| Pramxnim |
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As written, the Barbarian's level 16 Rage action Dragon Transformation is a huge trap.
The relevant texts are "You transform into a Large form of a dragon" and "The special statistics of your dragon form can be adjusted only by penalties, circumstance bonuses, and conditional bonuses (such as those you gain while raging)."
Now, the Dragon Form spell on page 218 has you either transform into a Large Dragon or a Huge Dragon when heightened, with the Dragon's statistics overwriting the PC's. The stats for a Large Dragon are appropriate for a level 11 PC (since it's a level 6 spell), but you only get Dragon Transformation at level 16.
By this level, your Dragon stats are woefully inappropriate. +20 to attack is 7 below the expected attack bonus of a Barbarian of the same level, 27 AC is 10 below a Barb (and you get a -1 penalty from raging too). Finally, the 24 DC saving throw on the Breath attack is trivially surpassed by monsters at levels 14-16, which the PCs are fighting.
Even if you could transform into a Huge dragon, the upgraded stats are still a little bit behind (-1 for attack, -3 for AC).
Right now, there's no reason to take this feat, because the moment you transform, it's like you suddenly lost 5 levels and become much less effective in combat.
An easy fix would be to let the Dragon Form use your attack bonus and AC, like Animal Rage does, and have the Dragon Breath DC be your class DC. Also, you should be an Expert in the unarmed attacks granted by Dragon Transformation, just like its counterpart Animal Rage.
Looks like this ability needed some proofreading to find the glaring omissions that make it a downgrade when used. I hope it gets fixed in future rounds of errata.
| DoomedDruid |
In my interpretation, this feat is not nearly as big a trap as you make it out to be. I think it does work similarly to animal rage. After all, the text in the feat states that you ignore your armor's check penalty and speed reduction, if any, and states nothing about altering your AC, so you would keep your own AC. The same counts for the attacks, with you using your own attack modifier with your proficiency being trained.
Why else put the list of effects under this feat and not simply refer to the spell for all effects? Also the athletics bonus of +20 is not mentioned in the barbarian text, because who would expect a barbarian to have an athletics lower than +20 at that lvl?
The only thing that is specifically referred to from the dragon form spell is the benefits you gain for your chosen dragon's type, which is the extra benefits such as a burrow speed (Blue) and the types of attacks you have.
I do agree with you about the dragon breath DC. You would expect your dragon breath to do full damage a good bit of the time, but a Horned Devil (Trivial at lvl 16) has a 55% chance to roll a critical succes, and only a 5% chance to ever fail (a nat 1). Class DC does indeed seem a bit more appropriate.