Dynamic Wildheart Barbarian

Overview

Wildheart Barbarian is one of my favorite subclasses, but I find the limitation of a single animal totem to be unnecessarily restrictive. Each animal offers a unique playstyle, and the encounter variation in the game means that they're useful (and not useful!) in different contexts. For example, when fighting undead enemies who are immune to bleeding, Tiger Heart Barbarians are unfairly punished; for most players, this just means that they need to respec during Act Two. The Bear and Eagle Hearts are always good, and I suspect that not many players have ever even tried Elk or Wolf.

This mod reworks the Wildheart subclass to remove this restriction. Each time you Rage, you can select which Bestial Heart to attune to, gaining their passives and active abilities. While raging, you can change Bestial Hearts with a bonus action without expending an additional Rage Charge.

This makes Wildheart Barbarians significantly more versatile without meaningfully breaking game balance. If you're expecting to take a lot of damage next turn, you can switch to Bear Heart for its resistances, or to Elk Heart to run away with increased movement speed. Tiger Heart Barbarians can bleed and maim a group of enemies, then switch to Eagle or Elk Heart to knock them all prone. Wolf Heart can be situationally useful to focus down a boss with a team of martials, but it's almost never picked today because it requires a specific team composition to compete with the other animals; with Dynamic Wildheart, you can use a different Rage until the situation calls for a coordinated smackdown.

I think this really changes the way that the Wildheart subclass feels to play, and I hope you find it as fun as I do!

Notes

• []To minimize the risk of conflicts, I intentionally avoided changing any logic related to character progression. This means that each time you level up as a Wildheart Barbarian, you will still be given an option to select a Bestial Heart. This choice is now mostly for flavor; it only affects the following:

  []Your default animal piercings

  []The icon for the Rage: Bestial Heart skill container in your action bar and spellbook

  []Which Bestial Heart will automatically trigger via Aspect of the Beast (Honey Badger)

[]Changing Bestial Hearts has the effect of refreshing your Rage status, which affects the following:

[*]The duration of your Rage status is refre