The 2014 Barbarian was a ton of fun to play, but had very few options beyond trading damage, and suffered at high levels when their Brutal Critical feature fell dramatically short of the designer’s expectations.
The 2024 rules give Barbarians a ton of utility, giving them more skill proficiencies, allowing them to use Rage as a skill buff outside of combat, and adding the new Brutal Strikes to give Barbarians a damage boost and some crowd control options at high levels so that they continue to feel mechanically interesting. Overall, the class has kept the things that we love (high risk, high reward damage/durability trades) while addressing many of the 2014 version’s biggest pain points: lack of utility, and the huge drop in effectiveness around level 10.
