The Diablo 4 Barbarian class has some of the strongest builds in the game, and as a result, are going to be a very popular class. However, the downside is that they are slow levelers, lacking both early damage and some tankyness issues. But, using these builds, you’ll find some ways to manage it, making the Barbarian a slightly better experience. Here is a look at some of the best Barbarian leveling builds in Diablo 4’s launch.
Here are our picks for Barbarian leveling builds in Diablo 4. Image via Blizzard Entertainment.
Diablo 4 Barbarian Leveling Builds¶
Below you’ll find four Barbarian leveling builds in Diablo 4, with a synopsis of each one further down the page. Since the Barbarian builds are largely similar in their core setups, we have provided and important notice in a tip box just below this list, which we recommend reading. As for more specific builds, feel free to check out the links to auto scroll to the specific builds you are interested in:
- Rend Bleed Leveling Build
- Whirlwind Leveling Build
- Upheaval / HOTA Leveling Build
- Double Swing Vuln Build
Diablo 4 Barbarian Leveling Build: Rend Leveling Build¶
The Rend Bleed Build is a great build, especially thanks to its bursting potential, bossing, and more importantly, survivability. The Bleed build offers the player some opportunity to restore health from Rend, while, also granting ways to get strong cleaved DoT effect on packs as well, making it decent for both single and AOE. You also want Deathblow skill in the weapon mastery tree, as that will make one-shotting world tier one normal HP mobs easy, allowing you to destroy packs gleefully without spending resources on them. Not to mention this build turns into a very strong late-game build anyway, so there’s that advantage. Once you have your Shouts, you can look for passives, as mentioned in the tip box above, and get Hamstring to give your bleeds some more CC options. As for the legendaries, you want 
Slaking Aspect, which you get in Fractured Peaks, and 
Iron Blood Aspect, which comes later in Kehjistan to round out the leveling damage profile.
Diablo 4 Barbarian Leveling Build: Whirlwind Leveling Build¶
No matter which build you run, most Barbarian leveling builds use the same passives and skills to generate damage and Fury. Image via Blizzard Entertainment.
The Whirlwind build is a solid build. However, it is very legendary dependent early on, which can take a while to gather. We recommend doing this when you have the aspects unlocked on another character so you can funnel this later. But, if you like this playstyle so much and you want to do this on your first character in the season, you can do.
The Basic premise of the build requires you to use Shouts to grant movement speed, Fury generation, and damage buffs, while getting Bleeds on Whirlwind to further increase your damage via passives. Overall, this is a great pack clearer with decent fury generation, but, it will lack single-target damage very early on without legendary effects and certain passives.
So, you want to look for the Aspect of Dire Whirlwind and the Aspect of Echoing Fury as soon as possible. The aspect of Dire Whirlwind is the first one you can get, as it comes from Scosglen. This effect grants additional critical strike chance the longer you hold the Whirlwind down for. You can get the Aspect of Echoing Fury from the Sirocco Caverns, on the border of Dry Steppes and Kehjistan at the start of Act 4. The other Whirlwind legendaries are sadly random drops, so, you likely wont see them until you get around level 40 when the legendary drop chance greatly increases, or perhaps even later when you get to Act 3 and legendaries may as well become commons.
Diablo 4 Barbarian Leveling Build: HOTA / Upheaval Build¶
Lastly, we have the Hammer of the Ancients and the Upheaval Build. These builds are fairly similar to each other, in that you’re ramping Fury, then expending it when you reach certain stacks and full Fury to get the most damage out of the Core Skills. It means that these builds are all about spamming Basic Skills, until you can get your shouts going for resource generation and damage boosts.
The only difference is which Core Skill you prefer to use, a mace bonk for closer range, ideally single target bonking, or Upheaval for better ranged AOE damage dirt flinging. So select which one you want to use, and follow the basic guidance form the tip box earlier for skill leveling and recommended passives to pick up as you level.
While leveling, the 
Edgemaster’s Aspect and 
Aspect of the Expectant are your best friends as they help to bolster the damage windows of your held Fury and deal more damage based on the amount of times you used basic attack before you used your Core skill. Since this build uses many basic skills before attacking, these two legendaries synergize well for adding additional damage bonuses to your already ramping damage bonuses.
If you go the Hammer of the Ancients build, you will want to go to Socsglen when you can and pick up the 
Aspect of Ancestral Force, as that adds an AOE effect to your Hammer, thus greatly improving this build as soon as you get to act 2 content. Sadly, Upheaval doesn’t get anything juicy early, so, if you want this playstyle, we’d recommend going HOTA over Upheaval.
Diablo 4 Barbarian Leveling Build: Double Swing Vuln Build¶
The Double Swing leveling path is a strange build, and only something you really want to do until you get your ultimate stage. This build uses Double Swing and Rend to extend Vulnerability up time, granting some solid DPS boosts, while using a minor bleed build to use the 20% damage window you can extend. This allows the Barbarian to deal more damage early on, which is something it lacks in comparison to every other build, while using Frenzy to slap enemies during that window. However, you will likely switch this build out to one of the builds below when you can access all your shouts and ultimate skill. We have a dedicated page about the Double Swing leveling build, if you fancy reading up on it. Therefore, we will not go any further into detail on this since it is a very early game respec build.
This concludes or Diablo 4 Barbarian Leveling Builds page. Hopefully, there’s a build you’re interested in, and can keep you interested through the leveling process of the Barbarian. By the later stages of the class’ leveling, you’ll certainly be able to feel the power of the class getting ever so stronger, ready to dominate the end game content with!
Looking for more leveling builds? Check out other class’ leveling builds below:
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