Best Endgame HotA Barbarian Build in Diablo 4

Hammer of the Ancients is one of the most satisfying abilities in Diablo 4 if you’re the type who enjoys dealing big damage with one attack. Once players reach the endgame, HotA Barbarians become capable of unleashing stupidly big bonks that deal billions of damage, but doing so requires a lot of thought into making a big build that just works.

This guide is for a HotA Barbarian build in Diablo 4 that uses one of the new Season 11 Uniques, Chainscourged Mail, to enable an infinite loop of leaping, stomping, and slamming, all while creating and detonating Earthquakes.

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Diablo 4 Endgame Hammer of the Ancients/Earthquake Build

Hammer of the Ancients is the star of this show, and everything on our hotbar is here to make it better. Combat Bash is completely optional later on, and it can be comfortably replaced by something else if needed.

Thanks to the Chainscourge Mail Unique Pants, Leap and Ground Stomp will have no cooldowns. However, you need to alternate between the two skills in order to make the other usable again. These abilities serve as our secondary damage sources and main Fury Generators.

Rallying and War Cry are self-explanatory. Use them off-cooldown to get big buffs. We’ll also be using Challenging Shout here through the Lac Rune.

To play the build, simply spam Leap, Ground Stomp, then HotA in that order. If your crit chance is high enough (over 50%), use Bash before HotA to prepare an Overpowered hit.

Passive Skills

This passive skill setup should maximize your damage output, survivability, and Fury efficiency. You’ll always be Berserking and Fortified, so you don’t need to worry about the conditional skills here.

Unbridled Rage is the best capstone passive for this build. The increased Fury cost penalty hardly matters, but the x50% bonus Core skill damage definitely does.

Weapon Expertise

You’ll want to use Rank 10 Polearm Expertise on your Technique slot for the bonus to Lucky Hit Chance and Damage to Healthy Enemies. This will let you one-shot most enemies while allowing Lucky Hit Effects to shine.

Season 11 Theme – Divine Gifts

Divine Gifts are part of the theme introduced in Diablo 4 Season 11, and these give you different boons and banes depending on which ones you use.

The only important one here is Essence of Lies from Belia. This gives you 1% of your Max LIfe as Fortify per second. With this equipped, you won’t need to equip any skills or Legendary Aspects to gain Fortify.

Gear and Aspects

This build relies heavily on Unique items and certain Legendary Aspects to work, so instead of our usual tabled list of stuff to look out for, we’ll be breaking each part of this build down.

Mantle of Mountain’s Fury

This Unique Chest Armor does a few things for HotA:

• HotA emits a linear shockwave that deals damage to enemies
• HotA will detonate any Earthquake it hits
• HotA gains bonus damage after an Earthquake explodes

Mantle of Mountain’s Fury is a must-have for HotA builds. The damage it provides is amazing, and the synergy with Earthquakes is quite nice too. You can get this Unique item from the Beast in the Ice.

Chainscourged Mail

HotA and Mantle of Mountain’s Fury synergizes nicely with Earthquakes, which is why we’re going to use Chainscourged Mail for our Pants slot. With this, Brawling skill cooldowns are removed. Instead, they become disabled after being used, and when all Brawling skills in your hotbar are disabled, they are all reset.

You’ll be able to spam Leap and Ground Stomp with this Unique, which means you’ll also be filling maps with Earthquakes. Make sure to equip Aspect Of Bul-Kathos and Aspect of Earthquakes so the Earthquakes actually form.

Banished Lord’s Talisman

After you spend enough Fury with Banished Lord’s Talisman equipped, your next HotA is guaranteed to Overpower, and since HotA costs a ton of Fury to cast with Unbridled Rage, you should be able to trigger this fairly often (unless you have a lot of Resource Cost Reduction on your gear). Pair this with Combat Bash to Overpower more frequently.

Battle Trance

If you’re not feeling Banished Lord’s Talisman, use Battle Trance instead. With this, you’ll have a 20% chance on Lucky Hit to get a Frenzy stack, and when you have max stacks, you get significantly increased attack speed and damage. This is a great alternative to Banished Lord’s Talisman, but you may have trouble triggering the recommended Bone Breaker Paragon Node (more on this later).

Saber of Tsasgal and Ramaladni’s Magnum Opus

These two swords are here to buff our damage even further. They’re not as mandatory as the others, but they’re important for scaling your damage output in the upper Torment tiers.

Legendary Aspects

What Stats Should You Look For?

Apart from the usual damage boosters, you should pay extra attention to Maximum Life and Maximum Fury. The former will scale the damage you deal with Overpowered hits, and the latter increases the damage you deal with Hammer of the Ancients thanks to the Furious HotA upgrade.

Paragon Boards

For our Paragon Boards, we’re going to focus on pure damage with a bit of attack speed on the side just to keep things flowing smoothly.

• Bone Breaker guarantees one of our skills will Overpower once every 12 seconds. It will also significanlty buff our Overpower damage as long as keep Overpowering.
• Carnage and Blood Rage are for boosting our damage while Berserking.
• Flawless Technique lets us reach 100% crit chance more easily while also boosting our crit damage.

As for Glyphs, take the following:

• Crusher increases damage (including Overpower damage) when wielding Maces
• Ire further increases your damage while Berserking
• Might provides another multiplicative boost when wielding 2H Weapons
• Challenger improves damage against Elites

Don’t worry about which boards you place these on. Focus on leveling them up first through Pit of the Artificers runs.