Path of the World Tree Barbarian: D&D 5e 2024 Optimisation Guide - Dungeon Mister (2024)

A protector of the planes, the world tree barbarian is a team player with excellent battlefield control.

At a glance

Path of the world tree features

The path of the world tree turns your hard-hitting barbarian into something of a battlefield controller with a large streak of protector. It works wonderfully at making your barbarian not only more devastating, but also more tactical.

Vitality of the tree – Level 3

How it works

Keeps you and your allies on their feet for longer with temporary hit points. You get 2 specific benefits with this feature:

• Whenever you activate your rage, you gain a number of temporary hit points equal to your barbarian level.
• At the start of each of your turns while your rage is active, you can grant an ally within 10ft temporary hit points by rolling a number of d6s equal to your rage damage bonus. Notice that this happens at the start of your turn and requires no action of any kind (but won’t start aiding your allies until the turn after you activate your rage).

Tactics

• Always activate your rage at the beginning of combat for maximum temporary hit points. You should be doing this anyway as the other benefits of rage are also excellent.
• Fight alongside allies. The temporary hit points you grant your allies is not only greater than what you grant yourself, it’s more regular too. But it also only has a 10ft distance so you’ll want to have some martial buddies to fight alongside.
• Remember, temporary hit points don’t stack! If you keep granting temporary hit points to the same ally, they’ll only gain the benefit of them if they were hit in the last round. This makes the path of the world tree most effective with a couple of martial allies, though you may also find that just letting your allies take a bit of a beating works well too.
• Remember, the temporary hit points end when your rage does. This includes if you’re knocked unconscious, so even more reason to make sure you stay in the fight.

Branches of the tree – Level 6

How it works

At the start of a creatures turn, if they’re within 30ft of you, you can summon the branches of the world tree to pull that creature next to you (if they fail a strength saving throw). You can also choose to reduce their movement to 0 until the end of their turn (there’s no escaping this barbarian)!

Tactics

• Keep weak enemies close like spellcasters and archers to limit their effectiveness and keep yourself in striking range.
• Protect allies by keeping deadly martials with their attacks aimed squarely at yourself instead of running off to attack the party wizard. You should be the tankiest person in your party so this is often a good tactic, but be aware that the resistances from your rage are limited to bludgeoning, piercing and slashing damage. It means you’re very resilient to weapon or claw attacks, but less so to something like a fire elemental.
• Pluck an ally out of danger and into your protective sphere of influence (kind of like giving misty step to someone else).
• Remember this takes a reaction so you will sacrifice making opportunity attacks by using this feature.

Battering roots – Level 10

How it works

When wielding a heavy or versatile weapon, on your turn your reach is extended by 10ft with that weapon. Note that this doesn’t work for opportunity attacks as these don’t occur on your turn.

You can also apply push or topple to your attacks. This is on top of any other ability your attacks might gain from things like weapon mastery.

Tactics

• Another way to ensure enemies are not safe from your reach. This allows you to select the best targets to attack around you.
• You can aid nearby allies by using topple to knock an enemy prone, granting advantage to your ally’s attacks. Alternatively, you can push them away from an ally that needs to escape. In fact, you can even do both in the same attack if you also combine some weapon mastery and brutal strike into the mix. In fact, there are some potentially terrifying combinations you can make here between these 3 features.

Travelling along the tree – Level 14

How it works

Teleport 60ft (that’s further than misty step) when you activate your rage and/or as a bonus action while raging.

On top of this, once per rage, you can make the teleported distance up to 150ft and take 6 willing creatures along with you, as long as they’re within 10ft of you (that’s definitely better than misty step).

Tactics

• Easily travel large distances to get to your foes. Remember that you can still make your full move (typically 40ft at this stage, or 45ft if you’re a Goliath) and use instinctive pounce when your rage starts for an extra 20ft of movement. This means that when you activate your rage on your first turn, you can travel about 120ft! And apparently leaping through a world tree portal to strike down your target!
• Because you can teleport, you can now move away from an enemy you’re fighting without incurring an opportunity attack against you. Great for some tactical maneuvering or the very un-barbarian-ly thing of escaping a deadly encounter (don’t be ashamed, it’s a perfectly viable tactic, so you can smash that dragon another day).
• Get your friends out of danger by grabbing them all for a mega teleport 150ft from the action. Great for saving townsfolk from burning buildings or your wizard out of the way of enemy martials. For bonus points, get your ranged allies somewhere high up for extra protection.
• Or get your martial friends into the action quick. Path of the world tree barbarians are pretty collaborative and it’s good to keep your allies close for those temporary hit points (at this stage you’ll be handing out 3d6 of these per turn which averages at 11.5). Get them into combat with you so you can do some toppling and all benefit from advantage on attacks. Or even better, topple them, grapple them on the floor, then let your friends pummel this poor soul. Even if this opponent does get away from your grapple, just teleport him right back to you so you can beat him up some more!

Building a path of the world tree barbarian

There’s a lot to consider now between a brand new subclass, weapon masteries and big changes to the likes of backgrounds, species and feats. Below is some guidance on making an optimal build for your world tree barbarian.

Ability scores

Recommended options

• Constitution: Path of the world tree barbarians work best as protectors so I’d prioritise constitution for that extra hardiness.
• Dexterity: You’ve got 2 options here, go 14 dexterity for medium armor, or sacrifice some strength for bigger AC from unarmored defense. If you go with medium armor, you max out at 17AC which is only decent. This is likely better at lower levels, but as you progress, you should be able to beat this with unarmored defense. Because path of the world tree is a protective subclass, I’d lean towards the better AC in this build and prioritise dexterity so you can take more of a beating.
• Strength: Important for dealing damage. If you want to be more of a tank/protector and less of a damage dealer, then you may have to sacrifice this a bit. Remains important though.

Options to avoid

• Wisdom: Of little use to a barbarian.
• Intelligence: Of little use to a barbarian.
• Charisma: Of little use to a barbarian.

Skills

Recommended options

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

• Perception: Important for most characters as you’ll use it regularly, plus you can use your strength for this with primal knowledge now too.
• Intimidation: You may be dumping charisma, but primal knowledge lets you use strength for this ability check anyway. And those big muscles really are intimidating!

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 world tree 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).

Recommended options

• Aasimar (2024): Resistance to necrotic and radiant damage increases your hardiness 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, but you can teleport which will often achieve what you’d need from flight.
• 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.
• 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. Tool proficiencies are much more useful now too. Smith’s tools is probably your best option from the lot.
• Goliath (2024): The quintessential barbarian race! Faster movement makes you even better at traversing the battlefield. Your giant ancestry grants some very useful options too. For a path of the world tree barbarian, I’d lean into being more durable by taking stone giant ancestry for the damage reduction as you’ll be putting your neck on the line a lot.

Options to avoid

• Orc (2024): Sadly, adrenaline rush becomes redundant with all the temporary hit points a world tree barbarian already gets and their ability to teleport which is better than dashing. This is unusual as normally an Orc would work well as a barbarian, just not a world tree barbarian. You still get relentless endurance though which would stack with with relentless rage giving you more opportunities to not be knocked out.
• 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.

Below are the options I think work best for a world tree barbarian:

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.

Weapons

I’d consider 3 things when choosing your weapon:

• Heavy or versatile weapons: To take advantage of battering roots, you’ll need to be wielding a heavy or versatile 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 versatile 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.
  • 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.
• 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): You already get topple with battering roots so you probably want to go for another weapon mastery for better combos.
  • 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.
  • Warhammer (push): You can however combine the effects of your pushes making for one heck of a launch backwards!

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.

Yoi can also throw in a shield if you want to go higher on defense and lower on damage.

Other class guides

Not sure a world tree 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