking for, Monk's is better. Air Elemental gives you 20 AC. Bearbarian is if you want damage resistance and more damage from rage. "beast with martial arts" is an interesting niche, but you have to look at the beasts that have one strong single attack, not Multiattack. For any monster that does not have "unarmed strike" in its stat block, it's still just 1d4+ (str/dex), so I'm not sure it's worth it. Unless your DM lets you use Monk's Dedicated Weapon on your beast's natural weapons. Than you can be a Rhino with two powerful horn attacks :smallbiggrin:

[sithlordnergal]

As Diplomancer said, Wild shape Bearbarian is more about Resisting damage than blocking it with a high AC. Due to the Bear Totem's Resistance, you become the ultimate damage sponge. You have three HP pools to pull from, and they're all effectively doubled due to Rage.

[Dork_Forge]

Like other have already said Barbarian will generally be some degree of improvement but not huge.

I personally like the idea of the Beast Barbarian for this. Besides the imagery of warping a beast shape being cool, you can use the tail for a boost to AC and i think it adds reach to beasts without it.

[Sherlockpwns]

Gosh you know it never occurred to me until just now that the RAW of beast barbarian says….

“Once on each of your turns when you attack with a claw using the Attack action”

This is very different from bite which specifies “this bite” vs “a” claw.

Ergo It does not specify that the claw in question has to be from the rage transformation. It is unclear if this is true of the tail (giant scorpion?) as well. Though honestly if your DM says your shape overrides the beast barbarian form they are a jerk.

I mean this is not a GOOD build, but I guess wild Druid 2 / beast Barb 5 could get 3 attacks for 2d6+6 each while raging and transformed. Probably go back to Druid after 5 or 6.

As others said, that’s a lot of effective HP, even at level 7.

The sad part is there isn’t much else beyond that. Polar bear will do 1 more dmg and hit more / have more hp; though also counting as magic is nice.

Anyway, the character would work fine imo. Will be very effective from level 2-7 and then fall off slowly between 8-11. If you play much beyond that it’ll probably struggle a bit but still have plenty of options for fun.