Order Of The Lycan Blood Hunter

So You Want to Play A Lycan Blood Hunter

The Order of the Lycan is one of the original subclasses for the Blood Hunter class from Matthew Mercer's homebrew published on D&D Beyond. It transforms you into a werebeast when you activate your hemocraft. You start with a few hits, roll the damage dice yourself, and try not to die from blood loss. I've run half a dozen Lycan characters across different campaigns, and I keep running into the same cluster of problems. Let me walk through how the subclass actually works, what trips people up, and what I do to avoid wasting my own sessions on avoidable mistakes.

Order Of The Lycan Blood Hunter Mechanics

You gain this order at level 3. Your primary feature is Better Wild Shapes, which replaces the normal Druid transformation with a Lycan form tied to your Blood Hunter level. You choose a beast shape when you level up: wolf, giant poisonous snake, spider, or scorpion. Each shape gives you different physical stats and attack options. The real engine here is the Howling Fury feature. You spend hit dice to empower your claw and bite attacks. Your damage scales with how many hit dice you invest, but each point you spend comes out of your own survival pool. This is the most common mistake new players make. They dump hit dice into fury and then get one-shotted because they have no resources left when combat goes longer than one round. Your second feature is Bestial Intuition, which gives you proficiency in two skills of your choice and darkvision up to 60 feet. You also gain a climbing speed equal to your walking speed when in Lycan form. This is underwhelming on paper but genuinely useful in practice because most dungeons have vertical terrain that stops short parties cold.

At level 5 you get Improved Lycan Form, which adds your Blood Hunter level to your claw and bite damage. That's where the damage finally becomes relevant against anything tougher than a goblin. Before level 5, your Lycan form does about as much damage as a longsword for action economy reasons, but after that it outpaces most martial options.

What The Rules Actually Say And How They Feel At The Table

Here is the part nobody warns you about: when you use Better Wild Shapes, you retain your personality, memories, and ability scores except where the lycanthropy explicitly replaces them. You add your proficiency bonus to Strength and Constitution checks, but you do not gain the beast's full stat block. Your HP stays your own. You're not a 16 Strength wolf. You're a Blood Hunter who looks like a wolf and hits like one. This means your damage output depends entirely on your Strength modifier, not the beast's stats. If you put your Ability Score Improvement into Strength instead of Constitution or Dexterity, you will notice the difference immediately. I once played a Lycan with 14 Strength and spent three sessions wondering why my claw attacks did four damage per hit. A single point of ASI into Strength doubled my average damage per strike. That's the first thing I'd adjust on any build. Another thing that catches people off guard: your Lycan form does not give you a bonus action attack. You get one claw attack and one bite attack as part of the same action. Some people try to combine it with Two-Weapon Fighting. It doesn't work because the form gives you fixed attacks, not the flexible option of Two-Weapon Fighting. If you want extra attacks, you need the Two-Handed Weapon Fighting Style or a multiclass dip into Fighter.

My Typical Build Path

I almost always start with either the Martial Weapons Proficiency variant or the Ritual Casting variant depending on table tone. For a straight combat build I take Variant Human with Strength 16, Constitution 16, and Wise Tongues as my order variant. My usual spread is: I skip the snake and spider shapes unless the campaign demands it. The wolf is objectively the strongest because of the Bite attack scaling and the fact that wolves already have decent base stats. The scorpion is the worst because its venom save DC scales off your proficiency bonus alone, which makes it unreliable. One specific problem I hit was around concentration spells while in Lycan form. You can maintain concentration, but many concentration spells require verbal components, and your Lycan form changes your voice to a howl. Several DMs interpret this as breaking verbal components. I had a paladin Blood Hunter who was also multiclassing into Cleric and got caught flat-footed because his Blessed Strike spell failed mid-combat. The workaround was simple: I switched to feats that don't require concentration. Crossbow Expert and War Caster let me stay functional without relying on spells that could break.

Another edge case is the interaction between Lycan form and grappling. Your climbing speed works in Lycan form, but grappled creatures do not get the speed bonus unless the grapple specifically allows movement. This tripped me up in a campaign where we fought a hill giant that grappled me every round. I spent three turns trying to climb a wall while bound, and my party had to extract me. The fix was to take the Mobile feat so I could disengage as a bonus action even when grappled, which completely changes how you handle crowd control. There's also the question of whether your Lycan form triggers magic items that require attunement by a beast. Short answer: no. The form is a magical transformation, not a true polymorph into a beast creature type. I found this out the hard way when I tried to use a Ring of Beast Communication while in wolf form and my DM ruled it didn't work because I wasn't actually a beast.

When Lycan Is A Bad Call

If your table runs low-level combat with lots of crowd control and environmental hazards, Lycan struggles. The form is brittle at low levels. Your HP pool doesn't increase meaningfully, and you lose access to your spellcasting focus because your hands become claws. A party that relies on utility spells will feel your absence sharply. In those campaigns, I switch to Order of the Crimson Legion or Order of the Ghostly Guardian instead. They scale better through level 4 and don't leave you helpless when you're grappled or surrounded. Also, if your DM houserules Lycanthropy to be a permanent condition rather than an active transformation, the whole build falls apart. Make sure you confirm with your DM whether your Lycan form is a voluntary ability or something that triggers automatically. I once joined a game where the DM treated it as automatic, and my character accidentally shifted during a social encounter because I failed a Wisdom save. It ended the campaign quickly.

Download And Resources

The Order Of The Lycan Blood Hunter rules are available on D&D Beyond as part of the Blood Hunter class by Matthew Mercer. The full subclass text is free to copy and paste. There's no official PDF, but the community has created printable one-pagers that summarize the features. I usually print mine and tape it to my character sheet so I don't have to look up proficiency bonuses during sessions. If you want to play this build, start with the basic subclass rules, pick your beast form, and remember to put that ASI into Strength. Everything else is optimization on top of that foundation.