This is the Rotation and Gameplay page of the HotA Barbarian Build. To navigate to the other pages of this build, you can use the buttons below.
Rotation, Playstyle, and Skill Use
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
The general feel of this build is to gathering large amounts of demons and then unload with 
Hammer of the Ancients to break Earthquakes that we’ve spawned via 
Mantle of Mountain’s Fury to absolutely crush the whole screen with their explosions. We’ll spawning Earthquakes through a few different methods and aiming our Hammer of the Ancients through them to break them. Like previous iterations, this build is more of a setup playstyle. The key difference between the HotA builds of old and this new powerhouse is that instead of setting up big Overpowers for Hammer of the Ancients we’re setting up quakes and luring our foes in to obliterate them delivering that same satisfying feeling of one hammer cast that melts whole hordes.
Moving the Earth
A core component of this build are Earthquakes. You may be wondering ‘is earthquake a skill?’ and the answer is no. It is not a skill anywhere on our talent tree or a button we press. Instead several things can spawn them from normal gameplay. The most common way for us to spawn Earthquakes is through the 
Tec rune being equipped. We can pair this rune with another that generates at least 50 Offering such as 
Yul which grants 50 whenever we cast a skill with a cooldown like our shouts. Doing this will spawn an Earthquake which we can then use to benefit from several other aspects, paragon nodes, and of course our Mantle of Mountain’s Fury. The second method to spawn Earthquakes is through the 
Aspect of Earthquakes itself which causes one of our skills, 
Ground Stomp , to spawn a quake whenever it is used. Since Ground Stomp is a skill with a cooldown it will also trigger our Yul rune spawning two quakes in one button press which we can then blow up through Hammer of the Ancients for massive screen clearing damage.
You may notice that our build also uses 
Aspect of Bul-Kathos which causes 
Leap to spawn quakes as well yet we do not have it on our bars. This is simply because we do not have the space to take Leap in this particular setup. Does this mean you can’t take Leap ever? Not exactly, you could remove the 7 points from Ground Stomp and its supporting skills to take Leap, Enhanced Leap, and Power Leap instead if that is your preference. This does come with the notable downside of not having any Ultimate Cooldown Reduction through Strategic Ground Stomp but can provide some mobility for those wishing to play that particular style. You will still have the same number of ways to spawn Earthquakes as our build here but you may not be able to maintain uptime on 
Call of the Ancients as easily. At the end of the day, the choice is yours to make but for the highest potential for this setup, we recommend the Ground Stomp version over the Leap version.
Rotation
We want to build resources via our Shout skills and through Call of the Ancients which should have a relatively high uptime. We can use Ground Stomp to stun demons and reduce the cooldown of our ultimate skill Call of the Ancients. We want to make sure we’re properly aiming our Hammer of the Ancients so that the line spawned from Mantle of Mountain’s Fury passes through an Earthquake on the ground as often as possible. We lack a main generator but we shouldn’t have any resource issues thanks to the interactions on our gear and through our paragon setup allowing a lot of HotA spam and a lot of molten explosions.
Skill Use
- Hammer of the Ancients – The bread and butter of the build. We want to cast this skill as often as possible taking care to aim it through any active Earthquakes. Unlike previous builds this setup does NOT play Aspect of Ancestral Force meaning it doesn’t hit all around us anymore and only hits in front so be sure to position yourself accordingly
- 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.
- Call of the Ancients – Our ultimate skill of choice. With its short cooldown and powerful resource generating effects this will be our primary method of gaining Fury outside of our Shouts. Its interactions with Strategic Ground Stomp and Vehement Brawler’s Aspect also helps it add to our damage in pretty significant ways befitting an ultimate skill.
War Cry – One our main methods to enter the Berserking state so we can benefit from our key passive 
Unconstrained as well as a few other items and talents. It grants a large multiplier to our damage as well meaning when we shatter our quakes while this is active the damage can absolutely staggering. 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.
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