Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Leveling Build – Bloody Barb

Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Leveling Build – Bloody Barbarian – In this Diablo 4 Barbarian Class Build I’ll show you how to play a Rend Barbarian, which is a melee Diablo 4 Barbarian Build that focuses on setting the Bleeding status using Rend, and finishing off enemies with Death Blow. If you’ve been looking for a good Barbarian starter Build in Diablo IV, then this guide is for you!

If you need help with finding aspects make sure to use our Diablo 4 interactive map, or access the complete skill and item database on the D4 wiki.

Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Build – Bloody Barb

The general strategy for this Build is to use Rend to soften up enemies with a good amount of Bleeding damage, before finishing them off with Death Blow. Both of these attacks hit in an AoE cone in front of you, allowing you to strike many enemies at once, which is what makes this Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Build so good. You can wipe out many enemies at once, often in a single attack.

Fury is not a problem for this Build because of the Fighter’s Death Blow and Furious Rend passive skills which generate Fury, as well as the Slaking Aspect. This allows you to focus on mainly using these 2 damaging skills, and not having to worry about using a Basic Skill like Frenzy to generate Fury all that often (unless you muff up Death Blow).

Beyond this we also use skills to help keep us alive like Challenging Shout and Iron Skin, which come in handy when surrounded by many enemies at once, or when fighting a tough boss. And Leap is here to be able to get back to Bosses quickly or get out of sticky situations.

Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Build – Skill Distribution

Each Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Build is made up of the 6 Active Skills they have equipped, and changing these Skills can drastically change the way the Barbarian Class in Diablo IV plays. In this section, we’ll take a look at what Skills you should slot for the Rend Barbarian Diablo 4 Build. Your Skill distribution should look something like this:

The above list gives you the general order to invest in Skills, but keep in mind that you should prioritize picking up new Skills over investing in passives, so pick up passives later if you can get new Skills when you level up.

How to Handle Packs of Enemies

So there are really two different strategies to employ with this Diablo 4 Barbarian Build, and these change depending on whether you’re facing a large group of enemies or a Boss. Let’s start with a group of enemies first, and we’ll cover how to handle Bosses in the next section.

Death Blow

When facing a bunch of enemies with this Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Build, you’ll want to start by searching for a weak enemy in the pack. Once you find it, land a couple of strikes with Frenzy and finish it off with a Death Blow.

It’s imperative that you aim for the weakest target, because if you don’t kill it, then Death Blow will have a 15 second cooldown, and you don’t want that. So aim for the easiest to kill enemy and kill it, ideally hitting other enemies at the same time if you can. Remember, Death Blow hits in a small cone in front of you, so aiming is important. You can gain a lot of extra damage by clipping enemies you cannot kill with Death Blow while killing an enemy you can.

The Fighter’s Death Blow passive will net you a bunch of Fury from this and you should soon be able to begin using Rend to strike enemies.

Rend

You should start using Rend as soon as you have enough fury, as this will set the Bleeding and Slow status effects, greatly increasing your damage thanks to your equipment. Aim for the most enemies possible, since it hits in an area in front of you, so you can hit many enemies with it at once.

Once done, see if there’s any enemy low on health. If there is, use Death Blow to finish it off and restart the sequence. Remember that positioning is key, as you’ll want to not only kill an enemy, but hit as many enemies as possible with each Death Blow you use, otherwise it’ll go on cooldown.

The Furious Rend Passive should net you some Fury as well, so even if there aren’t any low health enemies, you can just use Rend again and see if that gets an enemy close enough to use Death Blow. Keep repeating this process until all enemies are dead. If you mess up with Death Blow, use Frenzy to gain back fury for Rend until it’s off cooldown.

Remember to pick up the Hamstring passive skill to make Bleeding enemies Slow. This helps them from getting to you, and also allows you to make use of the Damage to Slowed Enemies and Damage to Crowd Control Enemies gear bonus and really boosts the damage of this Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Build.

Challenging Shout & Iron Skin

When there are lots of enemies on you use Challenging Shout to gain a lot of Damage Reduction helping to shrug off damage. But unlike Whirlwind Builds, you don’t need to stand in the middle of enemies after striking with Rend, since the Bleeding will need time to do its work, so you can dip in and out of combat, hit-and-run style.

This Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Build also allows you to use Iron Skin when your Health gets low, but only use it when this is the case because the Barrier you gain from it is 50% of your missing HP. So the more HP that is missing, the more Barrier you will gain. If you get the Aspect of the Iron Warrior, Iron Skin will also grant you Unstoppable, which removes and prevents control imparting effects, allowing you to get out of difficult situations.

Another great things about Iron Skin is that there are several Legendary Aspects that work well with Barriers, so you’ll get more options while leveling up.

Boss Fights

Boss fights are handled a bit differently with this Diablo 4 Barbarian Build because you usually cannot kill something easily with Death Blow over and over. For this reason, we have to change up our tactics a bit.

Frenzy

The key to Boss fights with this Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Build is using Frenzy and its passive skill Combat Frenzy for the 8% Damage Reduction per stack, which translates to 24% at 3 stacks. That’s a good amount of reduction, and when you combine this with Iron Skin and Challenging Shout you are really hard to kill in boss fights, even if your DPS is not insane.

You generally sit there face tanking the boss, only moving to dodge particularly deadly attacks or when you have your Dodge off cooldown, but you want to keep attacking to keep your damage reduction up and Frenzy pumping. Use Challenging Shout every time it’s off cooldown, and use Iron Skin when your HP gets low.

Hit with Rend any time you have the Fury for it, even if you just used it, and keep stacking Bleed on the boss while using Death Blow any time it’s off cooldown. You won’t instantly refresh it, but it hits hard, and it doesn’t cost Fury, so you might as well use it every chance you can get.

Leap

Leap is here to help with mobility to get out of bad situations in these fights, or to get back to the Boss before your Frenzy buff wears off. Sometimes bosses teleport or knock you back, and this can get you back into melee range quickly. Additionally, sometimes they might drop a gnarly AoE that you need to get out of in a hurry, and this skill can do that for you, which is a nice addition to this Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Build.

Arsenal System and Weapon Expertise

Arsenal System

The Barbarian has access to a unique mechanic called the Arsenal System. Each skill can use either one or several types of Weapons from your Arsenal, being: “Bludgeoning” (Left Slot), “Dual Wield” (Mid-Slots) and “Slashing” (Right Slot). When performing a skill, you can choose which Weapon you’ll use while attacking with that skill.

To set a specific Arsenal Weapon Type for a skill, open the skill menu, and hover over the skill on your toolbar. Press the “Cycle Weapon” button and select the type of weapon you want to use. Now, each time you attack with that particular skill, you’ll use that specific weapon.

This serves two purposes, first, each weapon has a unique Expertise passive that will apply when using that Weapon. For this build, you’ll want to use one of the following Weapon Types for your slashing weapon:

– Two-Handed Axe: Deal a % increased damage to vulnerable enemies (Perfect combo with Pressure Point Passive)

-Two-Handed Sword: A % of the direct damage you deal is inflicted as Bleeding damage over 5 seconds.

The second purpose is Weapon Swapping. Many Aspects and Passives provide you bonuses each time you swap weapons. In this case, you’ll want to set Dual Wield for Frenzy, Bludgeoning for Death Blow and Slashing for Rend. This will allow you to quickly swap between 3 different weapons, triggering these kinds of bonuses.

Weapon Technique

Once you hit lvl 15, you’ll get access to the Class Mechanic Quest, Masters of Battle. Once complete, it will unlock the Technique Slot, allowing you to select a Weapon Expertise Effect that will be applied to all attacks, regardless of the weapon.

For this build, you’ll ideally want to have a Two-Handed Axe equipped and the Two-Handed Sword expertise on your Technique. This means that all your attacks (Including Death Blow) will deal Bleeding damage, as well as increasing your Rend damage against Vulnerable enemies thanks to the Two-Handed Axe expertise.

Final Tips

You can see the amount of Bleeding an enemy will take represented by a darker red on the enemy’s health bars. If the bar turns completely dark, you know the enemy will die from bleeding, allowing you to switch to a different target while you wait for it to die from bleeding.

For this Diablo 4 Bleed Barbarian Build be on the lookout for Damage to Slowed Enemies, Damage to Crowd Controlled Enemies, to +Skills to Rend, +Skills to Death Blow, Damage to Close Enemies, Basic Skill Damage, Strength, and Critical Strike Chance. All of these bonuses will benefit this Build, so definitely prioritize them. Damage Over Time is also not bad.

There are many aspects that work great with this build. On the offensive side, you should use Aspect of Anemia which allows you to Stun Bleeding enemies, Slaking Aspect, which generates Fury when using Rend. Edgemaster’s Aspect, which increases your damage based on your primary resource and Rapid Aspect, that increases your basic attack speed.

When it comes to increasing your defense, you’ll want the Aspect of the Protector which gives you a Barrier from time to time, and Conceited Aspect gives you increased damage while you have a Barrier active. These work well with Iron Skin, and Aspect of the Iron Warrior also makes you Unstoppable when you use Iron Skin, giving you CC immunity for its duration.

You should be on the lookout for these if you can find them, and remember that Aspects located on Two-Handed Weapons gain double the benefit, and Barbarians can wield 2 Two-Handed Weapons at a time. Amulets give you an extra 50% Aspect as well, so put your best Aspects on these items.

The Barbarian has more Weapon Slots than any other class, allowing you to slot many gems. Try to stack up as many Amethysts as possible to increase your Bleeding damage.

Be sure to check out our Diablo 4 Wiki for any other questions you have about the game and the Builds page if you are looking for more Diablo IV Builds, as well as our Ultimate Beginner Guide and Best Class to Play if you are looking for more Diablo 4 content!