Waste Whirlwind Rend Barbarian Guide

1. Do the Challenge Rift for the materials to cube Legendary Powers. You can complete this once a week for additional resources and we always update the guide for you!

2. Gather the full Wrath of the Wastes set. Each piece can be gambled from Kadala for Bloodshards. Do not salvage any duplicate pieces you find! Instead convert them to another part of the set with Recipe 4 in Kanai's Cube. If you have extra materials you can use Recipe 3 to craft the remaining pieces, but this is expensive and not recommended for new players.

3. Gamble from Kadala in this order:

1. The full Wrath of the Wastes set
2. Create a level 1 Barbarian and gamble for Band of Might
3. Lamentation
4. Warzechian Armguards and Nemesis Bracers, Mortick's Brace for other variants
5. Rechel's Ring of Larceny, keep Convention of Elements, Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, Focus and Restraint for the other variants
   
   

4. Craft using Recipe 3 in Kanai's Cube in this order:

1. Mighty Weapon to get Ambo's Pride
2. Swords to get In-geom
3. Two-Handed Axes to get Messerschmidt's Reaver
4. Maces to get Echoing Fury
5. Rings to get Rechel's Ring of Larceny, keep Convention of Elements, Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, Focus and Restraint for the other variants
6. Anything from the Gamble list in Step 3 that you haven't already acquired.
   
   

5. Do Bounties to acquire several important items for this build:

• Act 1: Ring of Royal Grandeur
• Act 2: Gloves of Worship
• Act 3: Avarice Band
• Bounty Turn In: Recipes for Captain Crimson's Trimmings, Sage's Journey and Cain's Destiny (for your follower)
  
  

6. There is one final required piece to piece to acquire, Squirt's Necklace. With amulets being so expensive to gamble and craft, we'll have to search for it to drop in Nephalem and Greater Rifts. It can drop on any class so try to group up with friends when possible to share your loot! Finally you can spice up your season by doing some Ubers to craft Hellfire Amulet (recipe can be bought from Squirt the Peddler in Act 2).

7. Use Primordial Ashes in Kanai's Cube with the new Curiosity of Lorath Nahr recipe to obtain a free Crafted Primal Ancient. Since you can only equip one of them, choosing the right item to focus matters! Great candidates are Weapons, Offhands, Jewelry or any item with an important multiplier. With that in mind, we recommend getting one of the following items:

• Pauldrons of the Wastes (go for Rend Damage, Cooldown Reduction and Area Damage)
• Lamentation
• Band of Might
• Squirt's Necklace

• Bane of the Trapped is the most common damage gem, and as we are a melee character, the rank 25 effect will slow all enemies within 15 yards providing us a flat 1.6 damage multiplier.
• Taeguk grants us up to 80% additive damage as well as a 20% Armor buff and is a great offensive gem since we are a channeling based build.
• Other popular choices are Bane of the Stricken for solo push, Boon of the Hoarder for Torment farming and Molten Wildebeest's Gizzard for a shield bonus in combination with Squirt's Necklace for double damage, some additional toughness and insane healing.

• Rend as our main damage dealer.
• Whirlwind to apply our Rend using Ambo's Pride.
• Furious Charge or Ground Stomp are used to proc Band of Might for a massive defensive boost, while also being used to maintain our Focus & Restraint buff for the 1.5 damage multipliers (for a total 2.25 damage multiplier).
• Wrath of the Berserker for an overall stat boost and Crowd Control immunity. Pair this skill with a Cooldown Reduction item like In-geom and/or Boon of Bul-kathos.
• The last two skill slots vary a lot from version to version. Popular choices are Battle Rage, Ignore Pain, War Cry and Sprint.

• Rampage is the strongest Barbarian passive there is with its 25% buff to total Strength. It provides a massive boost to both offense and defense (Armor).
• Boon of Bul-kathos is used to help us achieve 100% Wrath of the Berserker uptime.
• Other damage options include Brawler, Ruthless, and Berserker Rage. Nerves of Steel can be used as a defensive option.

¹ Add a bit of Vitality if you feel too squishy (a total of 700,000 Life is recommended).

The Altar of Rites is a tree that grants tremendous powers to your entire account in exchange for sacrifices. It requires you to farm Bounties, kill the Ubers, craft the Staff of Herding, and more. Completing all 26 of these tasks, along with sacrificing 6 Primal Ancients grants you extra Damage, Defense, Quality of Life, Increased Drops and 3 Potion Super Powers. Read the full guides on Unlocking the Altar and the Altar Mechanics by Raxxanterax and Chewingnom to learn everything about this fantastic mechanic!

Optimal Path

Patch 2.7.0 revamped the follower system giving all 3 hirelings new powers and the emanate system. The first thing you should do is read our complete follower guide and remember the key takeaways:

1. The emanation system allows followers to share certain legendary and set powers with you. The most important ones are: The Flavor of Time, Nemesis Bracers, Avarice Band, Sage’s Journey and Cain’s Destiny. Click the guide above for the full list.
2. Follower’s powers are based on their main stat (maxed at 25.000, but they have a 2.5x multiplier so you only need 10.000). This means we stack Intelligence on the Enchantress, Dexterity on the Scoundrel and Strength on the Templar.
3. Guardian's Jeopardy (3) Bonus works for followers by improving their inherent stat multiplier from x2.5 to x3.5, making it slightly easier to hit the 25,000 main stat threshold if needed.
4. Followers share 20% of their Experience, Magic and Gold Find stats with you.
5. Legendary gems do not work on followers, except Esoteric Alteration and Mutilation Guard.
6. Cooldown Reduction does not work for any follower skill except the Templar’s Heal.
7. Followers never deal significant damage; you’re on your own to clear the content.

With these in mind, let’s get into our recommendations for this build.
Select Follower

With Ambo's Pride our Whirlwind applies Rend and deals crazy amounts of damage. All other skills are there to buff your toughness, damage and movement speed. You want to Whirlwind almost all the time, never having to cast Rend itself in speed runs. Keep up all your buffs: Wrath of the Berserker, Battle Rage, Ignore Pain, War Cry and Sprint. Make sure to use Furious Charge or Ground Stomp to keep Band of Might and Focus & Restraint buffs.

This is a very hardcore friendly build as long as you make sure to always use Band of Might and Nerves of Steel.

Check out our dedicated Hardcore Survival Guide to learn more about how to succeed in this game mode!

• Has a base duration of 6 seconds, not 5 (the tooltip is straight up incorrect).
• Self-cast damage is only calculated off Mainhand. The Off-hand can be any off-rolled weapon for supporting purposes (Cooldown Reduction, Area Damage etc.). Whirlwind, and therefore Ambo's Pride, oscillates between both weapons.
• Scales with Critical Hit Chance & Critical Hit Damage but can not crit:
  Each Rend tick has (1 + Critical Hit Chance * Critical Hit Damage) as a separate multiplier.
  Only Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage that you see in your detail sheet, will scale it. Any debuff-Critical Hit Chance (Iceblink, Multishot Wind Chill, Corpse Lance Brittle Touch, Bash Onslaught, etc.) will not scale Rend.
• Battle Rage Bloodshed has no effect in regards to Rend damage (except for the base rune crit), because Rend does not crit.
• Rend instance snapshots Critical Hit Chance upon cast.
• Self-cast Rend does proc Area Damage.
• Rend Bloodbath explosions count as a separate Rend instance but are capped to 2 due to Lamentation. This makes Bloodbath by far the best damage rune (effectively doubling the damage output as long as you are constantly killing stuff).
• Rend ticks every 12 Frames (0.2 seconds). Damage is accumulated and displayed every 48 Frames (0.8 seconds).

• Ambo's Pride has a proc coefficient of 1 and applies a Rend on each Whirlwind tick.
• Rend applied by Ambo’s Pride does not proc Area Damage.
• Applies the equipped rune from the skill bar.
• Oscillates between Main-hand and Off-hand, just like Whirlwind.
• Can't exceed the base Lamentation cap of two stacks.

Pro 2H:

• 2-Handed Weapons gives 69% higher base average damage for your Rend:

• This is the average 2-handed Mace damage divided by average 1-handed Mace + average Mighty Weapon damage.
• If you factor in the 130% Critical Hit Damage of the second gem in the Off-hand weapon the total damage difference is 39.8%.

Pro Dual Wield:

• 20% more Cooldown Reduction for more Wrath of the Berserker, Call of the Ancients and Squirt's Necklace uptime.
• 130% more Critical Hit Damage as you gain a second gem in the Offhand.
• 20% more Elite damage due to Sun Keeper.
• 20% attack speed meaning faster Rend build up at 25 frames or 0.833 second instead of 30 frames or 1 second (25 frames breakpoint on Whirlwind instead of 30).
• Around 1600 more Main Stat and Armor as you gain an extra roll and augment from the Offhand.
• Faster manual Rend casts for Area Damage.

In the end both setups are very close to one another. Depending on the paragon and other stats 2-Hand is slightly more damage but less toughness. I personally can't really recommend one, I only played 2-Hand in the group video above, so again nice diversity! Just play with whatever good weapons you can find!