Barbarians are Diablo 4’s only pure melee class, with the other classes having hybrid builds for multiple ranges. There are four main ideas that all Barbarian builds stem from:

Fury dumping

Weapon and items swapping

Bleed

Berserk

Fury dump builds make use of the Unbridled Rage Key Passive, which causes your Fury spenders to cost double the Fury but deal more than double the damage. These kinds of builds obviously require very steady Fury generation, as it’s easy to starve yourself. Berserk builds that use the Unconstrained Key Passive are all about keeping your Barbarian in the Berserk stage at all times, which nets you a hefty bonus and cheap Diablo 4 Items. All Barbarian builds will likely use some skills that make them go Berserk, the Unconstrained Key Passive just enhances the effect.

Bleed builds use the Gushing Wounds Key Passive to create a critical strike-heavy build that’s great for whittling down groups of enemies with damage over time and explosions. Weapon-swapping builds offer what is almost certainly the most unique playstyle for Barbarians and take advantage of the Walking Arsenal Key Passive. The idea here is that you’re constantly swapping between your skills and weapons to give yourself massive damage buffs.

When making a build, you want to have one of these Key Passives in mind and choose your skills accordingly. Thankfully skills that share certain aspects (like Bleed) are color-coded on the skill tree, and you can even use the in-game search function to find them all. Other Barbarian builds let you take advantage of mechanics like Thorns or Shouts. But they still typically end with one of these Key Passives.

Looking for other Diablo 4 builds? We have explainers on the Sorcerer, Rogue, Druid, and Necromancer classes.