Boulder Toss Raekor Barbarian Skills and Runes

Active Skills
Weapon Throw Balanced Weapon Ancient Spear Boulder Toss 1 Battle Rage Bloodshed 2 Ignore Pain Iron Hide 3 Furious Charge Merciless Assault 4 Wrath of the Berserker Insanity
Passive Skills
Rampage Relentless No Escape Boon of Bul-Kathos

In a Reakor Boulder Toss build, Furious Charge is at the heart of your rotation, used both as a mobility and damage amplification tool from the Raekor set. Aside from charging around, remember that in a advantageous fight you can also charge against a nearby wall to build up stacks faster, stay relatively still and maintain the Endless Walk set bonuses. Keep up Battle Rage at all times for the massive damage benefits from Bloodshed. Also keep up Ignore Pain as much as you could, ideally in anticipation of incoming damage. Last but not least, apply Wrath of the Berserker as often as you can, and use its downtime for monster pulls. An ideal fight would feature a lot of trash and Elite enemies pulled close to a wall or another in-game obstacle, which forces the additional procs from the 6-piece Raekor bonus to detonate within range of the pull. While Wrath of the Berserker is up, you will need to use Weapon Throw 3-4 times to get to the overextended Fury cap from Arreat's Law, and then spend that Fury with Boulder Toss. Then, refill your Fury reserve by Furious Chargeing into the mobs, do the Weapon Throws again, and then Boulder Toss — rinse and repeat. This is your basic rotation while you have Wrath of the Berserker up. As a final note, the Raekor set amplifies your damage dealt based on missing life — a precarious state that is further encouraged by the Relentless passive. While you are undoubtedly at your strongest in that sub-35% Life state, it is not a situation you should actively pursue within active gameplay outside of very carefully considered and calculated situations.

Your primary damage dealer is the namesake of the build, Ancient Spear Boulder Toss. This particular rune falls into the category of "resource dump" skills, emptying your entire current resource reserve upon use and dealing more damage depending on the amount of Fury you spend with it. Points of Fury spent above the skill's cost (with RCR factored in) add 20% damage to the total damage dealt. With Arreat's Law, your Fury reserve maximum reaches 350 Fury, skyrocketing the base 500% weapon damage dealt to 7160%, or a 14.32 multiplier. The strength of these numbers turn the skill into a viable endgame progression spender.

Considering the crucial effect of Arreat's Law in the build, you will have to incorporate the ranged Barbarian generator Weapon Throw. You will be taking the Balanced Weapon for the improved Fury generation of that particular rune. While Arreat's Law improves Fury generation based on distance from the enemy, you will need to maintain the 15-20 yard range at all times to synergize perfectly between the Battle Rage Bloodshed and No Escape effects.

While it is certainly not the focus of the build, both spec and gear-wise, Furious Charge is nevertheless an integral part of this setup due to the mechanics of the Raekor set. Using Furious Charge builds up charges that are used to amplify your Ancient Spear damage; you should have at least 5 stacks for each Boulder Toss, so keep yourself at a healthy high stack count at all times. As mentioned above, keep in mind that you are not forced to move great distances with this skill unless you want to, and you can charge against walls and level edges to stay in one spot while building up power and maintaining the damage half of the Endless Walk set bonus. Aside from Raekor, this ability also serves as a Fury generator and a proc for Band of Might. Since the set brings you all the runes and you will not be dealing damage with this skill, the rune choice is purely up to your preferences. We have selected Merciless Assault simply to show the skill's cooldown self-sufficiency when you hit ~3 or more enemies (or just one — refer to Raekor's 2-piece bonus).

Battle Rage is a staple of the class, bumping up both damage and Crit Chance. While its 2-minute duration can catch you off guard, never allow Battle Rage to drop — it is a solid source of damage, especially with the AoE-oriented Bloodshed rune. Note the 20-yard range of the Bloodshed rune, which should optimally be the furthest you are fighting from — maintaining a mid-range playstyle.

No superlatives should be spared when talking about Wrath of the Berserker, especially when paired with the damage amplifier of the Insanity rune. For the sake of brevity, this is the single most powerful self-buff of Barbarians, providing you with significant amounts of Dodge, Crit Chance, Attack and Movement Speed. Keep in mind this build only has about ~70% uptime of this skill at best, and its timing is crucial for the success of your run.

You have some wiggle room in your final active skill slot. Our base suggestion is Ignore Pain: cutting incoming hurt in half, as well as providing crowd control immunity as a baseline. The suggested rune is Iron Hide, which simply lengthens the effect, although the healing Ignorance is Bliss rune is also viable, considering the limited healing options in this build. Alternative skills for this slot include War Cry Veteran's Warning (lesser damage reduction effect, but easy overlap of the effect), or Threatening Shout Falter for additional damage against affected enemies.

Due to your lacking uptime of Wrath of the Berserker compared to other Barbarian builds, you will have to take Boon of Bul-Kathos to shave 30-second chunks off WotB's massive downtime.

Thriving in and constantly pursuing a nicely stacked, dense, trash-heavy fight, the Raekor is one of the most natural adopters of the Rampage passive, which builds up your damage and defense multiplicatively as long as you keep feeding it kills.

Relentless is one of the biggest passive sources of toughness a Barbarian can take, and it has additional synergy with the low health empowerment from the Raekor set 4-piece bonus and the craftable Cpt. Crimson set 3-piece bonus, which scales damage reduction based on resource cost reduction.

You have some options in your last passive slot. The riskier option (but the one that provides the most damage) is to take No Escape, which increases the damage of several skills — most importantly, Ancient Spear — if you maintain a distance of at least 15 yards. This further reinforces the 15-to-20 yard gameplay of this build. If you find yourself too glassy, this is the slot to alternate to the cheat death of Nerves of Steel. Or better yet, consider using a Stormshield as your offhand, and slotting Sword and Board in this passive slot!