Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred

Blizzard

Diablo 4’s Lord of Hatred expansion is here, and it’s being generally quite well received, from its excellent story to its new classes to its skill tree additions and endgame changes. Not perfect, but the game is certainly in a good state and worth revisiting.

I had a lot of time to play it before release, and now, after playing the early stages yet again (since my characters were wiped), I have some advice for those just starting out. To be clear, this is early game advice, not much for post-launch and certainly not for deep endgame.

1) Don’t Stress About Campaign Difficulty Settings – This is advice I didn’t really follow myself, but I probably should have. Obviously, the base idea is that if you want more of a challenge, then up the difficulty, but there are some caveats. I did it on hard, but going to expert or penitent is going to be sort of a slog, not based on your skill, but based on gear, mostly. As I went, I did up the difficulty and was at penitent by the end, but there was no real reason to.

I thought I would do this for better XP gains, but once you hit the endgame, that’s pretty pointless. It doesn’t matter if you finish the campaign at level 40 or level 65, because once you get there, if you start War Plans, you will soon find yourself buried in more XP than you can carry. You’ll gain levels that would have taken you five times as long to get if you just played the campaign on that higher difficulty. So it’s not really getting you a head start at all, if that’s your goal.

2) Do the Post-Campaign Side-Missions – Over the years, there have been good and bad Diablo side-missions, many of them pretty bad, but Diablo 4 has improved those in time, and in Lord of Hatred, we now have some of the best to date. After the campaign ends, I would definitely do the new “!” items that you see around, as they resolve a number of storylines and loose threads from the end of the campaign, and a few are so involved that they are pretty close to campaign missions themselves. Plus, side missions give you decent rewards now, from materials to big XP to sometimes legendary/unique gear.

3) Change This One Setting For Gear – If you care at all about starting to get top gear when you reach higher levels, there’s one setting to make sure you have checked. In Options under Gameplay, there is Advanced Tooltip Information, which you should turn on. This may clutter up the gear UI a bit, but it shows you the possible range for every stat/affix, so you can see if you’re on the low end or high end, letting you know if you can improve. While you’re here, you might as well also turn on Advanced Tooltip Compare, which lets you see a more detailed look at gains/losses when switching items.

4) Check the Shop For Upgrades Every Level – This is more for leveling as you go through the campaign. Pretty much every level you gain, you will reset the shops, and they will sell improved power level items. These are not expensive, and while the jewelry and armor ones can be hit or miss, you can get big power gains instantly with a new weapon purchase if yours is lagging behind, considering how fast those scale. Occasionally, the shops even sell legendaries, which you can use or salvage for the affix. So you may want to keep checking even after level 70.

5) You Almost Never Have To Truly Respec – While it’s obviously still possible to pull all your points and respect your gear, or backtrack a bunch, you have to do this far less than you have in past iterations of the game. The new triple modifier system for skills allows those branches to operate as toggles. You are never going to have to respec to switch them. They still cost a skill point to unlock, but you’ll only truly refund them if you’re getting out of that skill altogether. Also, with 15 points to max skills now, pulling points out for a new skill almost never means you have to do a full respec. It’s a lot easier than it was previously. The Paragon board works the way it always has, however.

That’s my advice for now. More to come.

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