Whirlwind (EQ) Barbarian Endgame Build Guide

• Bring up your active skills (default keybind: [s]).
• Hover over the skill you wish to assign a weapon to.
• Cycle through the available weapons to choose which to assign to the skill (default keybind: MOUSE3).

To see which weapons for each skill are used in this build, hover over the skill bar in the introduction of this guide.

This build can be very resource intensive, especially in the early stages. Some things that can help:

• Prioritize Rallying Cry being active as often as possible. This is especially valuable when combined with the Vocalized Empowerment Aspect.
• Fury Cost Reduction can be be rolled on Two-Handed Weapons. Replace an offensive stat like Vulnerable Damage or Critical Strike Damage with this instead. Fury on Kill is another great option in this slot.
• Roll Fury per Second on gear, notably Boots, since this slot is often not occupied by a Unique item.
• Use skills like Ground Stomp and Call of the Ancients to help recoup Fury. There's no shame in resorting to a Basic Skill generator like Lunging Strike, either.
• Ring of Starless Skies, though it can't be obtained until much later, is huge for minimizing Fury consumption.
• The Lum Rune is great for passively generating Fury. It can be combined with trigger Runes like Poc or Igni.
• Try to avoid Attack Speed on gear whenever possible; this stat makes Whirlwind consume Fury at a much faster rate.
• When there are no enemies around, just run! There is no need to spam Whirlwind while travelling if it's only going to drain Fury.

Weapons Master has 2 distinct effects that work independent of each other:

• Swapping weapons grants you 8% of your Maximum Fury.
• You deal 30% increased damage to Healthy and Injured enemies.

The second effect is useful for all builds, as it affects you regardless if you weapon swap or not. The first effect is only useful on our Pit Pushing variant, as it is the only variant that takes advantage of the weapon swapping mechanic.

• Earthquakes tick for damage every 0.5s
• Earthquakes only use skill variance: [dmg*0.9,dmg*1.1].
• You can have 10 Earthquakes active at the same time (including Tec and "cast twice" EQ's)
• Earthquakes can not trigger Lucky Hit effects.
• Earthquakes can not Overpower.

Earthquake sources and their Skill% scaling at max ranks are:

With "Skill% scaling" we mean the value used as "Skill%" in the general damage formula found in our In-Depth Damage Guide.

Interactions that work with Earthquake

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they are functional. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

Interactions that partially work with Earthquake

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they have buggy/unintutive interactions. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

• Runes
  • [BUG] Earthquakes from the Tec Rune does x20% more damage than expected compared to the base value of 700%.

• Skills and Passives
  • When you spawn an Earthquake by any means except the Tec rune, the rank 10 Polearm bonus from Polearm Expertise drops until you use a skill that has a Polearm selected as its arsenal selection.

Interactions that do not work with Earthquake

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they are not functional. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

• Aspects
  • Edgemaster's

• Skills and Passives
  • Furious Upheaval

• Glyphs
  • Earthquake crits do not count towards Wrath Fury gain.

• Whirlwind can not Overpower.
• Whirlwind snapshots Attack Speed effects at the start of its channel. Buffs/effects that are procced during a channel do not apply before you stop the current channel and start a new one.
• Using Whirlwind applies a 25% penalty to your Movement Speed, meaning if you have 150% Movement Speed you'd only have 150%*(1-25%) = 112.5% Movement Speed when using Whirlwind. Being Unhindered while using Whirlwind cancels the 25% penalty meaning you move with full speed.
• Whirlwind spends 40% of the in-game tooltip Fury amount for each attack animation. For example:
  • If we have 0% Resource Cost Reduction (RCR), 0% Attack Speed and assigned a 2H Mace for Whirlwind (26 frames for attack animation, you can find breakpoints in the Attack Speed Breakpoints menu below), we will drain: 25*40%*(60/26) = 23.077 Fury per second.
  • If we instead have 15% RCR, 30% Attack Speed and assigned Dual Wield weapons for Whirlwind (16 frames for attack animation), we will drain: 25*(1-15%)*40%*(60/16) = 31.875 Fury per second.

Attack Speed

The following Attack Speed % sources function for Whirlwind. For a more in-depth explanation of how Attack Speed works, please read our Attack Speed Mechanics article.

Interactions that work with Whirlwind

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they are functional. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

Interactions that do not work with Whirlwind

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they are not functional. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

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• The Unconstrained (UC) Key Passive increases the global damage multiplier of Berserking from 25%[x] to 60%[x], and while below 65% HP you are always Berserking and gain 30% physical damage reduction.
• The interaction with Wrath of the Berserker functions the same as with the base 25%[x] multiplier here, increasing the 60%[x] Berserking multiplier by 25% for every 50 Fury spent:

• The physical damage reduction does not have any effect on the hit that takes you below 65% HP, the physical DR is only applied to damage taken while you are below 65% HP.

• The base functionality adds Earthquake damage to your additive damage bucket based on how much strength is found in the glyph range.
• [BUG] The additional bonus of dealing 10%[x] increased damage against bosses and crowd controlled enemies for each active Earthquake up to 50%[x], is applied in steps of 10% multiplicatively and thus goes above the 50% cap for a total damage increase of: (1+10%)^5 - 1 = 61.1%[x].
• The legendary bonus works as expected and is a separate multiplier on Earthquake damage.

• Blood Rage is a global multiplier [x] for all your damage which scales off of your Damage while Berserking stat, up to a cap of 45%[x] damage increase with 450%[+] Berserking damage.

• Force of Nature is a multiplier [x] for Earthquake damage which scales off of 40% of your Close Damage, up to a cap of 200%[x] damage increase.
• [BUG] It appears that the tooltip of Force of Nature scales with the statsheet value of Close Damage (which is affected by Pit Fighter and Ire multipliers), however only the Ire glyph works an actual damage increase to the Force of Nature multiplier, ranks in Pit Fighter will increase the tooltip value but won't actually increase the actual damage output. In summary, Ire double-dips its Close Damage multiplier for Earthquakes by being a global multiplier and also increasing the Force of Nature multiplier.

• Every time you swap weapons, i.e. you cast a skill that uses a different weapon than the one you're currently holding, Weapons Master generates 8% of your maximum Fury.
• This works even when using the different attacks of Iron Maelstrom.
• [BUG] Weapons Master applies its 30% as both an additive and a multiplicative value for damage vs Healthy and Injured enemies, meaning if you no other additive damage vs Healthy stats for instance, your statsheet value will be: (1+additive%)*multipliers-1 = statsheetValue -> (1+30%)*1.3-1 = 69% (same for damage vs Injured).

EQtickDmg = [wpnDmg] * [Skill%] * [1+mainstat/1000] * [1+add%] * [multipliers] * 2 * 1/8

where the 2 is from Earthquakes having a bug that makes them deal double damage compared to their tooltip values, and the 1/8 represents the damage of 1 tick (4s duration with a tick every 0.5s). The total tick damage of an Earthquake and a detonation is simply written as:

EQtotalTickDmg = [wpnDmg] * [Skill%] * [1+mainstat/1000] * [1+add%] * [multipliers] * 2 * [1+(EQduration%-mod(EQduration%,12.5%)]

EQdetonationDmg = [wpnDmg] * [Skill%] * [1+mainstat/1000] * [1+add%] * [multipliers] * 2 * [1+EQduration%]

which is roughly the same amount when we account for the number of EQ ticks only going up by 1 every step of 12.5% duration, by comparison the explosion damage scales continously with more duration. Each Earthquake tick has a separate roll to cause a Critical Strike on each individual enemy hit, where as an Earthquake detonation just rolls a Critical Strike on each individual enemy hit as it's 1 instance of damage instead of several ticks.

Some findings about the detonations:

• EQ duration affects the explosion damage.
• The unique effect on the chest has no effect on the explosion damage.
• The size of the explosion scales with increased Earthquake Size and goes further than the area covered by an Earthquake (exception being the Tec Rune where the explosion only happens within the area of an Earthquake).
• The number of exploded Earthquakes has no effect on their damage, each Earthquake tracks its own explosion damage.
• The damage of a detonation is not affected by how long an Earthquake has already been active, popping it after 0.5 or 3.5s yields the same detonation damage.
• The damage increase from ‍Violent Hammer of the Ancients is a dynamic multiplier which means it affects detonation damage even if it wasn't active when an Earthquake was spawned.
• Spawning an Earthquake while wielding ‍Ramaladni's Magnum Opus increases the damage of an Earthquake for all its damage ticks by an amount corresponding to how much Fury we had when that Earthquake was spawned, and this damage multiplier also carries over to when that Earthquake is detonated (i.e. it's snapshotted at Earthquake spawn).
• The weapon that you are wielding when spawning an Earthquake is also snapshotted, meaning if you're holding an ilvl 800 2H Mace compared to wielding ilvl 800 1H Swords, the Earthquake that was spawned while holding a 2H Mace will deal more damage when detonated compared to if it was spawned while wielding 1H Swords.
• The ‍Ring of Starless Skies buff is dynamic for Earthquake ticks and is also dynamic for the detonation.
• A list of aspects and passives that are applied to Earthquake explosions include but is not limited to:
  • Earthquakes
  • Incendiary Fissures
  • Executioner's
  • Force of Nature
  • Heavy Handed
  • Heavy Hitter
  • Pit Fighter
  • Slaying Strike
  • Wallop
  • Warpath
  • Weapons Master (adds +30% additive damage and a x30% multiplier vs Healthy and Injured enemies)

In general, if a multiplier snapshots to an Earthquake for its regular tick damage when that Earthquake is created, it will also be active for the detonation. See the Earthquake header for more information on Earthquake interactions.

The unique effect of Ugly Bastard Helm converts all your damage to Fire damage while you're Berserking and provides a Fire damage multiplier on top. The only exception to this is Bleed damage which stays as Physical damage but still gets the Fire multiplier on top. All other additive damage sources function as normal. In other words:

• [BUG] The Fire Damage proc does not gain the Fire damage multiplier unless you are Berserking.
• The Fire Damage proc works with Berserk Ripping, and the resulting Bleed has no variance in its damage.
• The Fire Damage proc works with Ramaladni's Magnum Opus when Dual Wielding.

Berserking is a vital mechanic for the Barbarian, securing high Berserking uptime with your build is often essential to making your character as powerful as possible.

• Berserking provides a global 1.25[x] damage multiplier (1.6[x] with the Unconstrained key passive) and 25%[+] movement speed.

Working sources and interactions of Berserking

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they are functional. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

Interactions that do not work with Berserking

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they are not functional. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

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• Fortify can be seen as an extra layer of defense that acts alongside your health. It's built up through various skills, glyphs, passives and paragon nodes and can reach the same value as your max HP. While you have equal or more Fortify than your current HP, you have an additional 15% generic damage reduction.
• It should be noted that damage reductions are applied through inverse multiplication, which means if you're taking 1000 damage from a hit without being Fortified, you will take: 1000*(1-15%) = 850 damage if you instead were Fortified. If you for example are Fortified and have an additional 10% damage reduction against Close enemies, you will instead take: 1000*(1-15%)*(1-10%) = 765 damage from Close enemies. This is how all separate damage reduction sources function in Diablo 4.
• Fortify is a dynamic damage reduction. This means that if you have more HP than Fortify, but the next hit will bring your HP below your current amount of Fortify, the game will look at how big the incoming hit is compared to your current HP and Fortify amount and calculate how much of the 15% Fortify damage reduction should be accounted for. We can set it up a general equation which given your current HP, current Fortify and the damage you will take from the incoming hit without being Fortified ("dmg" in the formula below), will calculate your remaining HP and whether to account for a partial Fortify damage reduction:

• The above equation covers all 3 damage taken cases of:
  • Your HP is lower or equal to your Fortify amount (full 15% reduction)
  • The incoming hit will take you below your current Fortify amount (partial reduction)
  • The incoming hit will not take you below your current Fortify amount (no reduction)

Interactions that work with Fortify

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they are functional. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

Interactions that partially work with Fortify

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they have buggy/unintuitive interactions. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

• Glyphs
  • The additional bonus from the Undaunted glyph does not work as expected. The additional damage reduction is not applied based on the amount of Fortify you have before you take a hit, but by the amount of Fortify you have after you take a hit. If you for example have 100% HP and Fortify before taking a hit, if you have 50% Fortify after taking that hit you gain 50% of the Undaunted bonus, e.g. 10%*50% = 5% damage reduction for that hit.

Interactions that do not work with Fortify

The following interactions have been verified through damage recording or footage to ensure they are not functional. Anything not listed here has not explicitly been verified during the creation of this list.

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