Hammer of the Ancients – Barbarian Build for Diablo 4 (Season 8)

Build Introduction

Welcome to the comprehensive guide for the new and improved Hammer of the Ancients Barbarian at endgame, utilizing insane overpowers and powerful slams to annihilate anything in your way. Bosses? No problem. Nightmare Dungeons? Easy. The Pit? Trivial. With the new Runewords, new Paragon Glyph Levels, New Uniques, and the power of more skill points this Vessel of Hatred version of a beloved Barbarian build has little problem turning demons in front of them into paste. Let’s dive in!

This page covers the build’s introduction, requirements, skill tree points, and mercenary recommendations for the HotA Barbarian. To navigate to the other pages of this build, you can use the buttons below.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Build Requirements

Required Uniques

Mantle of Mountain’s Fury

Fists of Fate

Ugly Bastard Helm

Required Aspects (Non-codex)

Aspect of Earthquakes

Aspect of Incendiary Fissures

Executioner’s Aspect

Want to know more about the Uniques supporting this build? Jump to the Uniques Section.

Quick Navigation

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Skill Bar and Skill Tree Points

Skill Bar Setup for HotA Barbarian (order does not matter)

Hammer of the Ancients Rallying Cry War Cry Challenging Shout Call of the Ancients Ground Stomp

Wondering what to do after Level 60? Head to the Paragon Board section to power up the build even further.

Follow the points allocated in the image above for the complete build. The additional skill points are completed using the Renown system.

Barbarian Class Mechanic – The Arsenal System

The Barbarian can wield four weapons simultaneously as well as choose a weapon expertise to use as their Technique allowing them to gain that weapon’s bonus even if they’re wielding another weapon type. Finally, the Barbarian can assign its skills to use different weapon types shuffling between Two-Handed Bludgeoning Weapons, Two-Handed Slashing Weapons, and Dual-Wield Weapons.

For Hammer of the Ancients it requires that we use our Two-Handed Bludgeoning Weapon so we don’t get to customize our weapon selection as much as other builds.

For our Weapon Technique Slot, we will be choosing Two-Handed Axe for its damage bonus to vulnerable enemies.

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Boss Powers (Season 8):

Season 8 brings a slew of powers to equip similar to Season 2’s Vampiric Powers. You can equip a total of 4 powers. A single main power that will trigger its primary effect when certain conditions are met and three modifier powers that modify the main power and other skills for even more power. For this build we recommend the following combination:

Main Power

• Grigoire’s Lightning Square – This will give us a bit of extra damage whenever we use Hammer of the Ancients

Modifier Powers

• Harbinger of Hatred’s Volley – This will give us some multiplicative Vulnerable damage whenever we activate our main boss power which should be very frequent. We do not care about the Basic Skill part for this setup.
• Sinerat’s Flames – This gives us another multiplier to our elemental damage based on our resistances allowing our fiery earthquakes to hit even harder.
• Hatred’s Embrace’s Haste – Lastly this will give us some extra critical strike chance based on our Shadow Resistance to help ensure big quakes and hammers.

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Mercenaries

As you play through the campaign in Vessel of Hatred, you will unlock various NPC Mercenaries who can join you on your quest to slay demons. Each Mercenary has their own small talent tree that will give them bonuses and skills to help you. Additionally, you can assign a Mercenary that you don’t take with you as a reinforcement to jump in when you activate certain skills. Let’s take a look at how we want to set this up for this build.

We hire Raheir, the Shieldbearer

• Core Skill: Ground Slam
• Core Skill Passive: Raheir’s Aegis
• Iconic Skill: Bastion
• Iconic Skill Passive: Inspiration

Our Reinforcement Mercenary will be Varyana, The Berserker Crone

• Opportunity Skill: War Cry
• Reinforcement Skill: Bloodthirst

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Season 8 Updates

For a complete overview of Season 8, its mechanics and theme, new leveling activities, and other changes coming with the Season of Belial’s Reutrn, please take a look at our comprehensive season hub here.

Here is a quick overview of the seasonal changes relevant to this build:

• Tec damage reduced from 1400% to 700%
• Hammer of the Ancients fury cost reduced from 35 to 30 and damage increased from 90% to 98%
• Executioner’s Aspect damage per 100 Strength reduced from 15% to 5%, bonus now capped at 200%
• Fists of Fate no longer applies random crowd control effects, now replaced with a chance to make enemies Vulnerable for 3 seconds.
• Aspect of Bul-Kathos no longer increases Earthquake damage, only provides damage reduction now
• Rumble damage is now additive with itself rather than multiplicative per stack and per stack bonus reduced from 10% per stack to 50% to 3% per stack to 15%
• Bug fixed where Rumble was not fully benefiting Earthquakes

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Changelog

• April 25th 2025: Reformatted and updated for Season 8
• March 31st 2025: Updated skill tree recommendations
• January 21st 2025: Added section detailing Earthquake spawns and provided Leap variant information.
• January 19th 2025: Tooltips and Seasonal section updated for Season 7
• January 17th 2025: Build updated for Season 7.
• October 22nd 2024: Updated talent setup, paragon images removed and paragon tool added, and gear recommendations shifted slightly.
• October 3rd 2024: Guide updated for Season 6 and Vessel of Hatred.
• August 2nd 2024: Guide updated for season 5 and patch 1.5.0.
• May 6th 2024: Guide restructured, updated for season 4.
• April 16th 2024: Ownership of page transferred, build Revamped, paragon adjusted, unique items added.
• March 5th 2024: Updates for Patch 1.3.3.
• January 21st 2024: Season 3 speculative changes.
• October 13th 2023: Build Adjusted to prepare for Season 2 launch.
• August 7th, 2023: New Format and build Revamp.
• August 2nd, 2023: Patch 1.1.1 section added with build specific changes.
• July 18th, 2023: Guide updated for Season 1.