Quick Navigation
Use the table below to jump to the sections you are looking for.
Build Mechanics
In this section, we will detail how to play this build, what the various skills and passives are used for and what your damage rotation should be to get the full benefit of this setup to smash the most demons and bosses. Let’s get started!
Playstyle
This build has come back to the old style of HotA that we all know and love. Big hammers dealing big damage. No more Earthquakes doing all of the damage or blowing them up via the new uniques. This is just straight forward raw 
Hammer of the Ancients damage thanks to the new systems and items in place that allow for some pretty wild combinations. Let’s take a deeper look!
Rotation
We want to build resources via our Shout skills and then begin hammering. Thanks to the new Chaos Perk “A Beast Cornered” we can get some of that resource back as we spam. We can use 
Ground Stomp to stun demons and reduce the cooldown of our ultimate skill 
Wrath of the Berserker. Each Hammer we cast will spend more and more fury refunding more and more as well giving us plenty of resources to keep slamming them out. We’ll be triggering 
Ring of Red Furor frequently as well giving us guaranteed critical hits and overpowers for even bigger damage numbers.
Skill Use
- Hammer of the Ancients – The bread and butter of the build. We want to be spamming this as often as our resources allow.
- Ground Stomp – We use this powerful crowd control both for its CC but also for its built in ultimate cooldown reduction via Strategic Ground Stomp. Its relatively short cooldown means we should be casting this quite frequently giving us some safety from the hordes but also incredibly high uptime on our next skill.
- Wrath of the Berserker – Our Ultimate of choice. We want this up as often as we can. This gives us everything from damage to berserking and makes our damage go through the roof. We’re also considered Unstoppable during this skill so we can ignore crowd control effects and can continue to keep blasting and smashing.
War Cry – One our main methods to enter the Berserking state, it grants a large multiplier to our damage as well meaning when we smash down we’ll have huge hammer hits. You’ll want to cast this often especially during bossing and elite packs.
Rallying Cry – This shout grants us movement speed, resource generation (the important bit), another source of Unstoppable and some basic resources to get started. We want to press this basically on cooldown. 
Challenging Shout – Lastly this skill provides our main defensive option while doing harder content granting us a large 40% damage reduction and bonuses to maximum life while active. We want to cast this whenever we’re engaging with more difficult enemies such as elite packs and bosses or if we ever find ourselves surrounded by many many demons.
Runeword Synergy
Let’s take a quick look at the runewords we will be using for this setup and explain the interactions that help this build work.
Igni is our first ritual rune granting us 25 offering every 0.3 seconds. This is about 75 every second and to trigger it we simply need to cast a non-basic skill to gain the stored up offering so every Hammer should trigger this rune.
Lum is our invocation rune paired with igni. It gives us back 3.5 resources per 5 offering. So with 75 offering every second from Ignire, this is roughly 263 Fury. A gargantuan amount but we’ll need that much to keep chugging through our hammers
Ahu is our second ritual rune, granting us 15 offering every time we lucky hit an enemy that isn’t healthy. In Diablo 4, Healthy means above 80% HP. So once a monster drops below 80%, it’s considered not healthy, so basically this rune should give us offering every time we finish something off when paired with Hammer of the Ancients‘s very high lucky hit chance.
Qax is our second invocation rune paired with Ahu. This sometimes drains all of your fury (but don’t worry, our Igni+Lum combo will get it back fast) but gives you a massive 100% damage boost for 1 second for your next Hammer which should make it really destroy whatever it’s aiming for.
Which Elixirs Should You Use?
When in town you can visit the Alchemist to craft helpful elixirs which will provide a special effect and increase your experience gain. Crafting has been simplified and there are fewer specific flowers to harvest; instead, almost all herbs in the world drop as Bundles of Dried Herbs, allowing you to craft the elixirs you want. Some elixirs cannot be crafted and can only drop from things like Helltide or Nightmare Dungeons.
For this build we recommend 
Elixir of Advantage for the increased attack speed to get out more Hammer of the Ancients and continue dumping fury for Ring of Red Furor
Navigation to Other Pages:
