Diablo 4 Season 7 Quake-HOTA Barbarian Build: How To Build It?

The exciting Diablo 4 Season 7 has finally arrived. Are you ready to face all the challenges and threats brought by the new season? In addition to the necessary consumables such as sufficient gold coins and items, a qualified construction plan is also a necessary preparation for starting a new season journey. Here, we will start to introduce a Quake-HOTA Barbarian Build that is very powerful in Season 7 in the future.

The core of this build is the new Chest Armor, which allows us to make Earthquakes explode through Hammer of the Ancients. As early as on PTR, we can clearly feel that the damage potential of Earthquake in the new season is slightly higher than HOTA itself, so this build is also more focused on Earthquake damage.

However, with the new body armor and gloves, you can also reach a Hammer of the Ancients skill level of more than 50 points. So it also has a variant that focuses on HOTA damage, and in theory you can even try to create a balanced combination of the two. How to build it depends on your game style.

Skill Tree

Let’s start with the skill tree. First, HOTA and Whirlwind, one point each. Damage scaling is crucial for Hammer of the Ancients, as it increases all the damage we deal, and overpower hits will happen quite often.

Alternatively, we can also take the passive skill below, Warpath, and use Iron Skin as our only defensive skill, which will provide additional damage reduction and make Aspect of the Iron Warrior unstoppable.

Then we have War Cry and Leap, each Leap will generate additional Earthquakes. And Aggressive Resistance will provide some nice protection. Since we will always apply Berserking in Weapon Mastery Cluster, it has very good synergy with some of the passive skills at the bottom of the skill tree to increase our Earthquakes damage. Finally, we also need Key Passive, Unconstrained.

For the pure HOTA variant, maximizing HOTA effect is of course a no-brainer, and at the same time, we also need to invest 3 points each in Heavy Handed and Brute Force. For both variants, we choose Two-Handed Axe Mastery and use a one-handed weapon to perform all other attacks except Hammer of the Ancients.

Paragon Board

Next, let’s look at Paragon Board system. For the starter board, we chose Challenger Glyph. Here we have a weapon aspect that increases our Earthquake damage proportional to our Strength value. So we want to stack as much as possible on Paragon system and equipment.

On equipment, Force Of Nature is a must-have for an Earthquake build. So for Legendary nodes, we stack damage to close enemies on equipment. Meanwhile, on this board, we also light Dominate for continuous powerful attacks.

Next up is the classic Blood Rage Dominate board. Like we said before, we also continuously stack Berserking, so we can get a double damage bonus here. In addition, there is Paragon Glyph, Rumble, which is the most important Glyph regarding Earthquake damage, so there are a lot of Strength nodes on this board to maximize its effect.

Then there is Decimator board, which also provides a solid damage bonus, depending on whether we need more Berserking damage or damage to close enemies.

The last board is Bone Breaker, which provides an additional vigorous attack, which will not only increase our damage but also generate additional Earthquake on this board. However, since we already use Exploit Glyph for a pure HOTA build and want to use Weapons Master board with Crusher and Wrath Glyph, we will abandon Force Of Nature and the last two glyphs.

Equipment

For the necessary equipment required for this build, the first thing we mention must be Ugly Bastard Helm. Because it converts all our direct damage into fire damage and then provides a significant bonus to all our fire damage.

In addition, the new Mantle of the Mountain’s Fury is also a good unique Chest Armor choice. Because we always want a higher chance to deal double Earthquake damage, and the unique item effect causes Earthquake to explode, dealing all the damage in one burst. That’s why we definitely want to increase Earthquake duration, because longer duration means more damage from the explosion.

For gloves, we used Earthstriker’s Runic Gloves. To be honest, HotA rank isn’t as important as the extra Strength and Temper here. So we prefer to choose a gear that deals more damage to close enemies and has more Earthquake size. Of course, you can definitely choose other gear, depending on how much Diablo 4 Gold you have.

Then we equipped Aspect of the Iron Warrior on the pants, and Temper determines Earthquake size and Iron Skin cooldown.

Additionally, since we need Fury per second to make sure our resource management works on Amulets, we use Aspect of Bul-Kathos, which makes our Leap generate additional Earthquakes and provides additional damage reduction when standing in an Earthquake.

New Patch Buffs

Thanks to the new patch, we also get a powerful damage multiplier that scales with Strength stat. So that’s why we stack so much Strength to easily reach over 1,000% damage bonus. Of course, Temper to maintain the duration of Earthquake and damage to melee enemies are also important.

Items Needed For Pure HOTA Variant

For the pure HOTA variant, we want to add as many ranks as possible, so we have different priorities here. For equipment, we chose Banished Lord’s Talisman, Ring of Starless Skies, and Ring of Red Furor.

In the meantime, because we also want to stack strength and critical strike damage here, different weapons are also needed. You can add Grandfather Unique Two-Handed Sword to this setup, insert Runewords into the armor pieces, and fill the weapon with red gems to deal more overwhelming damage.

If you need more good equipment to optimize your build, then you might want to follow iGMeet Discord, where some giveaways from time to time may allow you to get some free resources.

Final Thoughts

In short, the above is all for this guide. Because this build has only been tested on Season 7 PTR so far and still needs to be patched and optimized, Quake-HOTA Barbarian Build you use must be much stronger than what you see so far, and you can customize it to your play style. However, keep in mind that when playing this build, the biggest damage comes from Earthquake, otherwise you can also try pure HOTA Barbarian, which is also fun and should be able to run high-level Pit. Let’s look forward to this build making Barbarian class shine in the new season!