Diablo 4 Hammer of the Ancients Barbarian – Lvl 50 Juggernaut Build Guide: In this Diablo 4 Barbarian Class Build, I’ll show you how to play a Lvl 50 – Hammer of the Ancients Barbarian (HOTA), that uses a combo-playstyle to inflict massive damage on enemies. This build is very engaging and provides a very fast clear speed. If you like seeing big numbers on the screen and destroying bosses in seconds, then this Diablo 4 Walking Arsenal Build guide is for you!
Diablo 4 Juggernaut Barbarian Build – Hammer of the Ancients
The key feature of this build is the Walking Arsenal key passive, which motivates you to constantly swap weapons while attacking enemies. The main limitation for this passive is the amount of fury that you can spend in combination with the cooldown of some skills. To overcome this, we’ll use a combination of Aspects, Skills and Passives that will allow us to maintain 100% uptime while keeping the Fury gauge at max at all times.
This build allows you to engage enemies in many different ways, but the general idea is to start off with Lunging Strike (Dual Wielded) and then using Ground Stomp to stun enemies. You’ll follow up with Death Blow (Slashing) and finally strike with Hammer of the Ancients (Bludgeoning). If any enemy remains alive, you’ll use Death Blow again to finish them off and continue into the next group. From here, you’ll want to swap to Lunging Strike – HOTA – Deathblow as your regular combo, but you can adapt to different scenarios as required. If you are getting overrun or facing multiple elites, you can unleash the Iron Maelstrom ultimate, which decimates everything in the screen while cycling through all your weapons.
The build acts similar to a glass cannon, as you’ll sacrifice some defensive skills to maximize damage output, but this isn’t an issue as you’ll be constantly applying stun, and you kill stuff so fast that they won’t even have a chance to strike back.
Diablo 4 HOTA Barbarian Build LvL 50+ – Skill Distribution
Skills play a huge role in this build, as you must constantly cycle between them in order to maintain the Walking Arsenal passive active. Each skill has a different role and it’s important to understand what each of them do in order to use them effectively.
Walking Arsenal Key Passive
Let’s start by explaining in more detail how the Walking Arsenal Key passive works.
After you unlock it, you’ll notice 3 individual globes above your skill bar. These represent the passives for each weapon type. When you hit an enemy with either a Two-Handed Bludgeoning, Two-Handed Slashing, or Dual Wielded weapon, its corresponding globe will fill with yellow and start draining, letting you know that the passive is active and how much time you have left.
While active, each of the passives will grant you a 10% increased damage for 6 second. The damage from these passives are cumulative, and while all three passive bonuses are active, you’ll gain an additional bonus of 15% increased damage.
To activate the passives, you’ll need to use a skill that is using that Arsenal Weapon Type. It’s very important to assign the correct weapon to each of your main skills, as this will allow you to keep the rotation. You’ll want to use Dual Wielded for Lunging Strike, Slashing for Death Blow and Bludgeoning for Hammer of the Ancients. Remember that you can change this by opening the skill menu, hovering over the skill, and then cycling to the correct selection type.
Active Skills
Lunging Strike
This basic skill allows you to close the gap with enemies and to get straight inside a group, as well as activating the Dual Wielding bonus and generate some fury. It’s not necessary to get an upgrade for, as you’ll only use it to reposition yourself in the battlefield.
This is the main skill of our build, allowing us to trigger the bludgeoning passive, deal massive AoE damage, stun enemies, and increase our fury generation.
Let’s talk about its enhancement first, which provides you with an increased percentage in fury generation for each enemy that gets damaged by it, up to a maximum of 30%. Thanks to the Aspect of Ancestral Force, which increases the AoE, you’ll be often getting the max stack as soon as the fight begins. This synergizes great with the Fury generated by Death Blow and the Furious Impulse Passive.
For the upgrade, you’ll want to take the Furious Hammer of the Ancients, making it so you deal 1% additional damage for each point of Fury you had when using it. Increasing your maximum fury will further boost the effect, so if you have for example 120 Fury you’ll deal 120% more damage, which is insane.
Death Blow
Deathblow serves both as a finisher as well as a resource generator in this build. When used, you’ll deal a massive amount of damage as well as triggering the Slashing passive. The Weapon Master’s Aspect will provide you an additional charge, making it more forgiving, and allowing you to use it at the start of fights to generate fury.
The Expose Vulnerability passive will guarantee that your next HOTA will apply vulnerable to all enemies that get hit, greatly increasing your damage. You’ll want to finish a fight with a Death Blow, making it so the next fight you can lead with HOTA to apply the vulnerable status and then Death Blow to finish them off and repeat the sequence.
Death Blow will get 1 charge refunded if you kill an enemy while using it, so I recommend using a weapon that provides damage to injured enemies in your Slashing slot, as this will ensure that you are killing them to get back the spent charge and maintain 100% uptime.
Another thing that makes Death Blow so good is the Aspect of Encroaching Wrath, which often allows you to one-shot elites. This aspect activates after you spend 100 fury (3 HOTA), providing you a one time buff that increases damage by a massive 100% ~ 200% damage increase when slotted into a 2 handed weapon.
Iron Maelstrom
This ultimate ability uses all of our arsenal weapons in three different stages (triggering each Walking Arsenal Passive), allowing you to annihilate everything on the screen.
First, you’ll hit the ground, stunning enemies with your bludgeoning weapon and dealing damage. This will enable all stun damage effects, as well preventing enemies from attacking you. Next, it will use your Slashing weapon, dealing both regular damage and applying massive bleeding. To finish off, it will swing your dual wield weapons, hitting enemies multiple times for even more damage.
This is an amazing skill to clear out big mobs or to deal with multiple elites at the same time. Its only big downside is that once you activate it, you won’t be able to use any other skill until you finish the combo. This means that you won’t be able to trigger Iron Skin if you get crowed controlled nor Ground Stomp to stun enemies.
This ultimate is great for this build as we have many different ways to reduce its cooldown. For starters, Supreme Iron Maelstrom, will reduce its cooldown by 1 second each time you deal damage to an enemy after swapping weapons. We’ll take the Strategic Ground Stomp reducing the cooldown by 1 second for each enemy damaged by Ground Stomp, and what makes it even better, is that this effect also works with the 100,000 Steps passive ability.
Ground Stomp
You’ll want to use this at the start of a fight to make sure enemies are stunned. This will both prevent them from attacking you, and allow you to set off your combo while taking advance of all the Stun related Affixes. As previously stated, this will also reduce the cooldown of your ultimate, so try to hit as many enemies as possible while aiming for elites.
Iron Skin
The idea with this build is to destroy your enemies before they even have a chance to react, but there’ll be times when things go south, and you get crowd controlled or your health quickly drops. Iron skin mitigates all those scenarios thanks to the Aspect of the Iron Warrior, which grants you Unstoppable in addition to its regular effects. Make sure to save it for when most needed.
Passives
Enemies deal so much damage that you’ll need enough life and damage reduction to be able to withstand their attacks without dying in a single hit. For this reason, you’ll want to get and max out the Imposing Presence, Martial Vigor and Pit Fighter passives.
As previously stated, Expose Vulnerability will guarantee that you apply vulnerable with HOTA after using Death Blow. Each time you assign into this passive will provide 1 second of vulnerability, so 2 points should be enough to keep active during rotation.
The Concussion passive provides a lucky hit chance to stun all enemies hit by your HOTA. This will trigger even more often thanks to the Luckbringer Aspect, which increases Lucky Hit Chance when all bonuses of the Walking Arsenal are active.
Furious Impulse generates fury each time you swap weapons, allows you to maintain max fury at all times. While Tempered Fury increases your maximum fury to further boost HOTA.
To further boost our damage, we’ll take Wallop, which increases your HOTA damage while enemies are stunned or vulnerable, as well as No Mercy, which increases critical strike chance against stunned enemies.
One of the downsides of this build is its lack of mobility. You can compensate that by getting the Swiftness passive which increases your movement speed.
Finally, we’ll take Brute Force, which massively increase the overpower damage when using a Two-Handed weapon. This works great with the Earthstriker’s Aspect, which provides us with a guaranteed to overpower attack.
Weapon Technique
For your weapon technique, I recommend the Two-Handed Axe Expertise, as you’ll be able to constantly maintain vulnerable on enemies, greatly increasing your overall damage.
Diablo 4 Hammer of the Ancients Barbarian Build – Equipment, Gems and Aspects
The equipment plays a key role in our build, not only because of the aspects that make the build possible, but because of the combined damage increased affixes that is what allows us to deal as much damage as we do.
Codex of Power Aspects
You’ll be constantly updating your gear as you increase in level. If you only rely on extraction you’ll find yourself out of options very fast and some Aspects are very important to keep the build going. For this reason, I strongly recommend that you clear the Dungeons associated to the following Legendaries to unlock their codex of power, which will grant you a reliable way to imprint them while leveling up
Offensive
- Edgemaster’s Aspect – Oldstones, Scosglen: This aspect increases the damage to all your skills by a % based on your available Fury when you cast them. Since we are already going for max fury, this will massively increase the damage of all our skills.
- Aspect of Retribution – Abandoned Mineworks, Kehjistan: This aspect proportionally increases your damage against stunned enemies. You should equip it on your two-handed weapon for 100% efficiency.
- Aspect of Ancestral Force – Sunken Ruins, Scosglen: This provides a big AoE to our Hammer of the Ancients, not only dealing damage but applying all damage effects like the stun as well. It’s not necessary to slot it into a two-handed weapon, as you’ll be direct hitting elites, and you’ll want to finish off the other enemies with Death Blow anyway.
- Earthstriker’s Aspect – Maugan’s Works, Hawezar: This aspect will allow you to get a guaranteed overpower attack (with increased damage) with any of your skills after swapping weapons 10 times. The idea is to use it with Death Blow for single target damage, or with HOTA when dealing with groups.
Defensive
- Aspect of the Iron Warrior – Carrion Fields, Dry Steppes: This will be your only Unstoppable mechanic, so make sure to get it as soon as possible. It’ll give you increased damage reduction while Iron Skin is active
- Aspect of the Protector – Lost Archives, Fractured Peaks: This aspects provides you a barrier when you damage elites. Great to avoid burst damage before your stun procs.
Lucky Drop Legendary Aspects and Unique Equipment
Legendary Aspects
The following aspects cannot be obtained by completing Dungeons, and can only be extracted from Legendary Equipment that you find during your play through and then imprinted into your own equipment. Make sure to keep any spares that you find, so you can re-imprint them as you progress further. The uniques can
- Weapon Master’s Aspect (Offensive): This aspect is crucial for this build, as it provides an additional charge to Death Blow proving a ton of options during combat. The lucky hit stun effect is also amazing thanks to the Luckbringer Aspect .
- Aspect of Limitless Rage (Offensive): This allows you to capitalize the excess Fury you generate by increasing the damage to HOTA by a percentage, further boosting your damage.
- Aspect of Encroaching Wrath (Offensive): As mentioned before, this aspect massively increases the damage of your Death Blow after you spend 100 Fury (3 HOTA attacks). You should slot it into a two-handed weapon for double the effect.
- Luckbringer Aspect (Utility): This greatly increases the Lucky Hit chance while all passives of the Walking Arsenal are active. This is specially useful in combination with Concussion, which allows you to stun enemies while attacking with HOTA, and with Weapon Master’s Aspect, which allows you to Stun while using Death Blow as well.
Unique Equipment
- 100,000 Steps – Unique Boots: These boots provide everything we need for our build. For starters, it’ll give you damage to stunned enemies and damage with skills that changes weapons. The added dexterity is nice to have, and the +rank to ground stomp will reduce its cooldown. Its unique effect will trigger when you get a full Walking Arsenal cycle (even if it’s still active), generating a ton of fury, and triggering a free Ground Stomp that stun enemies (the Strategic Ground Stomp will also apply, reducing our ultimate cooldown)
- Ramaladni’s Magnum Opus – Unique One-Handed Sword: While not mandatory for this build, I personally like this weapon because of the Lucky Hit effect which restores a % of your Fury, which synergizes great with the Luckbringer Aspect.
Where to Slot Aspects
Most aspects can be slotted into multiple equipment pieces, so here is a guideline of what I used during my gameplay:
- Two-Handed Weapon 1 (100% Increase): Aspect of Retribution
- Two-Handed Weapon 2 (100%): Aspect of Encroaching Wrath
- One Handed Weapon 1: Ramaladni’s Magnum Opus
- One Handed Weapon 2: Edgemaster’s Aspect
- Helmet: Luckbringer Aspect
- Chest: Aspect of the Protector
- Gloves: Weapon Master’s Aspect
- Waist: Aspect of the Iron Warrior
- Boots: 100,000 Steps
- Amulet (50% Increase): Aspect of Limitless Rage
- Ring 1: Earthstriker’s Aspect
- Ring 2: Aspect of Ancestral Force
Equipment Affixes
The amount of damage you deal is strictly related with your equipment, as it proportionally increases your damage. Thanks to the stun and weapon swapping mechanics, you’ll be able to stack a lot of passives. When comparing an item, try to calculate the combined % of damage increase you are getting from all affixes, instead of just looking into DPS. The more variety of damage affixes you can stack, the better.
You should search for the following affixes:
Damage
- + Maximum Fury (Increases HOTA damage)
- +Rank Deathblow, Hammer of the Ancients and Passives
- + Damage to Skils that swap to new weapons
- + Damage with Two-Handed Slashing Weapons
- + Damage with Two-Handed Bludgeoning Weapons
- + Damage to Stunned Enemies
- + Core Skill Damage
- + Damage to Crowd Controlled Enemies
- + Strength
- + Overpower Damage
- + Damage to close Enemies
- + Physical Damage
- + Vulnerable Damage
- + Critical Strike Damage
- + Damage after killing an Elite
Defense
- Damage reduction from close enemies
- Maximum Life
- Damage Reduction
Gems
For gems, you’ll want to slot:
- Weapon: You can either slot Emeralds to increase damage to vulnerable enemies, or slot Diamonds to increase the damage to your ultimate. This will mainly depend on how you like to play the build.
- Armor: You should use Rubies to boost your maximum life.
- Jewelry: Try to compensate for any resistances that you are lacking. If you feel strong enough, just use Skulls to further boost your armor.
Paragon and Glyphs for Barbarian Build
When you reach lvl 50 you’ll unlock the first Paragon Board, and you’ll start earning Paragon Points. On the first Board for this Diablo 4 Whirlwind Barbarian Build you should first focus on the right part to get the “Brawn” rare node which further increases your damage and gives you maximum life. From there, continue up and get the “Socket” and the two other rare nodes.
You should slot the “Mortal Draw” Glyph into the socket which increases skill damage when you swap weapons for each point of dexterity within range. Once you allocate at least 25 Dexterity around it, you’ll get the additional bonus which increases the critical strike chance when swapping weapons.
Try to get as many “Strength” nodes as possible, but also make sure to fulfill the socketed glyph requirements on its radius to acquire its Additional Bonuses and to maximize its effect.
Once you reach the top, you will have to decide what Paragon Board to go for. I recommend the “Bone Breaker” board. There’s a rare node called “Bludgeoner” which increases your damage with Two-Handed Bludgeoing weapons as well as your overpower damage.
Final Tips
This build is easy to play, but difficult to master. You’ll want to learn how many skill activations are required to trigger your Weapon Mastery combo, as well as your Overpower combo to use them in the precise moment and situation.
Deathblow has a massive 100% bonus damage against bosses. If you time it right, you can create a combo where you combine both the Weapon Mastery Damage with the Overpower damage for a devastating blow. Make sure to use the HOTA first to apply the vulnerable effect.
Don’t be shy on using Iron Maelstrom, as you’ll quickly regain access to it thanks to its cooldown reduction mechanics.
Keep an eye on the buff bar above your skills, as this will let you know when your Weapon Mastery Damage combo and overpower combo are available.
Be sure to check out our Diablo 4 Wiki for any other questions you have about the game and the Builds page if you are looking for more Diablo IV Builds, as well as our Getting Started Guide and Best Class to Play if you are looking for more Diablo 4 content!
1 response to “Diablo 4 Hammer of the Ancients Build – Juggernaut”
Hey ! Very cool build, thanks! Do you know when we can expect the Crusher leveling build?
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