Abandon your Diablo 4 builds: The bouncy Barbarian boy is now the only valid way to play

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Turn your berserker hopping mad.

So, here we are, nearly a month into Diablo 4. What's your build? Are you rocking an Ice Sorcerer? A Bone Necromancer? Some kind of beefy pup-wrangler? Well whatever it is, I'm afraid you've been playing wrong this whole time. From this point forward, the only legitimate build in Diablo 4 is Inadvisably Bouncy Barbarian. Hey, I don't make the rules.

Brought to my attention by a streamer called Tangent (though others have done it too, including in Diablo 3), the Leapquake Barbarian build exploits stacked cooldown reduction and the Barbarian's natural enthusiasm to create a build that turns Diablo 4's beefiest class from meatball to bouncy ball, caroming down dungeon hallways with untrammelled gay abandon.

You can get Tangent's full rundown of their build in the video up above (kicking off around 4:50 in), but here's the basic overview: The star of the show is Tangent's Ring of Giant Strides, a legendary ring that effectively resets leap's cooldown whenever you hit two or more targets. 

That by itself could probably be enough to turn this into a valid build, but it's backed up by a pair of legendary boots. Those are imprinted with an aspect that resets the cooldown on leap whenever you kick or ground stomp an enemy, and then there's a legendary polearm that adds up to 600% increased damage for leap attacks whenever a core skill does direct damage to an enemy. They're backed up in turn by various other shiny gewgaws that do things like multiplying your armour whenever you output damage and generally turn you into a very springy wrecking ball.

There are, of course, no problems with this build whatsoever, but if you were desperate to find one, you could perhaps say something about the fact that it isn't exactly the most efficient way of slaughtering hell's legions. In the clips above, I'm pretty sure it takes Tangent a fair bit longer to clear a room than it would take me and my Necromancer, but who cares? The real question is, which of us is having more fun? Which of us is more inspiring? Long live the beautiful bouncing Barbarian boy, I say. Long may he ricochet.

Joshua Wolens
Joshua Wolens
News Writer

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.