other ways to be a fucked up beast man in 5e

i talked about the spores druid and the moon druid who are like, ways to be or turn into a fucked up beast guy, but theres other ways to be a mutant creature boy in fifth, and im wondering if theyre good, compared to wild shape, or combined with it

so the idea is .... whether youre a space warlock or a dragon demon or a wolf sorcerer or whatever, youre gonna want your guy to get big and wild sometimes

the thing with 5th is like... theres a medicine skill and a healers kit which, used together, dont heal, you need the spell 'cure wounds' or 'healing word' or better to heal, these are better than cantrip effects like 'spare the dying' which is garbage but still better than medicine and a healers kit. they expect, if you want to heal, you'll take cleric 1 (or bard or druid), and youll do these spells at worst, is healing.

the game wants you to work for small gains.

if you play in a 5th environment where levels are scarce, the question becomes like, how many levels of this can i afford to take, will i get to level 3 of this, is it worth this ability.

so the way 5th wants you to transform into animals is wild shape, which is druid 2, and although the idea is to present not-druid ways to be a beast warrior, you should consider wild shape, the druid gets it for free, the druid spell list will also serve you well in general for this character concept. druid 2 is a very inexpensive way to do this

backgrounds
the most important thing about backgrounds is they suck some of the useful abilities out of classes and make them generally available, so if you have a thing you want that another class would get you, see if you can start with a background that does it, or replace a similar background ability with the thing you want, for instance the criminal background gets thief tools, the most useful tools, so if there's a set of tools you can get it for free with some background, same with all skills, and the players handbook invites you to make up your own background, so just pick two skills and a steez and make up a background to match, taking concepts that you like from various backgrounds

the outlander background
sucks all the good hunting/tracking/foraging abilities out of the ranger class, so if you take this you can get those abilities.
as a high level concept, these abilities ask if you want survival to be present and important in the game, if you always succeed at survival stuff, it wont be.
the old school way is to have survival as like a pillar of the game, if the dm wants to do survival stuff youll do it and it will be as hard as the dm wants, if you bring these newschool abilities that mitigate survival completely, the dm might allow it, but you might cheat yourself out of having to play the game, so its a mixed bag

lycanthropy
this the kind of thing most dms would want to play out in game, over the course of an adventure where the player becomes a werewolf or soemthing. so the player doesnt have a lot of control over when or if theyll become a lycanthrope. but if its available you could pursue it, potentially getting cool shit like regeneration or being able to turn other people into lycanthropes. i think this is more powerful than the druid option generally but its not usually offered to players.
vampirism is the same, but theyre not scruffy. life drain is harder to replicate with character abilities, you can get vampiric touch around caster level 5...
anyway its not somethign you can assume your character has access to

races
the monster races are described in volos guide so like goblins and bugbears, tabaxi and whatever are options, id go with the yuanti pureblood for like a mileena feel, just in the players handbook, dragonborn and tiefling are good, halforcs as a bonus are hard to kill, gnomes and dwarves make sense, or you can do just like a scruffy human or elf

having a pet
havign a pet is a bunch of logical overhead, youll forget to do the pet stuff if you're not very excited about it, but you can always have the pet show up when you need it and give you an extra saving throw or something.

if you dont care about the abilities of your pet, soem dms will give you one for free, if you want it to be good for combat, you should consider the players handbook/dmg pet options

somethign to consider is being small, if youre small, you have more room to play with size, its a bigger deal when you transform into a big guy. also if you're small and you take a medium beast (or medium with a large beast) as a pet, you can ride around on it.

find familiar
wizard 1 or warlock 3 or magic initiate
1st level ritual, so 1hr 10 mins, 10 gold of stuff
if you get the magic initiate feat you can add this and some other wizard shit to your guy.
this is the cheap pet, the wizard ones are all basically animals, so its basically, choose a small animal, you have that.
it mostly doesnt attack in combat.
 the owl one always gets special mention because it can fly in and give you advantage to hit (the help action) and fly out without granting an attack.
the familiar gets the fey, celestial, or fiend keyword instead of the beast one - this seems like a step away from what we want
the warlock chooses from an expanded list of familiars, with imp, sprite, quasit, and pseudodragon - these have more stuff, they're better in most ways. but theyre not beasts really. one disadvantage with the familiar is it has this arcane theme hardcoded.

beastmaster ranger
this is the more expensive pet. if you take three levels of ranger you should consider the cool shit the hunter gets. colossus slayer (extra damage against enemies that are already hit) and horde breaker (extra attack when fighting more guys) are very good options. the beastmaster instead chooses a beast off the basic druids list of wild shapes, so that (if you can convince your dm of this) both the ranger and the beast take turns and make attacks. the moon druid can transform into better animals for combat at level 2. but! the ranger and beast is two guys, and you can do flying, and maybe? you can do swarms. the best beasts are swarms, theres errata somewhere that says you cant do swarms, but swarms are good, talk to your dm about swarms. the guy with a swarm of rats or insects or ravens is a strong character concept

primal savagery
druid cantrip, xanathars guide
you get these big sharp teeth or claws for the duration of 1 attack
melee attack, normal reach, uses wisdom to hit, d10 acid damage
this is good, good melee cantrip, the druid doesnt need strength or dex or like, a sword, the druid can be a fucked up acid biter guy, this is also good to extend the racial traits of your dragonborn or goblin or whatever, importantly, it makes the druid still a beast when hes a guy, sadly not available to non-druids
if you have a feat and no druid levels, maybe magic initiate to get this, some healing, and a thing. but that precludes magic initiate(wizard) to get a familiar.

disguise self
1st level wizard or sorcerer, 2nd level warlock
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this lets you look like whatever guy you want, so long as theyre about the same height as you. youre not actually turn into the guy, though, its an illusion, people can challenge it with an intelligence/investigation check. some nerds and wizards can see through illusions. but theres a warlock level 2 invocation 'mask of many faces' that makes disguise self be at will, so that its effectively always on, this is a very good buy if you want your guy to be some kinda shapeshifting at will, but only does humanoid shapes

alter self
3rd level wizard or sorcerer
this is an improvement to disguise self that lets you be really a different guy rather than just as an illusion, again the warlock can get it at-will as 'master of myriad forms' but not until level 15, if youre a mask of many faces and you get to this level you would want this. alter self lets you turn into a fish guy and breathe underwater, or grow a bunch of sharp bits and deal a measly d6+1 magic damage with them like a single lv6 monk unarmed strike, thats ok but not better than primal savagery + some other method of getting water breathing. the main advantage is solidly turning into guys as like an infiltrator spy unit, which is not actually the thing were trying to do with it.

wizard (or sorcerer or warlock)
so this sort of suggests as an alternative, an illusionist/transmuter wizard that casts spells to shape himself into the forms of janked up creatures, but of course it doesnt really give you animals, and wants to be transforming into people, so its not quite what we want. if you do this it maybe gets you access to the wizard spell list, i think the spells available for this character concept are sort of thin though, the druid spell list will probably serve you better as a melee beast man. you could combine wizard and druid though, gets spells like a full caster, and maybe you want to. theres sort of an absence in 5th where the summoner guy would be

if you did take 2-3 levels of wizard, int and wis is a pretty versatile smart guy character, theres lots of options there but it pulls you away from the core concept. wizard and druid or  maybe ranger is a good basis of spells and themed abilities, but you're going to also want probably con and perhaps dex or str, so its sorta diluted, because it needs wis and int

if you take a charisma caster instead, better access to the charisma skills which are more useful in most games than the knowledge ones - but the spell lists are more limited, and the warlock's pact magic doesnt stack with other casters' magic. ask yourself which feature you want, take the levels that gets you there.

barbarian
the basics of barbarian are rage, savage attack (gives you advantage to hit, grants advantage to hit you), unarmored defense. the barbarian wants to be a strength guy, wild shapes are strength. you want that damage resistance. savage attack its supposed to be really good? im not jazzed about it.

i think in general its hard to make a guy who hulks up into a better version of himself, and the game wants to model that with wild shape and rage as two examples. the problem is, on some level, dnd guys are supposed to be as good as each other, so your wild shape is modeled to be comparable to a druid who doesnt transform, or a barbarian who rages on the greatsword, or so on, and so theyre limited to like 'no better than this', transform abilities are no better than wild shape, and wild shape is no better than a dnd guy, just keep in mind that you have to work for small gains, and consider where you want to end up at level 5, at level 7 etc.

so stacking rage and wild shape (barbarian 1 and druid 2) makes you strictly better than either the druid or the barbarian, at making yourself a big guy. stacking either rage or wild shape with spellcasting is not an option, so this is pretty good synergy if youre not really spells, though you still get spells, from being a druid and all

barbarian 3
this is expensive but theres a bunch of cool options here.

monk
if the monk defense is higher than a wild shape defense, i think you can keep the monk one. this is als o true for the barbarian but the monk defense is based on your wisdom, so this is better, theres probably some interaction between monk unarmed strikes and wild shape melee attacks that you want, seems like something you have to argue with the dm about, is the flavor good (idk). if you can get it to put out more attacks or more damage on attacks it might be worth it, the controlly effects are probably worth getting especially if you want more mobility. it doesnt seem especially beasty. you get magic hands at monk 6 or druid 6, so the monk druid probably doesnt get magic hands