The best Barbarian builds in Soulstone Survivors

Soulstone Survivors is full of classes to unlock as you work through the roguelike shoot ’em up. The Barbarian, while only the first class available to you, is still totally viable, especially before you unlock some of the later persistent upgrades. If you want to get the most out of The Barbarian you’ll need to know exactly how to make his axes sing. Below, we’ve collected our favorite builds to give you a leg up on the enemy hordes.

Related: The best Pyromancer builds in Soulstone Survivors

The Barbarian’s best active skills

For our money, the better starting skill is Whirlwind. This is the one you’ll start the game with, meaning you don’t have to do anything special to unlock it. Double Slash is fine.

When you get into the game, you’ll start adding active skills to your repertoire of abilities as you level up. You can hold up to six of these (including your starting skill) and you can replace them as you go if you find something you like better. In our opinion, the must-have skill for any class is Chaos Golem. This skill lets you spawn a friendly unit to tank enemies, giving you some room to breathe when things start to get out of hand. You can add to their effectiveness by picking skills that boost your minion damage or debuff enemies around you. This is where something like The Barbarian’s Piercing Shout comes into play.

Once that’s settled, we like to target skills that get a large area of effect as you level up. Our current favorite is Shockwave because its wave of damage starts to scale in a big way as you boost its rating. Other options include Stomp (for the stun) and even Titan’s Clever because it swings in such a large arc in front of you. You can also grab something like Poison Cloud or any other big area of effect skill if you’d rather try to keep at range and let your minions take down everything.

The Barbarian’s best passive skills

In between getting new active skills, you’ll also unlock passive skills. After your bar of six active skills is full, you can also choose to get new passive skills instead of active skills. Your first priority for passive skills should be to upgrade your active skills. Leveling these up makes them incredibly powerful, so make sure these are the first things you target when they’re available.

If you don’t have any options to upgrade active skills, the things we try to target are player speed, cast frequency, area of effect, and then any damage-related skill. Until you start getting deeper into the game, we don’t really think things like armor or health are needed, especially if you’re using a Chaos Golem-centric build. That said, passive skill unlocks are ranked on a tier system. If you get a rare skill for something you wouldn’t usually grab, it’s probably worth getting it because the boost is generally more significant than normal passives.

Finally, keep in mind that Soulstone Survivors is currently in early access. The game will likely change frequently, so this guide may be updated as things change.