The Whirlwind Barbarian Guide provides an iconic playstyle that is loved by many - the classic "hold down one button and destroy everything in my path" playstyle, or as it is more commonly known, "spin to win."
Whether it's speedfarming, pushing Nightmare Dungeons, or anything in between - Whirlwind does it all. It is extremely versatile in both what it can accomplish and also in its choice of gearing. Feel like bludgeoning your foes to death in a whirling fit of rage? Pick up that Two-Handed Mace and go ham. Want to just spin faster and rip things to shreds? Then dual-wielding a One-Handed Mace and One-Handed Sword might be for you.
In this guide, we'll focus primarily on the latter choice, as it offers us a good balance of power and comfiness for much of the game. We eventually scale its power even more with the use of a powerful Unique item, Ramaladni's Magnum Opus.
For Season 4, we're also funneling a lot of our power into the buffed Dust Devils from Aspects such as Devilish and Fierce Winds, and increasing their size and effectiveness through newly added Tempered Affixes. Yep, spin2win just got a whole new meaning!
So if that sounds like your idea of a good time, then let out your loudest Rallying Cry as we Whirlwind our way through this Endgame Barbarian Guide.
This build guide assumes you have a Level 50 Character and finished the Campaign. Level up with our Whirlwind Barbarian Leveling Guide. If you are looking for a different Barbarian playstyle, check out all of our Barbarian Guides.
Season 4 - Loot Reborn
In Season 4, the Season Theme revolves around helping out the Iron Wolves. Compared to past themes, this one does not offer any borrowed power as the entire game has been redesigned with new itemization and crafting options, increasing player power substantially across the board. Instead, you can gather reputation similar to the Vampire Bounty Board from Season 2 to unlock rewards that supercharge your leveling journey to 100 with extra items, crafting materials and eventually even a Resplendent Spark to craft an uber unique.
We recommend to follow the seasonal questline until you unlock the reputation system, check which rewards suit you most and then follow your regular leveling path. To learn more, check out our full Season 4 guide for more information.
Skill Tree & Gameplay
The Whirlwind build is entirely melee-focused, as one might expect. The majority of the time, we hold down our spin button and everything around us dies.
- Lunging Strike is needed to progress the skill tree. This is dropped later on but is used for much of the early leveling process.
- Whirlwind is the core of our build, but not because of the base damage of the skill itself. We instead use it as a Bleed source and as our main way of spawning Dust Devils, which is where the bulk of our damage comes from.
- Rallying Cry provides us multiple buffs, including Fury regeneration, movement speed, and the invaluable Unstoppable effect while active.
- Challenging Shout boosts our defenses even higher with its massive damage reduction and health increase, while also Taunting any monsters in range.
- War Cry grants us the Berserking buff and a generous multiplicative damage boost while active.
- Ground Stomp is used for Elite packs and Bosses alongside Earthquake Aspect. While spinning in Earthquakes we get a nice damage multiplier to our Dust Devils, from the Aspect itself and the stomp Stun as well.
- Leap is taken for some extra mobility, Berserking, and Fury generation as needed.
- The gameplay loop goes something like this:
- Approach an enemy pack and Leap into it, activating Berserking and generating Fury in the process.
- Against normal enemies, activate Shouts for buffs as needed and to spawn Dust Devils. Then just Whirlwind to continuously spawn even more! Against Elite packs, follow up with a Ground Stomp after the initial Leap to Stun everything and proc Earthquake. Then you can spin.
- Against Bosses, Ground Stomp off cooldown to keep Fury and the Earthquake bonus active. Use Shouts whenever they are available to keep Dust Devils up. Remember that this is where the bulk of our damage comes from, not Whirlwind itself.
- That is really all there is to it. The majority of the gameplay is just holding down right click and spinning to your heart's content while watching the outbreak of tornadoes.
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.
For this purpose of this guide, the One-Handed Sword Expertise and One-Handed Mace Expertise are our main weapon choices since we are dual-wielding. The first offers us a way to help offset our Fury consumption, and to better utilize Ramaladni's Magnum Opus when it is acquired in the endgame. Our second choice has great utility when used against Stunned enemies, offering us a generic damage multiplier as well as another source of Berserking.
In the Technique Slot, the Two-Handed Axe increases your damage to Vulnerable enemies. Unfortunately, its secondary effect does not apply here - the limitation of the Technique Slot is that it does not allow you 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.
Resource & Cooldown Management
In order to play this build effectively, some attention is required in overcoming our Fury-spending issue, which can be a drawback early on. Here's what we do to help it:
- Using Tactical Rallying Cry. This is one of our main sources of Fury regeneration and we make sure this is active during any major fight.
- Leap and Ground Stomp can both be used as Fury generators.
- Taking Prolific Fury multiplies our Fury Generation.
- The One-Handed Sword Expertise inherently gives us a chance to gain Fury on hit.
- On the Warbringer paragon board, we take nodes that grant us Fury on Kill.
- Enhanced Whirlwind itself give us back Fury for each enemy we hit. This makes it ideal to always be fighting large groups of enemies when possible.
- Resource Cost Reduction on our Two-Handed Weapons drastically decreases our Fury comsunption.
Reductions to our Cooldowns (Shouts) are equally as important. Without ways to drastically mitigate their downtime, the build becomes weaker, slower, clunky, and unfun. We solve this by doing the following:
- Rolling Cooldown Reduction wherever we can get it. In our case, the Helm slot as well as the Amulet.
- Imprinting the Bold Chieftain's Aspect. It saves us up to 6 seconds on each of our Shouts under ideal circumstances, and really helps make the build feel smooth. Acquiring this should actively be one of our first priorities.
- Relentless Berserker's Aspect helps us keep our Berserking status from going on cooldown - if this ever falls off it is a large hit to our damage.
- Giant Strides is used to help keep Leap off cooldown.
- Rage of Harrogath is amazing for resetting cooldowns since we are constantly applying Bleed to enemies.
- The Disembowel Glyph works wonders for reducing cooldowns when fighting large groups, as long as we are applying Bleed. The can be used by simply swapping it withUndaunted.
- In general, being smart with our cooldowns and not using them where they aren't needed drastically improves our gameplay flow. This means not using Shouts when no enemies are around, saving Ground Stomp for tougher fights, etc.
Paragon Board
The early portion of this dual-wielding focused board is designed to help ease some early struggles that typically present themselves when leveling with Whirlwind, specifically Fury management. It also takes Blood Rage early to ensure we stay powerful throughout the leveling process. The final version eventually drops some of the early game utility in favor of more damage and more optimizations revolving around the use of Ramaladni's Magnum Opus.
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.
Glyphs
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.
Placeholder Glyphs
These Glyphs are only used while leveling because some of our endgame Glyphs can't be activated until they reach level 15. They are useful in the meantime, but don't level these Glyphs up because they will be replaced later. Both of these technically have some use later and can be considered a player preference, but for the purpose of this guide they are excluded from our main setup.
- Seething
Optional Glyphs:
- Disembowel
- This can be freely interchanged with Undaunted for more cooldown resets. Use whichever feels more comfortable.
Glyph Leveling Priorities
Level 15
- Twister
- Exploit
- Ire
- Ambidextrous
- Undaunted
- Territorial
Level 21
- Twister
- Ire
- Ambidextrous
- Territorial
- Undaunted
- Exploit
Also check out our dedicated in-depth guides to learn more about Paragon Boards and Glyphs.
Endgame Progression & Variants
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.
Progression Goals
Some of your Skill Tree choices depend on what Legendary Aspects and Unique items are available to you. These are listed in priority order:
- Unlock the following Aspects from Dungeons:
- Vocalized Empowerment in Sirocco Caverns
- Numbing Wrath in Heathen's Keep
- Iron Blood in Forgotten Ruins
- Relentless Berserker's in Hakan's Refuge
- Wind Striker in Shivta Ruins
- Berserk Ripping in Mournfield
- Edgemaster’s in Oldstones
- Dire Whirlwind in Garan Hold
- Brawler's in Haunted Refuge
- Find the following Legendary Aspects either as a random drop or by gambling with Obols:
- Bold Chieftain's: Gamble Rings
- Replaces Berserk Ripping.
- Giant Strides: Gamble Rings
- Replaces Vocalized Empowerment.
- Ancestral Charge: Gamble One-Handed Weapons
- Replaces Dire Whirlwind.
- Bold Chieftain's: Gamble Rings
- Acquire the following Unique items either as a random drop or by farming specific Boss drops.
Note: You cannot gamble Unique items with obols!- Ramaladni's Magnum Opus:
- Replaces Brawler's.
- Tibault's Will:
- Replaces Iron Blood and trades some defense for a large power increase.
- Rage of Harrogath:
- Replaces Relentless Berserker's. This becomes our primary way of reducing our cooldowns.
- Ramaladni's Magnum Opus:
- If you're lucky enough to obtain the following Uber Uniques, they're useful for the build.
- Ring of Starless Skies:
- Replaces Bold Chieftain's. Highly recommended to use this with Disembowel to help offset the loss of Shout cooldown reduction.
- Ring of Starless Skies:
Learn more details and how to farm Legendary Aspects and Uniques in our General Farming Guide.
Progression Setups
Follow the build's gearing progression from level 50 to 100, including the changes that need to be made as you obtain Legendary Aspects and Uniques.
Once you have completed the leveling guide, only the Codex of Power Aspects are guaranteed. With this setup you can farm the Legendary Aspects and Unique items you need for the next progression point.
Upon finishing the leveling process and approaching the endgame grind, many of the Aspects we use are already available to us from the Codex of Power. There is no reason we shouldn't put them to immediate use, since they can be imprinted as often as needed as we upgrade our gear. We'll start by doing the following:
Gear
Helm, Chest, Pants
- Numbing Wrath
- Relentless Berserker's
- Iron Blood
Gloves, One-Handed Weapons
- Edgemaster’s
- Brawler's
- Dire Whirlwind
Two-Handed Weapons
- Fierce Winds
- Dust Devil's
Boots
- Wind Striker
Amulet
- Devilish
Ring
- Vocalized Empowerment
- Berserk Ripping
This gives us a functional build to begin farming with. As a fair warning, leveling with Whirlwind in the early stages can sometimes feel underwhelming - there's no shame in switching up skills if you're struggling.
Skills
The preliminary version of our build makes a few changes to the skill tree to compensate for our lack of gear and to better suit our dual-wielding playstyle. Specifically:
- Early on, Lunging Strike earns a slot on our active skill bar early on to help mitigate Fury issues that could be present.
- We take points in Charge to use it as a secondary damage source with support from Brawler's.
Alternate Options:
- Call of the Ancients is very strong early on and can help alleviate some of our damage issues against Bosses. If Fury feels comfortable, replace Lunging Strike Otherwise, Challenging Shout can be replaced until the extra damage reduction is required.
Gameplay
The playstyle of this early version doesn't differ much from the endgame build, we're just trying to take things that are available and helpful to us early on that aren't required once the build is finished. Using Lunging Strike and Charge to help supplement our damage is the main difference.
In this setup, you have access to all Legendary Aspects, allowing you to pilot a much stronger version of this build. Additional Legendary Aspects are used to fill slots that may be replaced with Unique items later on.
At this point of progression, prioritize using any well-rolled Aspects on pieces of gear that will not be replaced soon. If they are not build-enabling, it is even acceptable to save them for endgame pieces.
Gear
Seek out the following aspects that aren't available in the Codex of Power:
- Bold Chieftain's Aspect replaces Berserk Ripping and helps keep our Shouts off cooldown more often.
- Giant Strides replaces Vocalized Empowerment. With Resource Cost Reduction and help from paragon, replacing this Aspect shouldn't feel too impactful in regards to Fury loss. If it does, Fury per Second can be taken as a roll on our Chest Armor.
- Ancestral Charge replaces Dire Whirlwind. Charge and its supporting Aspects just make leveling feel faster and more smooth until the build is completely online.
- It is important to start paying attention to Resistances the further we progress. If incoming damage becomes an issue, prioritize single Resistances on gear, particularly in the Jewelry slots.
Paragon Related Gear Changes:
- Damage while Berserking should start being prioritized once the Blood Rage paragon node has been activated. Until then, generic additives such as Damage to Close Enemies are better.
- Fury on Kill rolls can start being replaced on gear once nodes on the Warbringer board are picked up, or whenever it feels comfortable to drop them.
Skills
- We've added Leap here as a replacement for Lunging Strike. It accomplishes the same thing in generating Fury, but generally does it better. It's also a great mobility skill to help speed up leveling.
In this setup, you have access to all Legendary Aspects and Unique items, unleashing the strongest version of this build. Be prepared to grind to access some of these highly sought after items!
Gear
This is the final version of our build.
- Rage of Harrogath is swapped in place of Relentless Berserker's. This is incredibly useful for resetting our cooldowns, and gives us some great damage reduction and Critical Strike Chance as well.
- Relentless Berserker's moves to our Boots and replaces Wind Striker. With optimized gear we overcap on Movement Speed so this loss won't be felt. Relentless Berserker's is important for keeping Berserking up on Bosses so we don't have to break our Whirlwind channel.
- Ramaladni's Magnum Opus is our best weapon for increasing the damage done by Dust Devils. It gives us a massive boost in power when we prioritize Maximum Fury on our gear and paragon. It replaces Brawler's since we aren't using Charge in this setup.
- For the same reason, we replace Ancestral Charge and pick up Earthquake for an extra generic damage multiplier.
- Tibault's Will occupies our Pants slot, replacing Iron Blood for a rather large damage increase.
Skills
Ground Stomp replaces Charge with this setup. This is great addition because it locks down enemy Elite packs and provides a damage boost in combination with Earthquake. The added Fury generation is also a nice touch, and keeps our Fury levels high and helps spawn extra Dust Devils. With Rage of Harrogath cooldown resets it has pretty decent uptime on Boss fights, which is where we really want to squeeze out as much extra damage as possible. Taking an "Earthquake Duration" Tempered affix (instead of Whirlwind Size) is also a solid option for this.
Gameplay
The gameplay loop is pretty much the same! With our added Uniques, we are just much stronger while doing it.
Hardcore Adjustments
Hardcore requires you to build into more defenses. Here are some tips to successful in this game mode:
- Prioritize more defensive rolls on gear, such as Maximum Life on Rings or Amulet.
- Tibault's Will can always be replaced with a Defensive Aspect, such as Iron Blood.
Build Scaling & Stat Priorities
Learn about the important build scaling mechanics and stat weights.
Fury and Cooldown Reduction:
- Our Fury and Cooldown management is instrumental to our success when playing Whirlwind.
- Due to constantly being channeled, Whirlwind has a high rate of Fury consumption. In order to be able to use this skill continuously, we need to put effort into maintaining its regeneration. Rolling Resource Cost Reduction on gear helps this pretty tremendously.
- Enhanced Whirlwind inherently returns Fury when hitting enemies.
- Cooldown Reduction is available on Helms and Amulets.
- To have our Shouts (and Fury generation) up as much as possible, we invest into Cooldown Reduction which is further bolstered by the Bold Chieftain's Aspect.
- Rage of Harrogath resets all of our cooldowns when we inflict Bleed.
Weapon Damage:
- Our Whirlwind only scales off the weapon(s) that we are currently using. This means that in all other weapon slots, the only requirement is an item level of 780 or more (to maximize ranges on the stats that can roll.) Weapon damage does not matter on these.
Damage while Berserking:
- One of the biggest generic sources of increased damage for us. Berserking acts as a 1.25x multiplier while it is active, and this damage scales even higher with the help of the Blood Rage paragon node. Because of this, we want to prioritize Berserking status at all times and take enough sources of Damage while Berserking to reach its cap.
- War Cry is a great way to instantly activate Berserking.
- Both Leap and Charge grant Berserking when combined with the Battle Fervor passive.
- The One-Handed Mace Expertise grants us a chance to activate Berserking through Lucky Hits.
Critical Strike Damage:
- This is a good generic additive damage source to prioritize when possible, as it usually has higher rolls than other additives. With good endgame gear, our Critical Strike change is very high, so we tend to get slightly better mileage out of this compared to other options. It's important to note that Critical Strike Damage rolls (and any other additive damage roll) on all of our weapons apply to us even if we are not using them with out main skill.
- Whenever a Critical Strike is dealt, the resulting damage is multiplied by 1.5x
- To help our odds of dealing Critical Strikes, we take Critical Strike Chance as a priority roll on Gloves, Rings, and Amulet.
Vulnerable Damage:
- This status acts as a 1.2x multiplier to our damage. We don't actively try to scale Vulnerable damage beyond this, since it acts as just another additive damage source.
- Exploit allows us to inflict Vulnerable whenever we initiate combat, and can be a main source of application. However, once its duration ends, we have to wait quite a while for its effect to activate again.
- Taking a Lucky Hit: Chance to Make Enemies Vulnerable roll on one Ring is usually an efficient way to keep this debuff active once Exploit expires.
Damage from Stuns:
- The One-Handed Mace Expertise increases our damage against Stunned enemies.
- Enhanced Charge provides us a way to Stun. The Concussion passive provides us a Lucky Hit-based option as well.
- Ground Stomp Stuns all enemies in its radius.
- Wallop multiplies damage if enemies are Stunned or Vulnerable.
Damage Reduction:
- Challenging Shout is one of our main sources of damage reduction. We can further increase its effectiveness by rolling + Ranks of this skill on our Chest Armor.
- We take various forms of damage reduction through rolls on our gear, such as:
- Damage Reduction from Close Enemies
- Damage Reduction while Fortified
- Damage Reduction from Enemies That Are Bleeding
- Aggressive Resistance is a source of damage reduction while we are Berserking.
- Pit Fighter offers us a small amount of Distant Damage Reduction.
- If desirable, Iron Skin in combination with Aspect of the Iron Warrior can be a source of flat damage reduction.
- There is a stacking damage reduction with our Shouts thanks to Guttural Yell.
- While enemies are Bleeding, we benefit from Iron Blood Aspect.
Fortify:
- While we are Fortified, we gain a baseline 10% damage reduction that can be scaled even further with Royal Sapphires in our Helm, Chest Armor, and Pants.
- Numbing Wrath can be used to constantly generate Fortify.
- The Vampiric Power, Sanguine Brace, is used as a way to consistently generate Fortify.
Armor:
Another form of damage mitigation. Armor is important as it is not conditional and always in effect. It reduces all incoming Physical damage by a percentage, so a high armor value is extremely ideal.
- Our Strength stat inherently grants us Armor, with a 1:1 ratio.
- Aspect of Disobedience increases our total Armor by a percentage.
- Royal Skulls can be socketed in Amulet and Rings for additional Armor, but they contend with gems that grant Resistances.
- % Total Armor rolls are taken on non-Unique Helmet, Chest Armor, and Pants.
Unstoppable:
- Enhanced Rallying Cry is our main source if prolonged Unstoppable.
- Charge grants us this effect during its attack animation.
- Wrath of the Berserker provides us Unstoppable for 5 seconds on use.
Unstoppable is our means of ignoring or escaping the many types of enemy Crowd Control effects.
Our Damage Explained article explains how to scale your Offense.
Learn all you need to know to scale Defense with our Defense Explained Article.
Stat Priorities
There are many stats and status effects that generate on gear, but many are not important for your build. See below for a general breakdown as well as a per slot priority list in the list.
- Helm: Numbing Wrath
- Maximum Fury ↑ ↑
- Cooldown Reduction
- Strength
- ⚒️Imposing Presence ↑
- ⚒️Concussion (as needed) / Crowd Control Duration
- Chest Armor: Rage of Harrogath
- Damage Reduction from Bleeding Enemies ↑ ↑ ↑
- Physical Critical Strike Chance Against Elites
- Physical Damage
- Thorns
- Otherwise Look For: Bul-Kathos
- Strength ↑ ↑
- Maximum Life
- Resistance / Armor (as needed)
- ⚒️Imposing Presence ↑
- ⚒️Concussion (as needed) / Crowd Control Duration
- Gloves: Edgemaster's
- Armor
- Critical Strike Chance ↑ ↑ ↑
- Resistance (as needed)
- ⚒️Concussion
- ⚒️Damage to Close Enemies
- Pants: Tibault's Will
- Increased Damage while Unstoppable (20%)
- Maximum Resource ↑ ↑ ↑
- Damage Reduction from Close Enemies
- % Damage
- Potion Capacity
- Otherwise Look For: Iron Blood
- Strength ↑ ↑
- Maximum Life
- Resistance / Armor (as needed)
- ⚒️Imposing Presence ↑
- ⚒️Concussion (as needed) / Crowd Control Duration
- Boots: Relentless Berserker's
- Movement Speed ↑ ↑
- + Ranks to Leap
- Maximum Life / Resistance (as needed)
- ⚒️Movement Speed
- ⚒️Concussion ↑
- Amulet: Devilish
- Critical Strike Chance ↑ ↑
- Cooldown Reduction
- Movement Speed
- ⚒️Imposing Presence ↑
- ⚒️Movement Speed
- Ring 1: Giant Strides
- Critical Strike Chance ↑ ↑ ↑
- Resistance (as needed)
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️War Cry Cooldown Reduction
- ⚒️Damage while Berserking
- Ring 2: Bold Chieftain's
- Critical Strike Chance ↑ ↑ ↑
- Resistance (as needed)
- Lucky Hit: Chance to Make Enemies Vulnerable
- ⚒️War Cry Cooldown Reduction
- ⚒️Damage while Berserking
- Two-Handed Bludgeoning Weapon: Fierce Winds
- Strength ↑ ↑
- Resource Cost Reduction
- Critical Strike Damage / Maximum Life
- ⚒️Dust Devil Size ↑
- ⚒️Damage to Close Enemies
- Dual-Wield Weapon 1: Ramaladni's Magnum Opus
- High Damage Per Second
- Increased Damage per Point of Fury (0.4)
- Maximum Fury ↑ ↑ ↑
- Damage to Close Enemies
- Damage with Dual-Wielded Weapons
- Otherwise Look For: Elements
- High Damage Per Second
- Strength
- Critical Strike Damage
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Whirlwind Size / Earthquake Duration ↑ ↑ ↑
- ⚒️Damage to Close Enemies
- Dual-Wield Weapon 2 (Mace): Earthquake
- High Damage Per Second
- Strength
- Critical Strike Damage
- Maximum Life
- ⚒️Whirlwind Size / Earthquake Duration ↑ ↑ ↑
- ⚒️Damage to Close Enemies
- Two-Handed Slashing Weapon (Sword): Dust Devil's
- Strength
- Resource Cost Reduction
- Critical Strike Damage / Maximum Life
- ⚒️Chance for Dust Devil Projectiles to Cast Twice ↑ ↑ ↑
- ⚒️Damage to Close Enemies
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
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.
Furious Whirlwind vs. Violent Whirlwind:
How do I assign skills to the correct weapon?
Why not use Gohr's Devastating Grips?
Why am I running out of Fury?
Mechanics
Learn about the mechanical details which makes the build tick.
Whirlwind
Fortify
Summary
The Whirlwind Barbarian offers a comfy and enjoyable way to experience all that the game has to offer. Dungeons? Spin. Helltide? Spin. Uber Lilith? Maybe spin. A lot. Basically, whatever it is you wish to accomplish, the answer is more than likely spin.
Credits
Written by snail
Reviewed by Facefoot
