Upheaval Barbarian Endgame Build Guide
Last Updated:October 8, 2024|Change Log|FAQ
Welcome to the Diablo 4 Upheaval Barbarian Endgame Build Guide!
May Vessel of Hatred release finally mark the day where Upheaval graduates as a viable endgame Core Skill? "Yes" is my answer, the recent buffs gave 14% extra damage to its base skill and bonus ranks (which you get a lot of), Furious Upheaval multiplier also went from 72% to a whooping 120%; we now also have access to a juicy Chance to Deal Double Damage Temper. Combining those with massive tankiness, permanent Shouts and Ultimate, and screen-wide Overpowered AoE, it can confidently be said that Upheaval earned its passing marks!
To support Upheaval, we take a lot of the standard tools for the endgame. Our main generator, Combat Bash, is used to keep our Fury levels high and charge up our earth shattering skill with its inherent utility in granting guaranteed Overpower hits and multi-stacking Furious Upheaval.
To help keep things comfy, we also rely on our beloved triple shouts setup: Challenging Shout for a massive chunk of damage reduction and increased Maximum Life, Rallying Cry for the Unstoppable status and Fortify generation and War Cry for the additional damage multiplier. We also have Call of the Ancients as an Ultimate to fall back on for a multiplicative damage boost, Fury generation, and a very generous Attack Speed buff.
With all of this at our disposal and our juiced up Hellhammer, those foolish enough to think they can escape shall learn that nothing can withstand the pure power that Upheaval delivers. And with that... let's show them Hell!
Note that Shroud of False Death has been temporarily disabled for the launch of Season 6 - Season of Hatred. Keep using the Chest Armor piece from the Starter or Ancestral variants until fixed!
This build guide assumes you have a Level 60 Character and unlocked Torment 1. To get there, level up with one of our Barbarian Leveling Guides. See how this Build compares against others with our various Build Tier Lists.
Season Theme
Season 6 is the Season of Hatred Rising. It features the Zakarum Remnants faction which hunts Realmwalkers, massive behemoths that roam outdoor zones and beckon Mephisto's hellspawn. Participate in these zone events and take down the Realmwalkers to spawn a portal to a Seething Realm. There you can acquire Seething Opals, new consumables that stack with Elixirs for a XP buff and the chance to gather extra rewards when defeating enemies. The types of Opals are:
- Seething Opal of Equipment
- Seething Opal of Gold
- Seething Opal of Materials
- Seething Opal of Torment
- Seething Opal of Socketables
Use these Opals at all times to earn reputation with the Zakarum Remnants faction and unlock further rewards.
Learn more details about the season theme in our full Season Guide.
Skills & Gameplay
- Bash is our Fury generator of choice; it is combined with the Bash Cleave Temper to maximize the guaranteed Overpower hits provided by its upgraded version, Combat Bash, and the stacking of our Furious Upheaval passive.
- Upheaval is a heavy-hitting Core skill, hitting enemies in very large cone with a moderately high Fury cost. It shines most when it becomes Furious Upheaval, which gives it essentially a permanent 120% damage bonus.
- Rallying Cry gives us the ability to become Unstoppable and is also our primary way of generating Fortify. Additionally, it provides us some extra Movement Speed and increases the rate at which we recoup Fury.
- Challenging Shout is one of our main defensive buffs that grants us a huge percentage of damage reduction and Maximum Life. It also helps with grouping up enemies with its inherent Taunt ability.
- War Cry is our last offensive shout, granting us Berserking and a hefty damage multiplier.
- Call of the Ancients is a skill we fall back on when we need a bit of extra damage during tougher encounters. The Ancients themselves don't do much damage in this setup, but the buffs provided while they are active are quite substantial.
Skill Rotation
- Ensure Challenging Shout, Rallying Cry and War Cry are up whenever possible. With the high Cooldown Reduction provided by Rakanoth's Wake, Bold Chieftain's and Shout CDR Tempers these can eventually become permanent buffs.
- Use Call of the Ancients whenever it is off cooldown, especially during longer fights, for more damage and Fury generation.
- Starting with Bash, alternate between casting Bash and Upheaval with a 1:1 ratio. As long as Bash Critically Strikes 4 enemies, the following Upheaval cast is a guaranteed Overpower.
- Note that this is only possible if the "Bash Cleaves" affix is tempered on a weapon, as this allows Combat Bash and Furious Upheaval to activate per enemy hit, instead of per cast.
- Do not wait for Furious Upheaval to be fully stacked, if a guaranteed Overpower is available, just send it! We'd rather keep our Ring of Starless Skies stacks!
- As you fight and spend Fury on Upheaval, you trigger the Kry Rune and your Mercenary Ancient Harpoons, both helping you group up enemies.
- Against Bosses: Since these are typically single-target fights, Bash needs to score 4 Critical Strikes before it grants its guaranteed Overpower. In most cases, this means the ratio of Bash to Upheaval casts becomes 4:1.
PRO TIP: Make sure to use the Hold Position key when attacking to maximize your Inner Calm and Lith Rune buffs.
Arsenal System
The Arsenal System allows us to use a specific weapon for every attack skill, with each weapon granting different bonuses. We also have what is called the Technique Slot. With this, we can use any weapon of our choosing to always reap the benefit from, regardless of which weapon we have equipped.
The Two-Handed Mace is used as our assigned weapon for both Upheaval and Bash to fully benefit from its expertise bonuses.
In the Technique Slot, the Two-Handed Axe allows us to deal 10% more damage to Vulnerable enemies. This build naturally has high Vulnerable uptime thanks to Pressure Point. Unfortunately, its secondary effect does not apply here - 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.
Learn more details and how to unlock this class specification in our full Arsenal System Guide.
Paragon & Glyphs
Carefully check your Paragon Boards to ensure correct board rotation. Glyphs go from a radius of 3 to 4 at level 15 and from 4 to 5 at level 46. Some of them cannot be activated before reaching these thresholds! Progress through The Pit to rank up your Glyphs.
Use the slider to see the progression steps. At around Paragon 200, leveling slows down significantly and all important Rare clusters, Legendary nodes and Glyph sockets should be unlocked. Afterwards, you can min/max your build with minor tweaks and by picking up additional smaller nodes.
Some Glyph position swaps, board changes and other pathing adjustments may occur as you unlock your full potential. The setup displayed by default is the final version of the build before spending additional points that do not significantly impact your character's power.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
Level 15
- Ire
- Dominate
- Wrath
- Challenger
- Crusher
Level 21
- Ire
- Dominate
- Wrath
- Challenger
- Crusher
There are a total of 328 Paragon Points. After reaching level 60, you gain up to 300 Paragon Levels, 24 from Renown and 4 from Altars of Lilith. Check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Runes
You can have up to two Runewords in your setup, each consisting of one Ritual and one Invocation Rune. Socket them in Two-Handed Weapons if your build calls for them, otherwise place them into your Armor pieces to replace normal gems. The Upheaval Barbarian focuses on the following combos:
Best in Slot
- Poc + Kry - This Runeword combination triggers the Spiritborn Vortex after 5 Bash + Upheaval rotations, which helps group up enemies.
- Lith + Xal- While in combat, this Runeword gives us 20% more Maximum Life for 4 seconds after standing still for 2.4 seconds. On top of it being a nice defensive boost, Maximum Life is also factored in when calculating damage for Overpower hits.
Alternative choices
If you haven't unlocked the final setup or found the top runes, you can also benefit from these options:
- Cem - A good alternative/substitution Ritual Rune for Yul, preferably with Boots having the “Attack reduce Evade cooldown by X second” implicit affix.
- Gar - A strong early game Invocation Rune option when trying to reach 100% Critical Strike Chance.
- Yax - A very strong 200 offering Ritual Rune that triggers whenever you use a healing potion.
- Tec - A cheap Invocation Rune that allows temporary use of the Earthquakes and Bul-Kathos Aspects.
Learn more about Runes and how they work in our dedicated Runewords Overview and Runewords Tier List.
Mercenaries
Mercenaries are unlocked during the Vessel of Hatred campaign and assist you in battle. There are 4 separate Mercenaries to choose from, each with their own skill trees and abilities. You can have one hired (permanent) mercenary during solo play and a reinforcement who assists you from time to time in certain situations.
Hired: Raheir
He has a lot to offer us from a defensive standpoint. Skills like Valiance and Bastion help protect us from heavy hits and grant Unstoppable. Bastion also works in tandem with Ground Slam to provide some very strong offensive buffs with Inspiration. Lastly, he provides a pretty decent boost to all of our Resistances, which can help compensate for low rolls on gear.
Reinforcement: Varyana
Varyana's Ancient Harpoons serve as a supplementary monster packing tool on a low cooldown.
We chose to bind Ancient Harpoons to Bash as a way of making sure the monsters are packed as soon as we start our damage rotation.
Learn more about Mercenaries and how they work in our dedicated Mercenaries Overview.
Stat Priorities & Item Progression
To enable the Upheaval Barbarian to perform optimally, hunt for these stats on your gear with good rolls and aim to Temper ⚒️ & Masterwork Crit ↑ them accordingly. Keep in mind that certain stats, such as Armor, Resistances, Extra Size Tempers, Attack Speed and more, have caps that may affect your priorities according to the items and Paragon points available at that moment.
Recommended Endgame Stat Thresholds
- 90%+ Critical Strike Chance
- 60%+ Attack Speed
- Rank 35+ Upheaval
- 100% Upheaval Size
- 80%+ Chance for Upheaval to Deal Double damage
- 300%+ Damage while Berserking (Blood Rage)
- 3000%+ Overpower Damage
- 3000+ Strength
- Armor Capped 1,000
- Resistance Capped 70%
- 25,000+ Life
- 180%+ Movement Speed
Item Progression Goals
Before you dive into the Endgame with the Upheavalkill] Barbarian, take a look at this overview of the items used in the build. See below for further details about the different progression steps and variants. Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. Keep in mind that while we can guarantee that everyone has access to the same Codex of Power Aspects, the exact progression is different for everyone.
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Build Variants
This section is designed to guide your Upheaval Barbarian from a fresh level 60 into the very late endgame using the three variants Starter, Ancestral and Mythic. At the final step, you should be fully decked out with a great all-rounder build. From there, follow the other min/max variants if you want to optimize around certain activities such as Pit Pushing, Speedfarming and more.
If you are fresh in Torment 1 coming from a leveling guide, this is where you begin. Since only some Aspects can be guaranteed from Dungeon unlocks for the Codex of Power, focus on acquiring the additional Aspects via gambling with Murmuring Obols.
Gear & Skills
- Note: If you have arrived here after following the Upheaval Barbarian Leveling Guide, it's perfectly fine to continue using the Starter variant described in that guide if there are no issues. There is often more than one way to play a build successfully; feel free to choose or even combine ideas from both to customize your experience!
- During early progression, Armor & Resistances should be prioritized in order to survive. Each Torment difficulty adds a penalty of -250 Armor and -25% to all Resistances and it's recommended to keep both capped at all times; this means having a value of 1,000 for Armor and 70% for each Resistance. As masterworking levels and Paragon points are unlocked, character power naturally scales into the higher difficulties. As this happens, most of these stats can start being replaced with utility or offensive-oriented ones.
- To lower Upheaval cost to a sustainable ~55 Fury per cast, we focus on getting Resource Cost Reduction affixes on our Two-Handers.
- Gameplay is very similar to the Endgame versions with the sole difference being that we also leverage Blood Boiling as a source of guaranteed Overpower, while also giving us nice AoE Damage when collecting the volatile drops.
- Remind yourself to use your Healing Potions to trigger your Runeword and stay in your Earthquakes when packing monsters with Steel Grasp to fully benefit from Earthquakes and Bul-Kathos!
The goal here is to progress through the Torment difficulties as you unlock Ancestrals, Paragon points, all Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and the most important Uniques to pilot this build. Some Legendary Aspects are used temporarily to fill slots that may be replaced with more Unique items later on.
Gear & Skills
- As gear is upgraded to Ancestral and more masterworking levels and Paragon points are unlocked, we can focus on replacing Armor and Resistance rolls with more desirable stats; however, staying capped at 1,000 Armor and 70% for all Resistances should always remain a priority for the current difficulty level.
- Prioritize farming Infernal Hordes to get Rakanoth's Wake.
- Rakanoth's Wake is a solid choice for patching up Resistances and providing a large amount of Cooldown Reduction. The latter should be the priority, since we have a number of skills that we want to stay off cooldown as much as possible.
- Then, hunt The Beast in the Ice for a Hellhammer. This is an absolute requirement for any Upheaval build, to the point where its worst stat is Strength... Yes, it's just that good.
- Lastly, start farming Lord Zir to get Ugly Bastard Helm and Arreat's Bearing.
- Ugly Bastard Helm is an incredibly strong item that gives a ton of damage reduction from ranks of Aggressive Resistance, as well as a hefty damage multiplier via its Unique effect. The Wrath of the Berserker Cooldown Reduction can be completely ignored; even though this is a wasted stat, everything else is too good to pass up.
- Arreat's Bearing gives an absurd amount of Cooldown Reduction to Call of the Ancients and helps us easily cap our Resistances.
This is the final version of the build's progression, including all regular Unique items, Mythic Uniques, Legendary Aspects, Temper mods and Masterworking, leaving you with a great all-rounder build for all content in the game. Additional variants use this as a baseline to optimize around certain activities.
Gear & Skills
- Heir of Perdition is loaded with great stats for this build and is pretty much a no-brainer. It easily lets us hit Critical Strike Chance cap, gives a ton of ranks to Upheaval, and comes with a built-in 60% damage multiplier.
- While the stats on Shroud of False Death are "okay" at best, it provides us an additional Fury Generation Bonus affix and mostly the amazing +1 to All Passive implicit modifier. This implicit represents a 30%+ damage multiplier on top of being a great boost to our shouts and defensive passives.
- Doombringer is amazing for Overpower builds since Maximum Life naturally scales Overpower damage. Aside from that, it gives an incredible amount of extra damage mitigation and helps us face-tank.
- Ring of Starless Skies is another no-brainer; it gives a bunch of Critical Strike Chance, Attack Speed, bonus ranks to Upheaval, and a large damage multiplier that is fairly simple to keep active.
FAQ & Mechanics
Once a guide is released, many players have questions on why and how we are approaching certain choices. In this section you can find the answers to the questions that have been asked the most.
Coming Soon
Mechanics
Learn about the mechanical details which makes the build tick.
Coming Soon
Summary
The Upheaval Barbarian is absolute Fire in pretty much all content. Here's why it is a great build:
- Massive screen-wide damage output from its guaranteed Overpowers provided by Bash; the flames are also a nice touch.
- High defense from its permanent Challenging Shout, Doombringer, and the Wat Rune.
- High mobility while travelling with Shroud of False Death.
- High uptime on all cooldowns with help from Rakanoth's Wake, Bold Chieftain's and Shout Cooldown Reduction Tempers.
- Low Fury maintenance; both Bash and Call of the Ancients keep it maxed out at pretty much all times.
Credits
Written by Beatdropper
Reviewed by snail