Earthquake Barbarian Endgame Build Guide for Diablo IV Season 12 - Slaughter

• Leapquake is very simple to play, since most of the time, all you need to do is hold down Leap! This causes Earthquakes to spawn constantly thanks to the Tec Rune and Bul-Kathos Aspect.
• Earthquakes "tick" their damage over a duration, but with Mantle of Mountain's Fury and Hammer of the Ancients, you can bypass this to detonate any active Earthquakes in your vicinity instantly. Because of this, the gameplay loop is generally:
  • Hunt for Elite packs; Leap past normal mobs and let lingering Earthquakes kill them off.
  • When an Elite pack is found, Leap a few times directly on top of it, then use Hammer of the Ancients to detonate Earthquakes. If anything survives, repeat.
• To maximize damage, the main setup uses the Walking Arsenal Key Passive. This requires you to rotate your other skills while they are assigned to different weapon types in order to receive a large damage multiplier and the Unstoppable buff. It might sound complicated, but this actually occurs quite naturally and doesn't require much thought once you get the hang of it. Here's how you manage it:
  • Assign Leap to your Two-Handed Slashing Weapon (typically a Polearm). This skill is used constantly, so its Walking Arsenal bonus is essentially always active.
  • Assign Hammer of the Ancients to your Two-Handed Bludgeoning Weapon (your Mace). This is done automatically when you put the skill on your bar, since it can only use one weapon type. The Walking Arsenal bonus refreshes whenever you use Hammer of the Ancients to explode your Earthquakes.
  • Assign Lunging Strike to your Dual-Wield Weapons. You only need to use this skill once every 15 seconds to refresh its Walking Arsenal bonus; besides that, it has no other real purpose.
• All remaining skills on the bar are used as buffs or for utility purposes.
  • Cast War Cry whenever it is available for a big damage increase. While it's on cooldown, Yen's Blessing automatically casts it for you every 8 seconds.
  • Cast Call of the Ancients whenever it is available as well. Besides giving you another damage increase, it also grants Damage Reduction, Fury recoup, and activates the Vehement Brawler's Aspect.
  • Cast Steel Grasp as needed to group up enemies. Try to time it so that Yen's Blessing doesn't cast this instead of War Cry, but it's not the end of the world if it happens. Ultimately, the true purpose of Steel Grasp, or any skill in the 6th slot, is activating an additional damage multiplier from Sabre of Tsasgal, which just requires you to cast any damaging skill once every 15 seconds.

The Arsenal System allows you to use a specific weapon for every attack skill, with each weapon granting different bonuses. You also have what is called the Technique Slot. With this, you can use any weapon of your choosing to always reap the benefit from, regardless of which weapon is equipped.

For this purpose of this guide, the Polearm is your main weapon choice when using Leap. It grants a passive 15% damage multiplier that is always active, and also fulfills the Two-Handed Slashing weapon requirement for Walking Arsenal. We also frequently benefit from the Two-Handed Mace, simply because Hammer of the Ancients requires it to function. By default, this grants a 15% multiplicative Critical Strike Damage bonus and allows you to benefit from other damage sources, such as the Wallop passive.

In the Technique Slot, the Two-Handed Axe Expertise is used since the main-hand and Expertise bonuses aren't able to be stacked (you can't wield a Polearm and use the Polearm Expertise, for example). This option gives slightly less raw damage than its competitors, but also grants an additional 10% Critical Strike Chance, which makes it quite comparable. For this Expertise to take effect, the enemy needs to be Vulnerable, which is easily achieved with Fists of Fate or the Lucky Hit: Chance to Make Enemies Vulnerable gear affix.