Diablo 4 is an ARPG with MMO elements, and neither of these game genres is known to be easy to dive into without some guidance and tips from experienced players. Not being much of an ARPG player myself, I had to find my way through the hardships of the long-awaited continuation of the Diablo series, make some mistakes on my way to the Endgame and learn valuable tips from the community that made the game experience so much better.

I wish I had some of those tips written down when I started playing, but now It's my turn to share them with you – and I hope you will put them to good use!

1. Salvage or Sell?

Soon in your leveling process, you will start noticing that the inventory is quite limited and gets filled in a blink of an eye, especially if you have a habit of picking up all the shiny loot you come across. My advice – start salvaging equipment you don't need as soon as you can, and you won't regret it when you see how many Veiled Crystals you need to upgrade items, imprint aspects, and especially re-roll stats. And yes, you still need gold, so it might be worth selling the weapons, as they are much better priced, while dismantling the armor for the Crystals, maintaining the balance between those resources.

2. Advanced Tooltips – Evaluate the Items You Get

That may sound like an obvious thing to do, and yet you should pay more attention to the stats on the items, while lots of players simply throw one glance at the Item Power and salvage the lower ones. But it's a little more complicated than that.

To properly evaluate and compare the true power of the item, you will need to enable both advanced tooltip options in the settings. Follow the route of Escape – Options – Gameplay.

Now that you can see the range of the rolls for the stats and the Aspect, you can immediately understand if your item has landed on the lower or higher side of the RNG stick. For example, I have rolled the max stat on the Crit Chance, but just below an average on Bone Damage and the lowest boost to the Distant Damage. While not the max roll, the stats are still great for my build, and I have imprinted the Max roll of the Aspect that I came by earlier and saved for the decent item.

Accounting for the stats and their excellent value for your builds, an item of a lower item level – 736, for example, with the correct main stats, can be MUCH better than the other one of much higher 800 Item Power but rolled with the wrong set of stats. The situation is more complicated with Weapons, where the higher power item provides a significant DPS boost. However, the stat values still have priority if you choose between weapons in the 20-30 item levels range.

3. Enchant Correctly: How to Re-Roll and Imprint

Now, once you've found a great piece of Rare gear with almost perfect stats, except for one that you prefer to switch for something else – it's time to go to the Enchanter and spin the wheel. Make sure to do Re-Rolls on RARES before imprinting Legendary Aspect to avoid the extra resource costs.

If the rolled stats are not what you are looking for, my advice is to choose the «No Change» option before going for another roll. The gold prices for the re-rolling jump drastically with each new spin, but if you don't choose the stat and keep the original one, the cost of the rolls will be much cheaper than it could be otherwise.

Once the Rare item is ready, you can proceed to Imprint the Legendary Aspect – you can use the Aspect with a good roll stashed in your bank or inventory. If you don't have the needed Aspect or refuse to apply the Max rolled one on that item and prefer to save it, you can get the Codex of Power from the collection and gain the less powerful version of that Aspect.

It is best to save the Max rolled Aspects and imprint them later on the items with BiS stats that will serve you for a very long time. I will explain how to focus-farm the specific Aspects in a moment.

4. Targeting Legendary Aspects

Five categories of Aspects are available to the players – Defensive, Offensive, Utility, Mobility, and Resource. Each can be associated only with its specific set of item slots. Knowing this is crucial for the efficient farm of certain build-defining Aspecst.

Farming the Resouce aspects is easy, as they only appear on the Ring item. In other cases, the fewer possible rolls the item slot has, the better it is for the specific farm.

You can choose to loot specific slots or types of items with the Tree of Whispers rewards, Helltide chests, and most importantly – Purveyor of Curiosities, commonly known as Gambling. You can tunnel all your Obols into the item slot of your choice and hope for the random to be on your side.

Use this Gambling Calculator to quickly find the best slot to focus on and search for the desired Aspect.

5. Gear Breakpoints, Sacred and Ancestral Drops

While there is no indication of this in the game interface whatsoever, all items in Diablo 4 fall under one of the six Item Power Tiers, ranging to 725+ items. Knowing this hidden but important aspect adds another layer of complexity to the gear optimization process. Remember Tip № 2 – Evaluate the loot and check if upgrading the piece of gear can push it into the next Tier, which comes with a tangible boost in the stats range. Thus, if you get an item of 700 Item Power (Tier 5) with decent stats, fully upgrade it as soon as possible and get all the extra stats of Tier 6.

The Sacred and Ancestral items usually drop at the highest item power and are available from the Nightmare and Torment difficulties, respectively. However, there is a hidden level requirement to fully unlock access to those items and drop them from the Tree of Whispers bounty rewards and Obolos Gambling.

Level 53 on World Tier 3 unlocks Sacred items, and Level 73 on World Tier 4 provides access to Ancestral gear. Focus on these milestones before you start actively farming and spending Obols on the gear gambling.

6. Must-Have D4 Instruments

Multiple community-made online instruments improve the quality of life and help players with everyday in-game activities. Make the bookmarks and use them to your advantage.

• Gambling Calculator – mentioned earlier, allows you to find the best items slot and efficiently farm the required Legendary Aspect.
• Helltides Map – shows the timer and the map of the ongoing Helltide. Easy to navigate between the Local Events to efficiently farm the Cinders Currency and check the active location of the Gift Of Mysteries chest, which you should always aim for, as it is filled with valuable legendary rewards and grants a good amount of XP. You can track the Legion event and the World Boss spawn on the same page.

• Diablo 4 Discord – an alternative way to know if the World Boss is about to spawn soon or Legion Events and Helltides begin is to get the notifications at the D4 community discord server. The channel includes other convenient tools, such as LFG, Trade channels, and Build discussions.
• Interactive Map – shows the location of all the dungeons, Altars of Lilith, collectibles, and other points of interest you may come across on your journey across the Sanctuary.

7. Leveling Tips

Where there are multiple ways to powerlevel characters and try to min-max your XP gains per hour, I'd like to describe the general course of action for leveling your first character in D4.

1. Complete the campaign – the story will take you on a journey across all the regions of the D4 map and, once finished on your main character, allows you to skip it on your alts. Run the campaign at your comfortable pace, take your time to deviate a little, and complete side quests and local events you come across in-between story chapters. That way, by the time you finish the Act 5 of the Campaign, you can be closing in on Level 45-50, depending on your World Tier. Try to play on the Veteran difficulty and make the most out of the extra 20% XP.

2. Play with Friends or use LFG to find the group – the D4 content gets much easier to complete in co-op, and the extra 10% from the group is a cherry on top.

3. Explore the map to unlock Waypoints and earn Renown. Renown provides nice bonuses to all characters on your realm, including Talent Points, Stats, and Paragon Points, while Waypoints make it easier to navigate the World and reach active events.

4. Complete the Capstone Dungeon and unlock World Tier 3 as soon as possible to gain access to Nightmare dungeons.

5. Farm the Nightmare Dungeons for the most efficient experience gains. Complete the Tree of Whispers bounties and Helltide events for a change. The amount of XP gained in the NM dungeons has increased significantly, making it the best way to level your characters. That, combined with a new ability to teleport to the Nightmare Dungeon using the map, makes the farming even more optimal.

6. Once you close in on Level 70, complete the Capstone Dungeon and switch to World Tier 4 to loot Ancestral items and gain even more XP. Stick to the same activities, work your way to level 100, and empower your Paragon board.

8. Focused Item Farming

Tired of getting all the wrong uniques and want to get the Build Defining ones for your class? It turns out there is a correlation between the type of enemies and their loot tables. Use the Target Farming tool and find the best places to farm specific unique items.

9. How to Buy and Sell Items

While the game is missing the Auction feature, you can try to Sell and Buy items using the dedicated channels on the Community Discord.

First, connect Battle.net with your Discord account and proceed to the Linked Roles in the Server Settings dropdown to get the Verified Battle.net Account role. Then you'll be able to post and leave comments.

Browse through the WTS channels, leave your offers, participate in the bidding, and get some great items with the stats you care for. Or post something yourself and sell it for a nice sum of gold.

10. Don't Worry, Don't Hurry, Take it Easy.

The final tip may not be what you'd expect to hear but rather something you need to hear. There is no rush to complete the game as fast as possible, finding all the ways to grind millions of XP per hour – fatigue and burnout is the only guaranteed result of such an approach.

Considering that the progression slows drastically after level 70, it is best to consider it a marathon, not a race. Look at the graphs and see for yourself – level 85 is only halfway to level 100 regarding the raw XP required. Save your strength for the season to come and try out different characters and builds. Find the pace that is comfortable for you, and don't optimize the fun out of the game – many players tend to overthink and overanalyze everything, turning the game into a job instead of a fun time. Let's not forget what we play the game for in the first place.

Bonus Tip – Overcoming the Challenge

You've made it to the end! Hopefully, these tips will help you get the best experience from the playthrough. And yet, there will be times of struggle of various sorts – there won't be enough gold to re-roll an almost perfect drop, you may get stuck on Capstone Dungeon, or Leveling becomes so tedious you'd like to take a break. Should you face such difficulties, there is no shame in asking for help from fellow D4 players in LFG or professional service providers. Investing in Gold or unlocking the new World Tier can save you lots of time, and outsourcing all the extra leveling prevents imminent burnout. If you were to choose assistance from professional players, it would be best to make decisions based on user reviews. Use Trustpilot to pick a highly-rated provider like Kingboost.net and get the desired rewards with high-quality service.