Dalkora’s Predictions for the Best D4 Barbarian Gauntlet Builds

D4 Barbarian Gauntlet Tier List Predictions by Dalkora

Hi! Welcome to my predictions for Barbarian builds for the Gauntlet. My name is Dalkora, I was one of the first people to hit 100 in HC getting my name chiseled onto the Statue of Lilith, a multi-rank 1 HC barb since, and a die-hard Barbarian main.

Running 3-5 level 100s most seasons (I know it’s a problem) testing, pushing, and theory crafting like a madman. And today I’m channeling all of my 1000s of hours on the class into a breakdown on the build I anticipate will dominate the leaderboards.

Gauntlet is due to be released at some point in season three (probably) and thanks to all of this extra prep time generously provided by Diablo 4 we’ve managed to put together a comprehensive list of all the best builds going into this new content for those of you interested in testing your might and climbing the ranked leaderboards.

My Criteria

For this list, the builds are measured on their clear speed (this will be the most important metric), how high the gear requirement is, and the difficulty to play to help you find the right build for your Gauntlet push!

For speed, we’re measuring, movement speed, traversal utility, and time to kill. Anything and everything that improves your ability to kill and move as fast as possible.

Gear requirement is rated on how many hard-to-obtain items a build contains, for example, uniques and uber uniques.

Finally is difficulty, honestly most builds are quite easy to play so this will be more of a sliding scale for the barb rather than a general measurement.

Lastly, ust before we start I want to mention that all of the rated builds are Meta and even the worst is extremely powerful and more than capable of blasting the hardest content in the game. So even if the build you like is near the bottom it’s by no means a weak build.

As an added note, Uber Uniques don’t play nearly as much of a role in the season 3 meta as they did in AoZ, in my opinion, the only one worth serious consideration, is the Harlequin Crest aka the Shako. Due to its excellent CDR and ranks to skills it can lend a lot of utility to builds making them much faster.

1. Charge and Its Variations

• Gear requirement
  • Low
• Speed
  • Insane
• Difficulty
  • Medium

[See Charge build here]

My go-to for rank 1 push will be charge, and if you’ve seen this build in action, it won’t be a surprise to see this build in the top spot for the Barbarian.

Charge received a very healthy buff this season now doing tons of damage and having a pretty insane area of effect when used with the ancestral charge aspect.
Then on top of this one-shot damage charge now has, you also have that benefit of traversing a sizable distance quickly as you use the skill too, for something like gauntlet this is the best kind of two birds one stone you could ask for.

And if that wasn’t already compelling enough, with the right build, like our Charge Build here on Mobalytics perhaps 😉, the cooldown on charge can be reduced to 0 allowing you to spam it like a madman. You’ll also be using Leap which allows for some pretty gnarly shortcuts, jumping up and down ledges and in a lot of cases right through walls to the next room.
Finally, to wrap it all up the build also synergizes with berserking extremely well, this means you get near 100% uptime on all those juicy bonuses like extra damage and movement speed to name a couple.
Safe to say in season 3 you really can’t go wrong with Charge.

2. Double Swing

• Gear requirement
  • Low
• Speed
  • High
• Difficulty
  • Low

[See Double Swing build here]

One of my favorite builds from season 2, Double Swing with Twisters, it’s silly fun, stupid fast, and looks pretty slick when you fill a dungeon up with tornados that rip enemies to pieces.

It’s an all-around fantastic build to say the least, it does very high constant DPS, no spikes just plows through everything all the same. Easily sustains max movements speed which of course is a huge bonus for gauntlet and has respectable AoE clear thanks to the dust devils that you create.

Double Swing is also one of the simpler builds to play, pop your shouts then Wrath of the Berserker and hold right-click until the dungeon is finished and that’s not a joke, and despite this simplicity, I still love playing this build it’s just so damn satisfying.

It might not quite be as fast as Charge but it’s not far behind at all, with the added benefit of being much more reliable vs boss and not being susceptible to DPS inconsistencies.

3. Thorns

• Gear requirement
  • Medium
• Speed
  • High
• Difficulty
  • Braindead easy

[See Thorns build here]

A surprising entry for third place here Thorns! And it’s all thanks to some of the new Unique Paingorgers and aspect adaptability that were introduced with season 3.

With this new build not only do we become an unkillable murder machine, the combo of Pain gorgers and adaptability turn Lunging strike is not a disgustingly powerful attack, giving it upwards of millions of damage per hit and turning it into an AoE!

Allowing us to dash around wiping out packs of enemies, and that’s just the ones that don’t one tap themselves against our thorns (we have a lot).

This build also features ridiculous toughness, making it VERY hard to die, even if you were to go afk mid-fight.So why third place right?

Unfortunately, the consistency of the AoE is a bit unreliable with applying paingorgers echo to enemies is RNG bound at times you may struggle to get through large groups quickly which slows you down a fair old bit.

That said this is an awesome build and I am happy to have a thorns build not at the bottom of a list for once!

4-5. Whirlwind

• Gear Requirement
  • Medium
• Speed
  • Medium
• Difficulty
  • Low

[See Whirlwind build here]

If you know me then you know it hurts my heart to have WW this low down on the list. Though it’s by no means slow and set up properly, it won’t have any issues with bosses, which was previously a pain point for Whirlwind.

But where it has trouble is with the movement speed reduction from Whirlwind and its comparatively low time to kill generic enemies at times. It’s good but It’s just not quite up to snuff vs the other builds.

One nice tech we can use particularly well with Whirlwind this season though is Temerity plus Invigorating Fury, This combination makes us essentially immortal so long as we don’t stop spinning.

And using Deathblow we can easily drop tough enemies in one shot which is very satisfying! All in all, Whirlwind is a much more well-rounded build than ever before and will have you cruising t100 dungeons like they’re nothing. But when it comes to gauntlet it doesn’t quite have the beans to compete.

4-5. Hammer of the Ancients

• Gear Requirement
  • High
• Speed
  • Medium
• Difficulty
  • Medium

[See Hota build here]

Now we all know HoTa hits like a truck, however Gauntlet is all about speed! Enemies won’t have particularly high HP so about 90% of HoTa damage is not going to be doing too much and though again like all of these builds HoTa is not slow by any measure, it does sacrifice some speed for this damage.

Currently, there are two main HoTa variations, Pure HoTa and WW HoTa. For pure HoTa it plays very similarly to Double Swing, but the difference is that it has a much harder time maintaining Berserking. resulting in less uptime on the buff and the included Movement speed boost.

Not only that HoTa also has a longer attack animation keeping your place slightly longer, might not seem like much but across a whole run it could be a difference maker. When it comes to WW HoTa it is generally quite a slow build in comparison to most others on this list.

This is due to firstly the movement speed reduction from whirlwind when you’re spinning and then from the animation swap to HoTa and back which will for a moment lock you in place. However, if you want to do big numbers this build would be in the top spot.

6. Walking Arsenal (style)

• Gear Requirement
  • Mega Low
• Speed
  • Medium
• Difficulty
  • High (for Barb)

[See Walking Arsenal buildhere]

Now this felt weird having Walking Arsenal this low down, especially considering this is the build I used to get Rank 1 HC 100 for Barbarian.

However, its strengths in leveling diminish post-100. It is still a meta build however, packing an insane amount of damage with very low gear requirements so as a Season starter this is an insane build – but when looking through the scope of what will be good for the Gauntlet, weapon swap builds, and anything with an animation that holds you in place i.e HoTa, Upheaval, or Iron Maelstrom will work against you in a speed-focused environment.

But for those of you just getting started and need an easy in, a powerful build with a fun and active playstyle I’d say still give this one a go.

7. Rend

• Gear Requirement
  • Medium
• Speed
  • Medium
• Difficulty
  • Medium

[See Rend build here]

Poor Rend when will it get any love? When it comes to Rend, or bleed builds in general you do have access to some pretty nifty skills like Rupture that when used well can delete an entire room in one cast making it quite good for speed farming.

But, like with HoTa though, it’s somewhat a little difficult to maintain Berserk meaning there will be times when you lose that speed boost. And as far as boss killing goes this might just be the weakest build on the list, however, whether or not this will be an issue in Gauntlet is yet to be seen so who knows, Sleeper builds maybe?

The nail in the coffin for this one is the animation lock on things like steel grasp and rupture which work well on this build but in general hurt clear times pretty badly. And if you mess one up i.e. miss, and with steel grasp in particular it be a little temperamental. You’ll end up in situations where you can’t do much AoE damage because your skill is on cooldown.

It’s a fun build with a unique feel, but I don’t see it winning any Gauntlets.

In conclusion

Season 3 is full to the brim with great builds for the Barbarian, regardless of what you decide to go for you’ll be cruising through dungeons and slapping bosses into the concrete.

Barbarian overall is looking like it will be a very strong contender for Gauntlet but at the same time don’t forget that the leaderboards are class-specific so don’t get caught up with the whole x is faster than y, if you like a class just play it!

And don’t forget to let us know which build you like best! Look forward to hearing from you in the comments!