Many players are currently busy tinkering with their builds in Diablo 4. A now well-known barbarian expert has taken his favorite class to heart and built a ridiculously strong thorns build. He even kills enemies without touching his mouse and keyboard.
Who is the player?
- Rob2628 is a streamer and expert on the barbarian in Diablo 4. He already reached level 100 during the test before release.
- Rob reached level 100 during early access, before most of you could even play. Both times he used the popular whirlwind build for the barbarian.
- Now the specialist has assembled a new build that relies entirely on thorns, betting that enemies will simply kill themselves while you watch.
This is the build: Rob has built the build around the “thorns” mechanic. Thorns reflect damage back to enemies that attack you. The goal of the build is to be able to take as much damage as possible, to take little damage yourself, and to reflect incoming damage multiplied onto enemies.
In the tier list of Diablo 4 the build does not appear at all. There, barbarians rather play with whirlwind or butchery. As Rob explains, he can completely do without some of the otherwise important stats.
On his weapons and jewelry, he actually needs neither attack power nor offensive values. More life and especially thorns are more important. And it works excellently, as he shows in the video. Even when he takes his hands off and just watches:
Build uses items that most of you ignore
The core of the build consists of some items that most of you would probably ignore. They are very specific and bring, outside of exactly these builds, rather nothing. The items include:
- Needleworm Aspect (weapon) – Causes thorn damage around you, the most important weapon for this build, Rob says.
- Aspect of Inner Peace (weapon) – Makes you stronger when you stand still. The build virtually forces you to stand AFK.
- Blade Plate (chest) – A unique item that has no stats except armor and thorns. Something that most players are rather annoyed about dropping.
Rob isn’t quite done building yet, as he says himself. He first needs to check what useful stats can be present on the pieces. He didn’t quite expect it to work this well.
He even tried the build in PvP and was probably a real nightmare for his opponents. Important values are especially more life and armor. Armor is ultimately the most important defensive stat.
That you can have a lot of fun with off-meta builds, I have also already found out with my Blizzard build:
An even similar build has been recreated by a German player for the necromancer (via GameStar). Here the huge summoned golem can dish out similarly nasty “hits” as Rob’s barbarian.
Although the build does not even appear in the tier lists, some fans in Rob’s chat are sure that the thorns will be nerfed soon. This is apparently what is happening with the popular whirlwind build of the barbarians, where there was apparently a bug:
Diablo 4: PoE player defeats the toughest boss on hardcore – build is too strong, will be disabled
