Walking Arsenal Barbarian Endgame Build Guide for Diablo IV Season 12 - Slaughter

The Walking Arsenal Barbarian (also nicknamed Kratos Barb because of the frequent uses of Iron Maelstrom) is a fun, fast and engaging playstyle that plays around the Barbarian's class mechanic to its fullest potential.

Swapping between all three different weapon types all the time, you become a machine that mows through hordes of demons and one-shots dungeon bosse thanks to the combination of Encroaching Wrath and Enhanced Death Blow. Large packs of weak enemies are decimated with Upheaval, which also grants and Vulnerable.

This build is designed to excel at leveling to 100 and speedfarming. Due to the nature of Death Blow requiring a killing blow, it shines in easy content but can slow down in high-end challenges such as pushing towards Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeons or fighting Pinnacle Bosses, where the lack of cooldown resets hurt the build's performance. However, thanks to Overpower synergies such as Brute Force and Earthstriker's Aspect, it's still possible to deliver devastating oneshots to elites and bosses with well-timed combos.

All in all, the Walking Arsenal Barbarian is a great package if you just want to blast and have fun with what the class does best: smashing your foes to bits and pieces. Let's jump in and see what it's all about!

In Season 3, you obtain the Seneschal Construct through the Season Questline, then collect Governing Stones or Tuning Stones to add attacks and augment them to support your build. Only certain Tuning Stones work with a particular Governing Stone. Look at the bottom of any Tuning Stone tooltip to see if it is compatible with your Construct's currently equipped Stones. Lastly, they can be leveled up by getting duplicates to max out their power. Check out our full Season 3 guide for more information.

1. Tempest - We don't take this Governing Stones for its damage, but instead for its rapid long-range attack.
   • Fortify Support - This Tuning Stones takes effect every time the connected skill is used, which makes it work well with fast attacks. This is our only early source of Fortify, which makes it a necessary part of this leveling build.
   • Swift Support - We take this to make the offensive ability even faster, which allows the other Tuning Stones to support us more often.
   • Safeguard Support - While the recent patch buffed our offense considerable, we lack the defense to stand toe-to-toe with the toughest foes. This stone helps us avoid becoming a glass cannon.
2. Reconstruct - This is one of the best Governing Stones for Barbarian leveling builds. The healing this stone gives is significant, even at its minimum power level. When we find Tactical and Duration Tuning Stones, attaching them to Reconstruct will eventually allow our companion to have 100% uptime on this healing ability.
   • Tactical Support - Legendary stones like Tactical may be very difficult to find, and some may not even be obtainable until later World Tiers. However, if you don't have one of these stones, there's nothing else to take its place, so just leave this slot empty until you find this stone.
   • Duration Support - By combining Duration and Tactical, we can make the effects of some Governing Stones (and their Tuning Stones) have 100% Uptime.
   • Initiative Support - One concern with the Construct is that it may get separated from us. To solve that problem, assign this Tuning Stones to Utility Governing Stone that affects us, and the Construct will occasionally teleport to us. If we are counting on the companion to keep us alive, then this could be the difference between life and death

Resource Support - This Tuning Stone is a good choice when leveling, because we need all the extra Fury we can get. Putting this on a fast attack enables us to take advantage of the benefit very often. We could use this instead of Safeguard if we feel that we don't need to extra toughness we get from Safeguard.

Evernight is one of the best Tuning Stones in the game. If you get this, use it over Safeguard or Resource.

Flash of Adrenaline is a great Utility type Governing Stone that boosts our damage. However, like Tactical and Duration, it can be very difficult or impossible to obtain in the early game. Once we obtain it, we can use it to increase our damage, but that seems unnecessary. Still, you may want to try using this stone instead of Reconstruct.

Genesis may be used in place of Safeguard Support if you find it.

• You need to rotate your weapons to keep up all buffs and make sure to not run out of Death Blow charges to be effective.
• On engaging an enemy pack or moving between enemies quickly, use Lunging Strike once. This gives you a 10 second timer for the Dual-Wield buff of Walking Arsenal, which is this skill's main purpose.
• Use Upheaval at least once to gain the Two-Handed Bludgeoning buff and to apply Vulnerable to all enemies hit via the Exploit Glyph.
  • When your Fury is high and you have stacked up Furious Upheaval, use it to deal massive damage in a large AoE and refresh the buff.
• Finish off targets with Death Blow to gain the Two-Handed Slashing buff and gain Berserking. Whenever possible, aim for a killing blow to reset its cooldown.
  • When your damage is very good, prioritize the bigger targets with Death Blow and smaller ones with Upheaval.
• If there are still enemies around, rotate between Upheaval and Death Blow to keep all buffs & debuffs up and use Lunging Strike at least once every 10 seconds.
• If your Death Blow goes on cooldown because you missed a hit or the enemy survived, try to finish off any easy targets in the area and move on. Without the big hits and Vulnerable from Exploit Glyph, it may not be worth the time to fight remaining monsters.

• Use Rallying Cry to gain Unstoppable as well as extra speed.
• Activate Charge whenever needed to become Unstoppable or to quickly avoid hazards. Charge through at least 3 enemies to minimize its cooldown through Power Charge.
• Freely activate your Iron Maelstrom Ultimate in large packs. Especially when enemies are spread out, it's a great skill to use to clean up the entire screen. This skill has a very short cooldown compared to other Ultimates in the game thanks to Supreme Iron Maelstrom, so you can use it often.

Against Bosses, follow this rotation:

• Right before entering a Boss arena, make sure to prepare the Encroaching Wrath buff by using Upheaval to clean up the last monster pack. If possible, enter with full Fury for the buff from Edgemaster’s Aspect.
• Prepare 4-5 stacks of Earthstriker's Aspect. You can watch your buff bar and swing in the air by holding down the Force Attack button if necessary.
• Approach the target, activate Iron Maelstrom to get all your Walking Arsenal bonuses.
• Trigger Earthstriker's Aspect with more weapon swaps if necessary.
• Once you have the effect, follow up with a massive Death Blow.
• If the Boss survived, weapon swap back and forth for Earthstriker's Aspect until you're ready to repeat the combo.
• If the Boss is close to death, finish them off with Upheaval + Lunging Strike.
• If the Boss is far from death, refill your Fury and repeat the combo above.

You can use the same combo against any tough enemies, such as tanky elites, the Butcher and similar.

The Arsenal System allows us to use a specific weapon for every attack skill, with each weapon granting different bonuses. We also have the Technique Slot that allows us to profit from one Expertise effect of our choosing at any time. The limitation of the Technique Slot is that it does not allow us to benefit from the second bonus that is normally gained from reaching rank 10 with any weapon expertise.

For this build, we assign our weapon slots as follows:

• Lunging Strike: Dual-Wield
• Upheaval: Two-Handed Bludgeoning
• Charge: Two-Handed Slashing
• Death Blow: Two-Handed Slashing

This allocation is chosen for two reasons. First, we need three different attacks with three different weapons to activate our Walking Arsenal bonuses, the main combo of this entire build. Second, with a Two-Handed Axe we produce the biggest damage output and that's exactly what we need for Death Blow to be useful. Upheaval on the other hand is often used more as a utility skill to apply buffs and debuffs and for dealing with smaller monsters in AoE combat. Assigning our Two-Handed Slashing weapon to both Death Blow and Charge provides some redundancy that will help us keep all of the Walking Arsenal damage bonuses up even when we fail to land a killing blow with Death Blow.

This build is mostly filled with attack skills and short cooldowns and barely has any Fury issues.

Lunging Strike generates Fury on attack and Aspect of Berserk Fury passively while we are Berserking. By following the gameplay rotation above, you generally don't run out of Fury because only one of your attacks is a spender. To help with resource generation early on, you can pick up Hungering Fury Paragon cluster until you have the Wrath Glyph later.

Both Charge and Rallying Cry provide the Unstoppable buff. In case there are many elites with crowd control effects around, you can stagger Charge, then Rallying Cry, then Charge again to repeatedly break crowd control and become immune for a short period.

This skill has a very short cooldown so use it whenever you feel it could speed up a fight, especially in large monster packs. If you know your way around specific dungeons well enough, you can also keep it ready the right moment to make it shine.

It's important to not run out of Death Blow charges. Thanks to Weapon Master's Aspect we gain two maximum charges which can be replenished with a single attack, given that we finish off two targets with it. This allows you to occasionally miss a hit and still continue your rotation as usual. If you somehow end up without any charges, consider simply moving on from the current fight while you're waiting for the skill to cool down.

Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 when they reach level 15!

Level the Paragon Board by scrolling. Each step optimizes progression.

This build's Paragon board has a pretty straightforward progression. The only point where we swap around some Glyphs is when the Ire Glyph reaches level 15. At this point you move it to the Carnage board and place Undaunted on the Decimator and Territorial on the Blood Rage board.

In addition, if you feel Fury starved early on, you can pick up Hungering Fury + surrounding nodes for better resource recovery until later.

We need to level up our Glyphs to increase their power and activate their Additional Bonus with surrounding nodes. Glyphs have a radius of 3 by default, this increases to 4 at Glyph level 15. Complete Nightmare Dungeons to obtain Glyph experience.

Note that there are some Glyph position swaps and a few adjustments to surrounding Paragon nodes once they reach level 15. See the last two steps in the Paragon progression above for details. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build.

Level 15

1. Might
2. Ire
3. Territorial
4. Mortal Draw
5. Undaunted
6. Exploit

Level 21

1. Ire
2. Undaunted
3. Might
4. Territorial
5. Mortal Draw
6. Exploit

When you start diving into the Endgame, you don't have all the tools available to achieve the final build versions. Let us guide you through different progression points to give you a smooth transition from our Leveling Guides to the final build version.

Many of our Skill choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to us. While we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the progression might be different for everyone!

1. Unlock the following Aspects in your Codex of Power:
   • Berserk Ripping in Mournfield in (Dry Steppes)
   • Disobedience in Halls of the Damned (Kehjistan)
   • Relentless Armsmaster in Calibel's Mine (Scosglen)
   • Edgemaster’s in Oldstones (Scosglen)
   • Earthstriker's in Maugan's Works (Hawezar)
   • Rapid in Buried Halls (Dry Steppes)
   • Ghostwalker in Broken Bulwark (Scosglen)
   • Veteran Brawler in Heretics Asylum (Kehjistan)
   • Might in Dark Ravine (Dry Steppes)
   • Numbing Wrath in Heathen's Keep (Hawezar)
   • Retribution in Abandoned Mineworks (Kehjistan)
   • Death Wish in Penitent Cairns (Scosglen)
2. Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
   • Encroaching Wrath: Gamble One-Handed Axes. The key to one-shotting Bosses and adds extra damage for our Death Blow throughout the run from time to time. This replaces Death Wish.
   • Weapon Master's: Gamble Boots. Important to provide us with a second charge for Death Blow in case we miss a hit. This replaces Rapid.
   • Steadfast Berserker's: Gamble Pants. Our primary source of Fortify later on, replacing Numbing Wrath.
   • Accelerating: Gamble One-Handed Axes. We swap weapons all the time so this Aspect smooths out the gameplay especially with the long Upheaval animation. This replaces a defensive Aspect later.
   • Berserk Fury: Gamble Rings. Grants us extra Fury for more Upheaval spam. This replaces Relentless Armsmaster.
   • Ancestral Charge: Gamble One-Handed Axes. This turns Charge into a large AOE that is much better at clearing trash and resetting its cooldown.
   • Brawler: Gamble One-Handed Axes. This ability greatly increases the damage of Charge by setting off a chain reaction of explosions when we kill enemies recently damaged by Charge.
   • Bear Clan Berserker: Gamble Rings. This aspect helps to solve Charge's only weakness: it has a cooldown.
3. Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops. Note: You cannot gamble Unique items with obols!
   • Overkill: Replacing either Conceited or Accelerating, this is amazing weapon for lategame that adds an extra shockwave to your Death Blow at the cost of better stats on a regular weapon and a doubled offensive Aspect. All in all, it's a great item to use for this build especially in easy content where the lower damage shockwave is strong enough to finish regular monsters.
   • Tibault's Will: Replacing Disobedience, this item offers lots of extra damage on an otherwise defensive slot. If you feel too squishy, you can run with a legendary item instead.
4. If you get lucky with Uber Unique drops, consider the following adjustments:
   • Harlequin Crest or Andariel's Visage: Replace Might for extra damage, life or life recovery.
   • Doombringer: You can use this weapon instead of Edgemaster’s. This sword has amazing stats and a damage reduction proc to survive high end content more easily.
   • The Grandfather: This sword adds tons of great stats but prevents you from running Encroaching Wrath on a two-handed slot if you're also using Overkill. It's still an amazing upgrade and replaces Berserk Ripping.

• The setup presented here is already quite tanky as is, running multiple defensive legendary aspects and stacking various defensive nodes and Glyphs on the Paragon board.
• Prioritize more defensive rolls on gear, such as Maximum Life on Rings and Helm and make sure to stack them entirely on Chest & Pants.
• Tibault's Will is an optional unique that can be replaced with a defensive legendary item.

Read on to learn all you need about how to scale this build into endgame.

Choosing the right stats for your gear can make or break your build. You won't always find perfect stats (also known as affixes or modifiers) though, and you may need to make a tough choice between two good pieces of equipment. Use the following list of priorities to compare your gear and pick the best.

• Helm: Disobedience
  1. Ranks to Death Blow
  2. Any Resistance
  3. % Total Armor
  4. Cooldown Reduction
  5. Maximum Life
  6. Any Resistance

• Chest Armor: Steadfast Berserker's
  1. % Total Armor
  2. Damage Reduction
  3. Close Damage Reduction
  4. Damage Reduction while Fortified
  5. Distant Damage Reduction
  6. Maximum Life

• Gloves: Weapon Master's
  1. Ranks to Upheaval
  2. Critical Strike Chance
  3. Attack Speed
  4. Lucky Hit Chance
  5. All Stats
  6. Strength

• Pants: Tibault's Will, look for high Close Damage Reduction & effect rolls
• Otherwise Look For: Might
  1. % Total Armor
  2. Damage Reduction
  3. Close Damage Reduction
  4. Damage Reduction while Fortified
  5. Distant Damage Reduction
  6. Maximum Life

• Boots: Ghostwalker
  1. Implicit: Maximum Evade Charges
  2. Movement Speed
  3. Any Resistance
  4. Any Resistance
  5. Any Resistance
  6. Movement Speed on Elite Kill
  7. Dodge Chance
  8. All Stats
  9. Strength

1. Amulet: Ancestral Charge
   1. Movement Speed
   2. Ranks to Weapon Mastery Skills
   3. Cooldown Reduction
   4. Ranks to Heavy Handed*
   5. Ranks to Counteroffensive *
   6. Damage Reduction
   7. % Total Armor
   8. Close Damage Reduction

* Cannot appear on the same item together.

• Rings: Berserk Fury & Berserk Ripping
  1. Critical Strike Chance
  2. Damage while Berserking
  3. Maximum Life
  4. Resource Generation
  5. Fortify Generation
  6. Damage to Close Enemies

• Bludgeoning Weapon: Overkill, look for high effect roll and Death Blow ranks
• Otherwise Look For: Accelerating
  1. High DPS (Item Power)
  2. Damage while Berserking
  3. All Stats
  4. Strength
  5. Damage to Close Enemies
  6. Vulnerable Damage

• Dual-Wield (Axes): Earthstriker's & Edgemaster’s
  1. High DPS (Item Power)
  2. Damage while Berserking
  3. All Stats
  4. Strength
  5. Damage to Close Enemies
  6. Vulnerable Damage

• Slicing Weapon: Encroaching Wrath
  1. High DPS (Item Power)
  2. Damage while Berserking
  3. All Stats
  4. Strength
  5. Damage to Close Enemies
  6. Vulnerable Damage

Fill your item's sockets with the following:

• Royal Skull into Weapons for health recovery.
• Royal Ruby into Armor for more survivability.
• Any gem type of Resistances you are missing into Jewelry, prioritizing Fire and Lightning first. If you are capped on all of them, add Royal Skull for more Armor.

This build benefits the most from the following consumables:

• Elixirs: Elixir of Cruelty, Iron Skin Elixir, Elixir of Fortitude, Heady Assault Elixir & Heady Precision Elixir
• Incenses: Song of the Mountain, Reddamine Buzz & Chorus of War

The Walking Arsenal Barbarian is a great leveling and speedfarming build that incorporates the basic principles of what the class is all about in the coolest way possible. Enjoy becoming an engine of destruction with this build!

• Assign your four attack skills to three different weapons and keep all of them up-to-date as you progress.
• Use each weapon at least once every 8 seconds for the Walking Arsenal buffs.
• Swap between attacks to activate damage bonuses and bring back Iron Maelstrom faster.
• Protect yourself withCharge and Rallying Cry (for Unstoppable).
• Activate Encroaching Wrath before engaging Bosses to deal a heavy blow to them.

Barbarian Guides

• Complete Barbarian Overview
• Upheaval Barbarian Leveling Guide
• Whirlwind Barbarian Leveling Guide
• Hammer of the Ancients Barbarian Endgame Guide

General Guides

• Powering Up
• Paragon Boards
• Nightmare Dungeons
• Legendary Items

Written by wudijo
Updated by slothmaster
Contributions by snail