Hey all, I’m new to Diablo IV after having not played D3 for a couple years, so I wanted to share a few tips for others who might also be new. These tips are based off my own experience in patch 1.1.0b.
TL;DR, I’ll elaborate on some of them later:
- Level to 45ish in WT1
- Do the WT2 capstone dungeon as soon as you can (45+ is doable for most classes/builds)
- Salvage items at the blacksmith until you hit WT3 and get Sacred items, then start vendoring for gold
- Only upgrade weapons, and only upgrade them twice, until you get to WT4 and get your Best-in-Slot pieces
- Don’t imprint weapons; weapon legendaries are rarer and thus the imprint mats are rarer too
- Nightmare dungeons at Tier 1 are easier than normal dungeons
- Nightmare dungeons are a great source of legendaries
- Legion events are a zerg fest so don’t worry if you’re not playing the top meta spec, there’s always someone there to help, and are a good source of EXP
- Do Helltides if you can, and farm 250 Cinders for the Box of Mysteries, but be careful as the monsters are higher level and you lose Cinders when you die.
- Do the world boss weekly for the box
Salvage vs Vendoring At low levels, items are worth very little at the vendor, but salvage to a good amount of materials. If you only upgrade weapons, or don’t upgrade at all, you’ll have a nice bank of materials for your WT4 ancestral BiS armor pieces.
As you hit higher levels and higher tiers of gear (Sacred/Ancestral), everything becomes more expensive and gold becomes more valuable, so consider vendoring things! 167 million gold might seem like a lot, but if you’ve ever tried upgrading gems from scratch, you’ll see how quickly that money evaporates. You can always run a dungeon or two and pick up everything to salvage if you run low on mats.
Nightmare Dungeons When I hit 46 with my WW Barb, I tried doing a normal dungeon but couldn’t get past the first elite in my first WT3 dungeon. To my surprise, NMD Tier 1 was very easy.
Also, ever wonder how most midgame/early endgame builds have a full set of imprinted gear and you think “how, I only have 7 of the imprint mats”, that’s because NMD’s give 1-2 legendaries on completion, in addition to whatever drops. Depending on your luck, you might only need to run a few of them before you can afford your imprints on your armor. You’ll end up with a lot of trash affixes that don’t matter for your build, into the bin it goes.
Bonus fact; salvaging legendaries unlock some cool transmog options!
That’s all I can think of just now, let me know if anything is wrong or leave a tip of your own for a fellow new Wanderer.
USE ELIXERS! My friends didn’t even realize they had them because of the weird bag layout. On top of that they had no idea that they all gave exp boosts. They kept asking how I was leveling so much faster even though we were playing together.
Put elixirs on your emote wheel.
I did not realize this was a possible.
Yep, and many of the free elixirs you get are quite useless, like “+10% fire resistance”. But they all give extra experience gain so always worth having one up.
Oh wow, didn’t realize they gave extra XP. I was doing fine without the bonuses so I never really bothered looking at them unless I was going for a specific boss.
Well. I am around Level 46, never knew they affected xp, and have never used one at all. Goddammit.
Everytime the bois and I enter a dungeon, there’s a sip check call-out to pop another elixer if you’re low. Highly recommend!
Seriously, I only found out around level 56 in preseason. I still often forget to apply any.
Elixers are only worth in Wt1 and possibly 2. At Wt4 you’re already getting 200% more exp so the extra 5% actually translates to around 1.6% more. So not as important on the higher WT levels.
That’s why this is tips for new players
And what he wrote is actually a tip for new players.
I’m the worst at remembering elixirs, this is definitely a top tip! Thanks :)
These are great tips and I’m sure they’d be super helpful for anyone new to D4 regardless of D3 experience. (Also big WW enjoyer here as well, hopefully our build gets some love)
One thing I’ll add in to your list: grouping is a MASSIVE advantage over solo play. If you have a couple buddies online, definitely party up and do some content together.
Great tips. A few notes of personal experience as a druid;
- was able to do capstone @ lvl 40 as pulverize, dinged 41 inside.
- took salvage blessing first for the same reason as yours (thinking of getting gold blessing 2nd)
- 250 cinder helltides are invaluable to gear up and 5x better than most other stuff
Sounds cool! Im a necro and tried capstone first time yesterday at level 40… I’m simply taking too much damage and not dealing enough… normal mobs are fine but those elite mobs are way too hard for me. Any tips? WT1 feels way too easy for me, my minions kill everything on their own… yet capstone is very hard
At the moment (and in my experience as a fellow Necro) minions are just too weak to be much help in harder/higher content. There are only a small few builds I’ve seen where minions are viable, and they require very specific builds/items that would be hard to find at 40. Finding a build that sacrifices them is usually the better option. Although it’s been nerfed heavily, the bone spear build is still very strong and is what I used to solo the capstone at 42 this season. Not sure if there’s a difficulty difference running the capstone on wt1 or wt2, but if there is, my clear was wt2
These seem like good tips, I’m going to try to use this while leveling up this season!
It can be good to upgrade anything 1 to 3 times if that brings it into the next tier. If you have an item that is has a level of 620 for example, it is a tier 4 item and upgrading it once to 625 will make it tier 5. You will get plenty of the mats for 1-3 upgrades, its the 4th and 5th upgrades that need rarer mats.
Solid list, glad to see other content here than just endless doom and gloom of the sub!
Good tips, but even though I’m level 53, and finished the campaign, I don’t know what some of these things are. Eg. I went to WT3, but have no idea what the capstone dungeon is that I should have done in WT2? What is vendiring for gold? Is that just selling? Also, what are mats?
There’s no way to unlock WT3 without doing the capstone dungeon in 2, so whether or not you remember doing it you definitely did already :)
Yeah it looks like it’s the cathedral of light, definitely did that!
Now can someone tell me what to do with all this stuff I have? Too many decisions based on too many days points and full bags and storage stopping me from playing.
Has someone written a program to help with this yet?
Dissemble it mostly, sell the rest (75/25 and never sell legendary gear for gold). Don’t worry much about gear until 65+, just upgrade item level. In the meantime, start looking at class builds, and what stats compliment your character the most.
Vendoring is selling and mats are materials (things like herbs, ores, leathers, shards, etc.).
Follow up question: Is it better to rush campaign and do side quests/dungeons/shrines/etc later? Is it better to do them WT3?
Im lvl 30 sorc on WT2 (skipped WT1)
If it’s your first play through, do the campaign, as you’ll never need to do it again. You can also do all Altars of Lilith (there’s map tools online to help you find them) as you also won’t have to do that again.
The consensus is that you should save side quests for WT4 at 70+ since pre season 1 EXP at that level was hard to come by. It’s only in WT4 you can do the last tier of renown anyway, so no point in doing the grind sooner than that.
Does xp you earn in a region still get applied after you finished the first three tiers of renown for a region? Or is it just gone and you need to do more once you open up Nightmare difficulty?
It gets stored, so you’re not wasting your time if you do the grind in WT1 just to have it ready when you hit WT4, but you do lose some EXP.
Many thanks for this, some solid tips
