General Leveling Tips
To find out more general information about leveling as a Barbarian in Diablo 4, you can check out our main Barbarian Leveling guide. You can also go to our Barbarian Builds page for a list of other leveling and endgame Barbarian builds for you to choose from.
In regard to leveling up on the seasonal realm, you might also want to check out our season checklist, as it will give you some useful tips and tricks for Season 6 of Diablo 4. Don’t miss this chance to make the most out of your leveling journey!
Build Introduction
The point of this leveling guide is to quickly take your character from Level 1 to 60 while using the 
Upheaval skill and prepare you for to easily transition into our Upheaval Endgame Build. This guide will review skill point placement as you level from 1 – 60, explaining the purpose and how each passive and skill work together to create power to tackle whatever leveling format you choose. We will also discuss which Legendary Aspects, Affixes, Gem, and Elixirs we can utilize for purposes of accelerating the leveling process.
Our primary skills in this build are 
Lunging Strike as our primary Fury Generator. We augment this skill using:
- Enhanced Lunging Strike – The major benefit to this augment is the opportunity to heal.
- Combat Lunging Strike – This helps us maintain a state of Berserking through the use of Critical Strikes, it can be used as a trigger or as a way to extend the Berserking buff longer.
Our Core skill in this is Upheaval. This is our primary spender and what we will be using to smash our enemies into oblivion. We augment this skill using:
- Enhanced Upheaval – The Stun effect can break up combat and offer us the chance to reposition or remove ourselves from a bad situation.
- Violent Upheaval – As with our previous skill, we are focusing on our state of Berserking, being in Berserk will be a key component to this build.
Now that we understand our two most basic skills, our Generator and Spender, we can look deeper into how we will be allocating our skill points as we journey from Level 1 to Level 50.
Allocation of Skill points
Your first 20 skill points are used to acquire all of your skills, filling in passive points only as needed to get to the next tier. The allocation of these points is listed below.
As you can see in the table above, we have all of our skills outside of our Key Passive. This completes our entire skill bar relatively quickly. If you are making a Seasonal Character, you already start with up to 12 skill points, so it is even faster.
Your complete skill bar will look like this:
Rallying Cry 
War Cry 
Leap 
Wrath of the Berserker Lunging Strike Upheaval Now that you are ready to fight the hordes of hell with all your skills filled out, we can fill in your passive points with each level up. As for which passives to take once you have completed your skill load-out and Key Passive, we recommend the following ranked by importance.
Skill Tree
Here is the completed skill tree for the build:
Skill Clusters
Let’s review each cluster in the Skill Tree and discuss our reasons behind each passive and skill choice, so we have a good understanding of the build before we transition into the Upheaval Endgame build. Keep in mind, if you are leveling a new seasonal character, you will have some additional skill points to spend at the beginning.
Basic Skills
Lunging Strike is our choice for the basic skill in this build and will be kept at Level 1. This skill is used constantly, as our Fury pool will be more challenging to keep up until we have more points to invest in our Fury Generation. The advantage of using this skill is the built-in heal and damage increase for a strike against any Healthy (life above 80%) monster. Essentially, you are trying to hit every full life monster around as you rotate through your skills. The second advantage we have here is Critical Strikes trigger Berserking. This will become more common as we equip our targeted affixes (Critical Strike Chance) for rings and gloves.
Core Skills
Our Core skill is Upheaval, this is used as our main Fury spender. As we gain Fury through Tactical Rallying Cry, 
Prolific Fury and Lunging Strike attacks, we will then deplete our pool by spamming Upheaval. Your positioning will be key during this spam attack. This may take time to feel smooth, but you want to target packs of enemies. Do your best to use it when you have groups of monsters and not waste it on small single target.
Defensive Skills
Our Defensive cluster has three of our skills and should be obtained quite quickly, especially if you are playing a new season. These skills are powerful components to keep us fighting effectively and quickly. Let’s look at our choices below.
- Rallying Cry – This skill is one of the main drivers for our Fury Generation, not only does it grant us 20 Fury upon activation but increases our generations by 40%. However, this skill comes with a significant defensive capability: Unstoppable. This is our crowd control breaker, it will allow us free movement for 6 seconds. Very important, especially with Boss encounters.
Challenging Shout – This skill gives us Damage Reduction and an increase in Life, perfect for surviving large packs of enemies. It also comes with the added ability of Thorns which can prove to be helpful, as this deals additional damage as enemies deal damage to us. Once you have enough resource generation through tempering affixes or affixes on your gear such as Fury on Kill or Fury Per Second, 
Lunging Strike becomes less necessary as you will often be able to maintain your resources through Shouts and 
Power Leap alone. When this happens replace Lunging Strike on your bars with this skill.
As for the passives in this cluster, we take three levels of 
Imposing Presence and 
Aggressive Resistance These increase our survivability and are helpful all the way into the endgame.
Brawling Skills
This cluster is all about passives. These passives are going to enhance this build and make everything from our Shouts to Berserking feel smoother. Let’s look at each one below.
- War Cry – Grants us Berserking and Fortified Life.
- Leap – Is our main mobility skill and will give us Fury through Power Leap
Swiftness – Movement speed is always a priority.
Aggressive Resistance – Increases our Damage Reduction while Berserking.- Prolific Fury – Increases our Fury Generation
Weapon Mastery Skills
Again, here we focus on passives only. Let’s look at each one below.
Pit Fighter – Increases offenses and defenses for Close Enemies.
Thick Skin – This gives us the ability to trigger Fortify and all of its benefits everything time we get hit.
Counteroffensive – This increases our Damage output while we are Fortified and still above 50% Life.
Ultimate Skill
For our Ultimate skill we are using 
Wrath of the Berserker for its powerful interactions with our key passive of choice and on-demand Berserking activation. Simply use this skill whenever you run into a Hellborne, The Butcher, Bosses, or any tough Elite monster to help you push through it.
Key Passive
Unconstrained is our choice for the increase in Berserking duration and overall damage. This amplifies all of our abilities, and as we raise our Critical Strike Chance, we will be able to trigger it easily with our basic attack Lunging Strike.
Mercenaries
As you play through the campaign in Vessel of Hatred, you will unlock various NPC Mercenaries who can join you on your quest to slay demons. Each Mercenary has their own small talent tree that will give them bonuses and skills to help you. Additionally, you can assign a Mercenary that you don’t take with you as a reinforcement to jump in when you activate certain skills. Let’s take a look at how we want to set this up for this build
We hire Varyana, the Berserker Crone
- Core Skill:
Cleave - Core Skill Passive:
Hysteria - Iconic Skill:
Bloodthirst - Iconic Skill Passive:
Bloodlust
Our Reinforcement Mercenary will be Raheir, the Shieldbearer
Mechanics and Playstyle
The majority of your power in this leveling build comes from Upheaval, aiming this into a group of mobs and cutting them down is your goal. Start off with War Cry and Rallying Cry to keep our Fury generation high and trigger Berserking, we can easily manage our enemies by using our basic attack skill or offloading all of our Fury with Upheaval then building back up again.
Our other defensive skills and Challenging Shout, will be use to manage the monsters during the downtime when we do not have enough Fury for Upheaval. This rotational way of playing will become important as it prepares you for the endgame version of this build which is played with a very similar skill set. Let’s review some other important elements we use to power ourselves up for leveling.
Berserking
The most challenging component you are going to have to learn is how to manage Berserking. We have a couple of options to trigger a state of Berserk and add to its uptime, and when done properly, you can keep this state triggered indefinitely. This requires a lot movement to ensure you’re hitting multiple targets with your Upheaval. We gain two seconds of Berserking from our Violent Upheaval perk when two or more enemies are hit. Keeping this in mind and cycling your shouts properly should keep your Berserking renewed constantly. This will become challenging in the early levels when you are struggling with Fury generation, but will vastly improve as you level up and add the needed Legendary Aspects to this leveling build. Additionally, as you begin to use gear with the increase to Critical Strike Chance affix, you will be able to trigger Berserking through your basic attack Combat Lunging Strike. Lastly, and most dependable, is War Cry for easy trigger for Berserking.
Leveling Options
There are many options to level your character: kill monsters, do quests in each region, follow the Seasonal storyline, farm generic dungeons, participate in regional events, etc. With so many ways to get to Level 60, we have chosen some methods that will accelerate your experience gains.
Open World Activities
The open world is full of monsters and activities, you are welcome to find your own path or leveling areas but if you are looking for some great options, here are two great suggestions for this build:
Helltide
Helltide is now always open from the start of the game and remains a fantastic option for leveling and gearing quickly in Vessel of Hatred. It provides stronger monsters for more experience and chests to get Legendary Aspects and loot as well as a mini-boss, The Blood Maidens, who drop a great many items when slain. Helltides are active for 55 minutes of every hour, with 5 minutes of downtime before a new Helltide spawns. For more details check out our Barbarian Leveling Guide.
Questing & Strongholds
Questing is a necessary evil if you are still grinding out your renown levels for each zone. If you need to complete your Renown, it can be a relatively easy way to get some quick experience along the way. If this is something you need to do, take as many quests as you can from one area and complete them all in one go. It may not feel necessarily faster, but going back and forth for each one is a waste of time.
In Vessel of Hatred, Strongholds have been slightly revamped to give massive amounts of experience the first time you complete them. Going through and doing each Stronghold across the various zones can net you a lot of fast levels as well as large renown gains to help you reach certain renown milestones if you haven’t completed them.
Gear Affixes
In the early levels, targeting affixes on your gear can be very challenging. The best opportunity for rare gear is a maximum of 2 affixes. We will show three recommended affixes to give you some flexibility in what you will want. We will also be listing a Tempering Affix for each slot, keep in mind that tempering is more of an end-game system and with the frequency of gear replacements may not be the optimal thing to do while leveling. Items may have up to two tempers placed on them as long as they are not from the same tempering category. For example you cannot have two tempers from the “Offensive” category. As such we will be listing the most important temper for each item slot below
| Gear Slot | Targeted Affixes | Tempering Affix |
|---|---|---|
| Helm | 1. Cooldown Reduction 2. Attack Speed 3. Maximum Life 4. Needed Resistance | 1. Upheaval Size  Brute Innovation |
| Chest | 1. Maximum Life 2. Strength 3. Needed Resistance | 1. Upheaval Size Brute Innovation |
| Gloves | 1. Critical Strike Chance 2. Ranks of Upheaval3. Attack Speed 4. Strength | 1. Damage While Berserking Berserking Finesse |
| Pants | 1. Maximum Life 2. Strength 3. Needed Resistance | 1. Upheaval Size Brute Innovation |
| Boots | 1. Movement Speed 2. Fury Per Second 3. Ranks to Leap | 1. Movement Speed Natural Motion |
| Amulet | 1. Cooldown Reduction 2. Attack Speed 3. Fury on Kill | 1. Resource Generation Worldly Stability |
| Rings | 1. Critical Strike Chance 2. Fury on Kill 3. Attack Speed | 1. Resource Generation Worldly Stability |
| Weapons | 1. Strength 2. Fury on Kill 3. Maximum Life | 1. Chance for Upheaval to Deal Double Damage Core Augments — Barbarian |
Gems
Listed below are the best gems to socket into gear for each slot type.
- Weapon:
Topaz for Basic Skill Damage until around level 40 and then 
Ruby for Overpower damage after - Armor:
Ruby for the increase to Strength - Jewelry:
Diamond for the All Resistances.
Runes
While leveling in Vessel of Hatred, you may come across Runes, a unique gem that can be placed into an item with two sockets such as a helm, chest, pants, or two-handed weapon. Putting one Ritual Rune and one Invocation Rune into the same item creates a Runeword which can enhance your gameplay and grant powerful boons. Ritual Runes generate Offering when the conditions are met, and once enough Offering has been met, the associated Invocation Rune’s effect will trigger. Here are some early Rune suggestions for leveling.
| Rune Name | Rune Effect |
 Cir | Gain 30 Offering: Cast the same Non-Channeled Skill 3 times |
 Zan | Gain 150 Offering: Cast an Ultimate skill |
 Tec | Requires 100 Offering: Cooldown 1 second, Evoke the Barbarian’s Earthquake, dealing damage to enemies |
 Lum | Requires 5 Offering: Cooldown 1 second, Restore 1 Primary Resource |
Legendary Aspects
The Legendary Aspects chosen below are all available from Dungeons in the open world. If possible, finding each of these Aspect on a piece of Legendary gear will offer you a better roll compared the base version available from dungeons. As a reminder all Legendary items can be put into the new Codex of Power once salvaged. These are simply recommendations for the easiest to acquire early on during your leveling path.
| Gear Slot | Legendary Aspect | Legendary Aspect Power |
|---|---|---|
| Helm |  Aspect of Might | Basic Skills grant 20% Damage Reduction for [2.0-6.0] seconds. |
| Chest | Aspect of Disobedience | You gain [0.6 – 1.1%] increased Armor for 4 seconds when you deal any form of damage, stacking up to [36 – 66%]. |
| Gloves |  Aspect of Sundered Ground | Every 20 seconds your next  Upheaval cast is guaranteed to Overpower and deals x [15-30%] increased damage. Critical Strikes with Upheaval against Elites reduce this timer by 1 second. |
| Pants | Iron Blood Aspect | Gain [2.0-4.0%] Damage Reduction for each Nearby Bleeding enemy up to [10-20%] maximum. |
| Boots |  Relentless Berserker’s Aspect | Lucky Hit: Damaging an enemy with a Core Skill has up to a [22-40%] chance to extend the duration of Berserking by 1 second. Double this duration if it was a Critical Strike. |
| Amulets(50% bonus) |  Wind Striker Aspect | Critical Strikes grant [8.0-16.0]% Movement Speed for 1 second, up to 6 seconds. |
| Ring |  Aspect of Vocalized Empowerment | Your Shout Skills generate [2.0-4.0] Fury per second while active. |
| Ring | Aspect of Voracious Rage | Killing an enemy with a Core Skill refunds [10.0-20.0%] of its base Fury cost. Can only happen once per Skill cast. |
| Bludgeoning Weapon (200% bonus) | Aspect of the Expectant | Attacking enemies with a Basic Skill increases the damage of your next Core Skill cast by [5-10%], up to 30%. |
| Slashing Weapon (200% bonus) | Edgemaster’s Aspect | Skills deal up to [10- 20%] increased damage based on your available Primary Resource when cast, receiving the maximum benefit while you have full Primary Resource. |
| Dual-Wield Weapon 1 | Aspect of Retribution | Distant enemies have a 8% chance to be Stunned for 2 seconds when they hit you. You deal [10-20]%[x] increased damage to Stunned enemies. |
| Dual-Wield Weapon 2 | Rapid Aspect | Basic Skills gain [15-30%] Attack Speed. |
Early Paragon
Once you hit Level 60 with this leveling build, you will be ready to delve into The Pit and unlock Torment 1. This will open up the true endgame and allow you to collect new Sacred Rares and Legendary Aspects you will need to transition into the Endgame Upheaval Build. Once you upgrade your build to the Endgame build, you will be ready to push further into The Pit, slay Tormented Bosses, challenge the Infernal Hordes, and much more!
Below you will find the first two Paragon Boards and the paths to take in your journey. We highly recommend after reaching that point in order to continue your progress to make the transition to an Endgame Build in order to gain even more power and paragon. As a reminder, all glyphs shown are the level 100 versions. Let’s take a look!
Elixirs and Health Pots
Visit the Alchemist in any main town to craft helpful Elixirs that increase stats, and experience gain for 30 minutes. Make sure to forage plants and pick up the necessary crafting materials during your adventures; they randomly spawn around the world. Use 
Elixir of Advantage for the attack speed but any Elixir you have for the extra experience as they all grant between 5 and 8% increased experience to help you fly to level 60 even faster.
Return to the Alchemist again every 5 to 10 levels to upgrade your potion. The extra healing is essential to survival.
Changelog
- October 3rd 2024: Updated guide for Season 6 and Vessel of Hatred
- August 4th 2024: Guide updated for season 5 and patch 1.5.0
- May 7th 2024: Guide restructured, starting paragon boards added, updated for season 4
- January 21st 2024: Season 3 speculative changes.
- October 23rd 2023: Revamp for Season 2.
- October 13th 2023: Build adjusted to prepare for Season 2 launch.
- August 23rd 2023: Creation of Leveling Guide
