My experience with Leapquake Barbarian in D4

Barbarian
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I would like to begin this post with a disclaimer that I have yet to reach endgame with my Barbarian. It’s a Couch co-op character that I’ve been playing with my partner, and my main is a Rogue.

Despite some of the other complaints/comments people have already brought up, I would really like to discuss the issues surrounding a specific build archetype that was brought in from Diablo 3. Leapquake Barb was my favorite build in D3 by far, and although not the most powerful build, was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in an ARPG.

Here is what I like that they’ve done. The Build was a 6 piece set in D3 (The Earth Set) and essentially allowed you to jump around leaving earthquakes every time you land making mobility and Area clear extremely strong aspects of the build. They decided to bring it to Diablo 4, with some small changes. Rather than a set, it’s a combination of legendary powers which is great because as long as you get the aspects early, you can start leaping and leaving earthquakes pretty early in the game. It also only really requires 2-3 legendary aspects to get going, The main one going in the boot slot which you get from Charnel House in Dry Steppes. This aspect allows kick and ground stomp to reset the cooldown of leap, essentially giving you infinite leaping potential.

However, this is where things start to become problematic playing this build. The other 2 aspects required for this build to work have some issues. One of these, which is the only other mandatory one is thankfully attached to a dungeon as well, Light’s Refuge in Hawezar to be specific. This one makes your leap leave an Earthquake behind dealing damage over time in an area, and making you take less damage while standing inside of your earthquake. The main issue with this particular aspect is two fold. One, the damage output of your earthquake, is specifically tied to the item aspect roll, and the level at which it was received. Now this may seem avoidable considering you can always upgrade it as you level since it’s tied to a dungeon and always available via the codex. However, the second issue is that it’s not an offensive aspect oddly. Meaning it cannot be put on a 2 handed weapon for the 100% bonus. The best you can do, is an amulet for the 50% bonus, but considering How little damage this build does compared to what’s meta, I don’t understand this restriction.

Before I go over some potential solutions, I want to address the 3rd aspect as well. This aspect makes your ground stomp create an earthquake, that also does damage over time, but this increases your damage if you are standing in it. It is not mandatory for the build to be functional, but is a serious damage increase if you can even get it, and reliably throughout the leveling process. This brings us to the main issue with this aspect, It is not tied to a dungeon. So the one mod that is offensive for the build, and can be put on a 2 hander for the 100% roll bonus, is drop only. This makes the damage output of this build feel pretty bad most of the time, especially since I have only gotten the aspect once and my Barbarian is close to 50. Now I am aware that Legendaries become a lot more common in WT3 and upwards, but having both damage outputs of this build be at such a disadvantage really hurts the experience of trying to make this work and is a constant gear stuggle, especially because I cannot upgrade my 2 handed weapon that has the third aspect mentioned on it until I get the aspect to drop again, Which lowers all of my non-Earthquake damage pretty substantially.

There are two potential solutions that I propose, and I know both would take quite a while to implement but either could work. One solution is targeted at this build specifically, and the other would affect all players. Please keep in mind, That Rogue and Barbarian are the only classes I have personally played, so my knowledge of all classes, their aspects and what these solutions could mean across the board is fairly low.

Solution 1: Bring Back EARTHQUAKE!
In D3, Earthquake was a skill, it was one of the ultimates, and did huge DoT damage with the right rune. I want Earhtquake back in D4 and it needs to be a skill, meaning Just like every other build, it scales off of your weapons rather than random damage modifiers attached to aspects. The Two Earthquake Aspects could simply read that Earthquake is Cast when you Ground Stomp/Leap. This would eliminate the need to put any aspects I mentioned on my weapons just for the damage boost, and make weapon upgrades the priority, and achievable since I am no longer locked behind an aspect drop. I also think the damage bonus/defense bonus should be active as long as you have an Earthquake, not standing in one, because that’s extremely counter intuitive to leaping around constantly.

Solution 2: An Upgradable Codex
This solution actually came from a discussion with a good friend who has also been playing as a Druid, but was telling me about his own issues while leveling. Essentially, it feels like for some classes, specifically Barbarian and Druid feel very aspect dependent to deal enough damage, where as a lot of the other classes don’t need much to get started. Now, everyone’s experience is different, but this was ours. And I can vouge for rogue being drastically easier to do whatever you want with.

The solution we came up with revolves around the codex. Some Legendary aspects can be gained from completing dungeons, and although it’s the minimum roll, this is a huge enabler for starting builds early on. However, only some builds can start early because of this, which makes diversity and creativity pretty limiting. Our idea was pretty simple. Rather than make all aspects a part of the codex, make it so that when you get a legendary to drop, if you extract the aspect, it goes into the codex. If it is one that can also be obtained from a dungeon, then it will permanently upgrade the roll to be the one you extracted from the drop. If it is an aspect that is drop only, it will permanently add it to your codex. This gives players an extended form of progression, and creates a lot of accessibility to different build options early on, as well as eliminates the gearing issues I have run into on My barbarian. I got the Earthquake on Ground Stomp drop once, so if I extracted it, I would always have it, completely eliminating the need for me to wait until it drops again to upgrade my weapon. This would also completely eliminate the need for an aspect tab, and the ridiculously small storage space issue that everyone has due to aspects taking up so much space. This kills like 3 birds with one stone, and would be a huge Quality of life for all players. Although I don’t know how I feel about this in conjunction with Sacred and Ancestral Aspects, that would most likely be a one time use still for balancing purposes, but that would be for Blizzard to decide.

Although I know these changes are unlikely, I really hope someone at Blizzard sees this. I love leapquake as a build, but it feels like the design and balance of it was completely overlooked or shoehorned in. I want this game to be successful, and want the classes, all of them to feel fun to play. However, at least for Barbarian, I feel very pigeon holed into playing something meta until I get all the gear pieces to transition later into leapquake. Although at that point, the only reason I would have to switch is for the fun of it, but as it stands I know that it’s strictly worse in every way compared to WW or HoTA.

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The main point of this build when leveling is to generate the fury to use HOTA.

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If that were the case, then why do the Earthquake aspects even exist at all. They don’t help you gain fury at all, only the skills Leap and Ground stomp do. I don’t think you’re understanding the way this build is supposed to work, at least the one from D3 which is obviously what these items/powers were trying to replicate. and Also, Kick is intended to be the Fury dump for this build, not HoTA.

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Don’t use them. The only thing that’s useful about them later on is the damage reduction from leapquake. The extra damage bonus from stomp is kinda low and groundstomp has a long cooldown compared to leap in that build.

Furthermore, kick does very little damage compared to HOTA. You use kick to regen leap for more fury regen.

The build in D4 is basically a fury regen build. Idea is to leap as much as possible for fury so you can HOTA or some other core skill. This is probably the most fun barb leveling build in the game.

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It’s like the contradiction with Charge all over again. If you want to use Charge as a gap closer, you can’t, since it creates yet another gap when it pushes enemies back and splits them up when you’d want them stacked instead as a melee.
It’s contrary to the purpose of what you’d often want to use it for as a melee, by design.

As for “leapquaking” like in d3, those two aspects only provides their buffs when staying in the quake, which makes it problematic to use for “leapquaking” (like in d3) since when you want to “leapquake” as a build (like in d3), you’d want to stay mobile and keep jumping around.
But you’d lose the buff with each jump, making those buffs kinda useless for the most part (in other words there’d be gaps when jumping when the buff falls off and then comes back again when landing and placing a new quake, kinda like how using the challenging shout HP buff enhancement removes the fortify buff for a moment). They’re contradictory to the purpose of “leapquaking” as a build like it was used in d3.

It’d be better if the aspects were changed to buffs provided for X amount of seconds when using Leap, and it’d be great if something could also be put into the game that’d put a significant slow on enemies while they’re in the “quake”.
It’d make it far more reliable as a build, regardless if you want to use it as it’s meant for in d4 as a fury builder, or if you want to be odd and try to use it as the main ability of your build like in d3.

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The post was tldr. But I use leap quake and stomp quake with my double swing barb with no generator skill and works really well.

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They seem to get a cool “Fight scene” idea in their head that tossing enemies all over the place is cool (And similar skills DO work in games like HOTS where scaling doesn’t exist), but they fail to understand that its counter to how a melee character works in an ARGP. We pretty much NEVER want to knock the enemy away because we want to BE near the enemy.

It might have worked better if they had double throw in the game so there was a quasi-ranged barbarian build, but as things stand I think that Charge needs to be altered so it does something else instead of knocking an enemy back. (like generating a shield for every enemy that was in your path or something)

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Kick is already a knock back, charge should be a knock up with the bonus damage tied to distance or number of enemies. And the aoe is quite small for all these spells.

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Honestly i dont get how esrth quake wasnt an ultimate instead of maelstrom. Then the leap+stomp quake items could have the added benefits of your earth quake passives etc

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If it was too long for you to read, why bother commenting? The whole point of the post was for people to read it. I’m glad it works to generate fury for Double Swing, yet you completely missed that at no point do I complain about Fury Generation in this build. I understand that’s one of the build’s strengths. My whole frustration is with how “Earthquake” was implemented. It has nothing to do with how the build functions, But how the Earthquake Damage is scaled, and how that causes gearing issues.

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Not the only good thing, those quakes are very good at keeping max disobedience stacks up.

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I agree mostly what you said.
Earthquake should have been a skill and aspects to go with it.
Possible Aspects for Earthquake
-make it bigger or have some cool effect
-Leap stunning/or vacuum mobs and getting extra charge.
-Steel Grasp to bring mobs in and wherever they land cause a earthquake(1 per steel grasp use)
just to list a few.
There is a ring that lowers Leap cd by 3-5 seconds that helps it be perma with cd reduction and hitting at least 2 mobs.
So many things could have been done but nope lets kill a fun build.

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The only real use is for them to help generate armor stacks with disobedience. With berserk ripping and leapquake i can keep 100 armor stacks up easily

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While I’m glad I read this before spending the effort to try it out, I am a bit disappointed it’s problematic. Maybe less so than some other build (RIP Rupture) but not worth changing what I’m doing now.

More like “lets just make stuff up and not design any build cohesion”.

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Every damage aspect needs to be just a % of weapon damage. Leap itself does pretty pitiful damage at end game so it could double that and still be subpar.

A friend I was playing with also mentioned the idea of an upgradable codex. I think they do something like that in the Division games?

Anyway, it just feels bad having to hold onto all these repeat legendaries just to replace an aspect when you get an upgrade. It is just taking up more of the tiny stash space you get and has no purpose but to add grind time to the game.

Remove aspects, let extractions go straight to the codex. Raise the costs extracting/imprinting if you need but let it be permanent so players can work towards building that codex

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Exactly this! Would solve so many problems. The Codex would act like the Cube from D3 and just store your legendary aspects, and I like the idea of it keeping the best roll you extract, so that there is still a small reason to use repeats you find, other than the crafting mats because there’s no real crafting system yet.

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I get that they want to have some grind to pad gameplay time… its crappy but the way of the gaming industry.

But that grind doesn’t have to be in a wierd way that doesn’t make permanent progress. I’d be fine if it just updated your codex by a % of the roll each time you extracted (regardless of the roll on the item).

At least that way you have this weird iteraction where “I found this perfect roll legendary at level 38, extracted it and imprinted it on something else at 46, but now my level 100 character is using a bad roll of the same item because I haven’t seen another perfect roll drop.” …just silly

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You should absolutely be able to upgrade your Codex. Once you get a Max Roll for an Aspect, that’s it! You do not need 25 of them to keep putting on gear, or swapping what pieces have certain Aspects on them. In all reality, Legendaries with high Aspect rolls should be much more rare than they currently are. This also means adding Aspects that are currently not found in your Codex to your Codex.

Aspects take up so much inventory and stash space, especially if you want to build additional specs and collect those Aspects. This would streamline things ALOT.

Also, you should be able to Salvage items without visitong a Blacksmith. Would help the pace of the game a lot.

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