From Bigby Presents: Glory of Giants, the Path of the Giant offers barbarians a way to rage with the power of the giants of legend. You grow in size and strength and toss around friend or foe with the might of a creature ten times your size.

Barbarian is a simple joy. It's the class for picking up a big stick and hitting things very hard. Brain off- only rage.

This mechanically has translated to a class that struggles a bit to differentiate itself meaningfully past the stereotypes. Most barbarians, agnostic of archetype, are going to look like beefy people with a short fuse.

Path of Zealot barbarians stand in for the truly madly devoted, those who seek to be taken over by their lord to deliver wrath upon the non-believers. Zealots truly feel like actual factual zealots in the game, delivering on a fantasy that otherwise was a bit challenging to find.

Path of Wild Magic absolutely is wild early on with some incredibly rewarding play patterns and options to open up how you engage a fight. Its scaling, even with getting more finite control of the table, is quite poor, though, and will heavily rely on your feats and base barbarian class to scale up your damage.

Path of the Totem Warrior is by far the best option a barbarian can get to open up more build decisions, and while some totems tend to overshadow their competitors, most will be more than serviceable, and enable a ton of fun builds to engage combat and exploration in some more unique ways.

Storm Heralds are the “aura” barbarians with their entire identity centering around creating space around them that threatens enemies. They have some modality, work great for delivering a variety of elemental or environmental based character fantasies, and offer the player a unique pool of tools to you out of combat. Want to feel like a raging inferno or a harbinger of an arctic god? Storm Herald is the pick for you. 

Path of the Berserker is aimed at the barbarians out there who just really want to embody the angriest creature alive, something that wants to turn their brain off entirely and beat things to death with a hammer. Mechanically, they’re kind of all over the place. 

Path of the Beast is one of my favorite options made for barbarian. You get meaningful choices, deeply satisfying payoffs for the fantasy promise, and a big bump in power that can fit into a decent amount of existing barbarian weapon based builds.

The Path of the Battlerager is from the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. It is centered around dwarves weaponizing spiked armor in combat, with some abilities tacked on that have nearly nothing to do with their namesake Battlerager Armor. It is an option that requires you to want a very specific fantasy, then takes 14 levels to actually deliver on that fantasy.

Ancestral Guardian has a bit of an identity crisis that can lead to it feeling feast or famine. If you’re against several or fewer large entities that prioritize killing you while stunning out or using other status effects on your allies, Ancestral Protectors, Spirit Shield, and Vengeful Ancestors all do nothing.