A Diablo 4 Barbarian just gave Uber Lilith a paper cut to the tune of seven billion damage when she was already inches away from defeat.
Hamburg City Brix faced off against Diablo 4's hardest boss with a Barbarian build focused on the absurd interaction between bleed damage and "Caged Heart of the Barber," a powerful gem exclusive to season 1. The final blow, which was really a single tick of damage from the bleed, hit Uber Lilith for more damage than any other class can put out.
Last week, Blizzard fixed a bug that kept a Barbarian Legendary Aspect from applying its bleed damage-over-time effect to enemies. Patch 1.1.1 also fixed a bug that didn't allow the ultra powerful Caged Heart of the Barber gem to increase damage types like bleeds. After suffering a rough start to the season, Barbarians were happy to have the build back, but didn't expect it to be the strongest one in the game.
The mechanics for how exactly The Barber empowers bleeds is funky, but it's essentially infinite damage scaling on single targets: When you deal a critical strike to an enemy, their health freezes. For the next few seconds, all the damage you deal is soaked up and multiplied by up to 60%. Then the target explodes for one gargantuan burst of damage. That damage is considered direct damage by the Berserk Ripping Aspect, which applies a percentage of that massive hit into a bleed. You can trigger the Barber window again and every tick of your uber bleed will feed into another, and this will continue stacking higher and higher until your target is very much dead.
While it's easier to min-max your character for a single, predictable target like Uber Lilith instead of random packs of enemies, 7 billion damage is unreal for a bleed build. Hamburg City Brix's Barbarian is also level 100 with some of the best items in the game, so don't expect to be able to replicate this without some grinding. Inevitably, it might not last. Many players suspect there's also a bug at work, but Blizzard has yet to comment on whether that's the case.
In July, Blizzard said Druids shouldn't be dealing 1 billion damage in the normal version of the game—AKA the Eternal Realm—of the action RPG. But with the addition of season 1's Malignant Hearts, players have made that Druid build look like a joke.
