Pure Hammer of the Ancients

This build will teach you all the Skills, Paragon, Aspects, and Gear you need to run a PURE Hammer of the Ancients build. This build will have TWO versions of damage. One is designed around spending as much fury as you can to proc Banished Lord's Talisman. This is why you run the Crown of Lucion any other helmet would not be a good replacement for this. This build is very resource management heavy, and will require some time to learn the play style.

The other is designed around a very gear dependent build running Melted Heart of Selig, Harlequin Crest, The Grandfather and Ring of Starless Skies. Both variants will hit hard, but this is designed to be your end goal for the build.

Important - The Chaos Armor variant swaps to Wrath of the Berserker. A new ring will be needed with new tempers.

Please read through the How it works section of the planner and if you have further questions you can join me live on Twitch and join Discord

Pure Hammer of the Ancients

• Cast Call of the Ancients to activate the Fury Generation, Attack Speed and increased Damage.
• Use your Shouts on cooldown, as well as Call of the Ancients.
• Cast Hammer of the Ancients to build up 10 stacks of Enhanced Hammer of the Ancients to give you 50(x) increased Fury Generation. You'll need it.
• Once your buffs are all active, as you pull groups of monsters, constantly spam Hammer of the Ancients
• Repeat

Hammer of the Ancients Damage

Unique Set-up

This build will be running on a Two-handed Mace set up in order to take advantage of Heavy Handed, Wallop and Brute Force. We are running the Banished Lord's Talisman to help us generate Overpower hits. We combine that with the Crown of Lucion to increase the cost of our Hammer of the Ancients to 150 Fury. This means that every 2 attacks with Hammer of the Ancients you proc the Banished Lord's Talisman. This build runs on very high Resource Generation in order to keep on hammering. If you don't have enough Maximum Fury or Fury Generation you can swap your Key Passives from Unbridled Rage to Unconstrained until you have enough.

Mythic Set-up

For this set-up we are running Harlequin Crest, Ring of Starless Skies, The Grandfather and the most important part of the build Melted Heart of Selig. Hammer of the Ancients scales it's damage through Furious Hammer of the Ancients based on your Maximum Resources. With the changes to Melted Heart of Selig we will see some big damage scaling. This is also pared with the updated Ramaladni's Magnum Opus which has been changed to ALWAYS be active.

We will use Strategic Ground Stomp to keep your Call of the Ancients up 100% of the time. We also are using Bold Chieftain's Aspect to maintain 100% uptime on our Shouts which will also help in reducing the Cooldown of Ground Stomp and Call of the Ancients by taking advantage of the Marshal Glyph.

• If you would like to learn how to set your weapon selection watch this video: How to Select Weapons

Fury Management

DO NOT SPAM HAMMER OF THE ANCIENTS UNLESS THERE ARE MONSTERS AROUND

To maintain Fury you'll need to have your Call of the Ancients cooldown at 9.5 seconds. That can be done with either a Greater Affix on Arreat's Bearing on the Call of the Ancients Cooldown Reduction (See planner). If you do not have a Greater Affix you can temper Call of the Ancients Cooldown Reduction on your rings. The reason this is so important Korlic generates 10 Fury each time he does damage. The more Ancients you have up, the more Fury you get back.

Using Bold Chieftain's Aspect will allow you to keep Rallying Cry running 100% of the time. This will give you 30% increased Fury generation. If you're still running out of Fury Yen's Blessing is a great way to add more Fury Generation. Enhanced Hammer of the Ancients gives a massive buff to your Fury Generation so maintaining that buff is very important.

For the overworld Fury Issues

• Ahu + Lum
• Igni + Lum
• Zan + Lum
• Bac + Lum
• Lith + Lum

Offense

• Aspect of Ancestral Force gives Hammer of the Ancients an increase to damage and allows it to hit in a radius around you.
• Aspect of Earthquakes increased your damage while standing in an Earthquake and for 4 seconds after you leave it. On top of that, it also increases your Earthquake damage as well.
• Call of the Ancients will be your main source of damage. When you use this Ultimate it will spawn an Earthquake. This Earthquake will be your strongest version. We will be stacking Summon Damage, along with Ultimate Damage which directly affects your Earthquake spawned by Call of the Ancients. That Earthquake also is run through every other Earthquake modifier you have i.e. Aspect of Earthquakes. This results in massive damage!

If you want to learn the basics about Multipliers watch this video: Additive vs. Multiplicative Damage.

Uniques

• Crown of Lucion is the key to making this build work. It increases Hammer of the Ancients Fury Cost, which is important because you need to spend Fury to get guaranteed Overpower hits from Banished Lord's Talisman.
• Ring of Red Furor will guarantee every hit of Hammer of the Ancients is a Critical Strike. Because the Crown of Lucion will make your Hammer of the Ancients cost more than 100 Fury you'll always have Critical Hits.
• Banished Lord's Talisman is the reason we want to be spending as much Fury as possible. Every 275 Fury spent you get a guaranteed Overpower Hit. Combine this with the Ring of Red Furor every Overpower Hit is a Critical Hit. Whenever our Overpower Hits are Critical Hits the Banished Lord's Talisman increases the damage of those hits.
• Arreat's Bearing is 100% necessary for this build. It will bring the cooldown of your Call of the Ancients down to the lowest it can go. Skills can only gain a total of 75% cooldown reduction and this one piece will give you that.
• Mantle of Mountain's Fury will be a great source of Armor and Defensive Stance for Damage Reduction and a passive heal. This also is a huge source of damage. As it casts a seismic line through any Earthquake you have created and explodes it. Whenever you explode an Earthquake it gives you big damage to your Hammer of the Ancients. You also gain massive ranks to your Hammer of the Ancients adding to even more damage.
• Tibault's Will will add extra damage when you become Unstoppable. You get this from Enhanced Rallying Cry.
• Ramaladni's Magnum Opus removing this from your weapon slot, adding it into your armor will free up another weapon slot for tempers, it will also add additional damage. It removes having to search for the perfect aspect since that is the most important part of the Ramaladni's Magnum Opus. Note: This item has changed in Season 10 to effect all abilities now. The "Skills using this weapon" has been removed.

Mythic Uniques

• Melted Heart of Selig will add huge amounts of Maximum Resources to your build, which will add massive damage scaling with this set-up.
• Harlequin Crest will provide you with the Cooldown Reduction needed to maintain your Shouts as well as Call of the Ancients
• The Grandfather has a Unique Aspect that doubles your Critical Strike Damage bonus. More importantly for this build it gives very high Maximum Resources. It's a great source of Max Life and the All Stats play a huge role in activating your Paragon Nodes.
• Ring of Starless Skies adds damage to all of your abilities after you spend primary resources.

Found a Mythic and want to know if it's useable? Is this Mythic usable with my build?

Chaos Armor

These Chaos Uniques can be found in any slot combination. You do not have to match the planner exactly, you will just need to find all of these in this combination.

• Mantle of Mountain Fury will be a great source of Armor and Defensive Stance for Damage Reduction and a passive heal. This also is a huge source of damage. As it casts a seismic line through any Earthquake you have created and explodes it. Whenever you explode an Earthquake it gives you big damage to your Hammer of the Ancients. You also gain massive ranks to your Hammer of the Ancients adding to even more damage.
• Ugly Bastard Helmet will give you increased damage while you have Wrath of the Berserker active.
• Battle Trance plays a big role in the build. It adds +30% all resistances and it has a lucky hit chance to apply frenzy stacks even if frenzy isn't on your bar. While you're at max stacks you're going to gain increased damage.
• Crown of Lucian is the key to making this build work. It increases Hammer of the Ancients Fury Cost, which is important because you need to spend Fury to get guaranteed Overpower hits from Banished Lord's Talisman.
• Fists of Fate great source of applying Vulnerable to enemies. Also a big increase at random to your attacks.

Boss Loot Tables Barbarian & General Pools

Varshan

Barbarian

• 100,000 Steps
• Fields of Crimson
• Gohr's Devastating Grips
• Ring of Red Furor
• Sabre of Tsasgal

General Pool

• Frostburn
• Mother's Embrace
• Rakanoth's Wake
• Shard of Verathiel

Grigoire

Barbarian

• Battle Trance
• Rage of Harrogath
• Twin Strikes
• Unbroken Chain

General Pool

• Endurant Faith
• Penitent Greaves
• The Butcher's Cleaver

Beast In The Ice

Barbarian

• Ancients' Oath
• Hooves of the Mountain God
• Mantle of Mountain's Fury
• Ring of the Ravenous

General Pool

• Fists of Fate
• Paingorger's Gauntlets
• Tassets of the Dawning Sky

Barbarian

• Arreat's Bearing
• Overkill
• Ramaladni's Magnum Opus
• Ugly Bastard Helm

General Pool

• Razorplate
• Temerity
• Vox Omnium
• Yen's Blessing

Urivar (Vessel of Hatred)

Barbarian

• 100,000 Steps
• Overkill
• Ring of the Ravenous
• Twin Strikes

General Pool

• Frostburn
• Paingorger's Gauntlets

Duriel, King of Maggots

Barbarian

• Bane of Ahjed-Den
• Tuskhelm of Joritz the Mighty

General Pool

• Azurewrath
• Banished Lord's Talisman
• Crown of Lucion
• Godslayer Crown
• Soulbrand
• X'Fal's Corroded Signet

Andariel

Barbarian

• Bane of Ahjad-Den
• Tuskhelm of Joritz the Mighty

General Pool

• Azurewrath
• Flickerstep
• Locran's Talisman
• Soulbrand
• Tibault's Will
• X'Fal's Corroded Signet

Harbinger of Hatred

Barbarian

• Bane of Ahjed-Den
• The Third Blade

General Pool

‍Banished Lord's Talisman

• Crown of Lucion
• Flickerstep
• Godslayer Crown
• Locran's Talisman
• Tibault's Will

Belial, Lord of Lies

**This boss contains loot tables of every boss. Once killed, you will select the chest for the specific boss you need drops from. The chests all have the same drop rate, so pick the chest you need the most.

Updated and optimized for Season 11