EARLY GAME LEVELING TIPS & TRICKS

Early Leveling Guide

In Diablo IV, enemies give a base experience value depending on their Life, size and level, with Elites always giving a fixed amount scaling with level and their Minions always giving 60% of their relative Elite experience (which makes them also a priority target, apart from Elites and Champions)

An experience bonus is applied for killing higher level monsters and a penalty for defeating lower level enemies.

In general the early levels of any class should be pretty easy in any of the starter difficulties (being Adventurer or Veteran) and gaining the first few levels is pretty fast, however it does slow down significantly as you get to higher levels. Your first character will have the weakest overall power potential initially, since it won’t have any account-wide bonus from world exploration, but even without Renown bonuses you can do perfectly fine and casually progress until Nightmare difficulty where due to the Resistances penalty and increased monster power you will need to start thinking more about your gameplay and builds in general, as some elite/champion/bosses might be quite challenging if you’re not prepared to deal with them in the first place, and things will just get increasingly harder as you level up, that’s when legendary Aspects, Uniques and other powerful gear will become necessary to progress further. Before Hell you must have a somewhat functioning build with both good defensive and offensive capabilities if you don’t wanna hit a big difficulty spike, since enemies will gain even stronger attributes and affixes while leveling up with you.

 

General Gameplay Tips & Tricks:

•  On your first character, explore the various regions as much as you can to gather as many Altars of Lilith, clearing dungeons to get useful Codex of Power Aspects (one way to know which Aspect a Dungeon will unlock is by hovering over the specified Dungeon icon in the World Map menu, so that it shows the name and effect of the Aspect tied to it, if it has one cause some Dungeons won’t unlock any Aspect) plants, material from gathering nodes and these sorts of items which will be very useful later on

• Clear World Events that spawn near you while traveling towards a destination (except higher level Strongholds and such dangerous places when you are not ready, those should be ignored) to earn some extra currencies, Obols, materials and equipment from their Reward Chest at the end
• Attune to every waypoint you see, clear every Stronghold within your level range, every Cellar and Dungeon you see for the first time cause that will increase your Renown points for that specific Region, in order to reach specific breakpoints unlocking extra Potion Slots, Skill Points and finally Paragon Points, 
• Be on the lookout for suspicious dead-end zones or other alternative paths which sometimes will be hiding an Altar of Lilith
• Do not salvage useless low level legendaries if you wanna earn tons of gold faster, check at the Occultist NPC the selling price of the Essence that you can extract from it and if it is +200k when extracting it costs 110k max, that’s easy early profit from an item that would have net you just few common materials by salvaging it that you will get from legendary items that are not profitable to sell like this.
• Team up with other players whenever you can, join a Clan or form your own if you wanna try to lead one, unless you are specifically seeking for a solo experience, it will be extremely beneficial to team up with other players around the World and make new friends to play with. Not only you get increased experience from being in a party with other players, but it will also be easier to progress the game at any level with some basilar teamwork and strategies
• When you are in a party with other players, monsters will be level synced individually for each player according to their level which is a very inclusive and well designed feature, allowing lower level players to easily team up with higher level players to run some dungeons while everyone gets more experience. Loot is also instanced for everyone individually (like in Diablo 3)

 

Character Building Tips & Tricks:

• Prioritize your main stat on gear based on your Class, followed by the generic “Damage Bonus”, Distant or Close Damage Bonus based on your build and weapons/skills used, then try to get as much Damage multipliers possible according to the type of damage and procs you get (for example a build with high Overpower proc chance will weight Overpower Damage Bonus much more than a build focusing on Vulnerable + Critical Damage), in general as many of these proc chances and multipliers you can stack together the bigger the final damage will be, for weapons Base Weapon Damage also matters a lot.

Remember, the more damage multipliers you can synergize together, the higher damage you will deal.

• Get bases with +1-2 to relevant skills you use, for example you can find +1-2 to Core skills on hands, +1-2 skills to other skills in some Helms and also in other armor slots, so armors with the correct main stat and +skill have the potential to become good legendaries, since you can also reroll one of the other affixes into a desired one
• Stack damage reduction, armor, elemental resistances and passive effects as you progress through higher levels and difficulties or you’ll most likely get stomped or one shotted at one point by Champions/Bosses in the endgame without a good defensive layer
• Maximizing as many different sources of high damage multipliers, while focusing on your main stat and offensive secondaries according to your build type of damage dealt will be the most effective way to increase your overall damage by a lot

 

Best Generic Codex of Power Aspects for ANY early build:

• Might, Protecting, The Deflecting Barrier and The Protector are the standard strongest mitigation Aspects you can universally put into a build, with Disobedience being an honorable mention for indirect damage reduction through enemy damage dealt debuffing.
• Edgemaster’s, Pummeling, Rapid, The Expectant are instead the generic best offensive Aspects that you generally put into a starter build, but also into more advanced ones.

 

Regarding the Codex Aspects, the most useful early on are without doubt the ones giving Damage Reduction such as Might, or also the barriers, bubbles and extra max life as shields you get from some defensive aspects are extremely powerful and  increase your survivability by a lot. Other generic well rounded Aspects for all classes are the Rapid one which gives 25-50% attack speed based on the item which gets it (2 handed weapons for doubled amount so +50%), or other damage boosting aspects, while the best ones for each class are situational based on the build you use.

As you explore Sanctuary, you will come across instanced Dungeons and Cellars (one room fights) which I suggest completing once with at least one of your characters. The progress made by clearing Dungeons is account wide just like for Altars of Lilith stats bonuses or Renown rewards, this means that once you explored a lot with your main, all subsequent characters created will start from lvl1 with extra attributes and skill points to use, apart from many potential Legendary Aspects that you could put into their Rare gear early on to transmute it into Legendary.

You can expect to have a decent functioning build very early for any character if you have some of these extra skill points available from the beginning (while extra paragon points will be instead unlocked at lvl50 with Paragon Boards)

Dungeons will usually be 5 to 10 minutes long, with objectives asking you to retrieve specific items and place them in the right spots or to kill some targets before advancing to the boss fight at the end of it. They are a decent source of exp and can be spammed by resetting their status if you don’t want to close and re-enter a game (you won’t lose your first time rewards). In general you will also spam Nightmare Sigil enhanced Dungeons which creates a Nightmare/High Tier version of a dungeon based on the tier of the Sigil you crafted (from 1 to tier 100 max) and at the end of it you’ll be given the option to put special Glyphs experience points into “Glyphs” which are pretty much the equivalent of what Legendary Gems were in Diablo 3, although they work in a different way, their final purpose is the very same.

These Glyphs will be placed in dedicated slots within the Paragon Boards, and based on the type and rarity of the Glyph it will give several bonuses. They also has a “range” of nodes with conditions to be met to further enhance their power, like for example a Glyph could give +5% damage every 5 points of tiles with Dexterity activated within its radius with a cap of 40 points max, while increasing that bonus to +10% if you have at least 200+ total Dex (just an example but you get the point).

By leveling these glyphs up in these Nightmare Sigil enhanced Dungeons, that 5/10% bonus will go up by a lot, just like maxed Legendary Gems in Diablo 3 so that they will be very important for any well designed build willing to reach their highest potential.

NOTE: Protecting or Might are the best candidates to be put into the Amulet slot, since they would get a 50% boost to their effect (for example Protecting in an Amulet will give a barrier 50% stronger than anywhere else)

Rapid, Pummeling or The Expectant are the best candidates depending on your build among the generic Aspects to be imprinted into a 2 handed weapon for +100% boost to their effect, or Amulet for 50% boost (for example Rapid in a 2h weapon would give +50% attack speed to Basic skills sas minimum value)

 

NOTE: Respecializations (also known as “respecs”) are obtained by paying gold, early on they will be very cheap but after level 50, complete respecs will definitely start being expensive (even if there is a method to farm few millions relatively fast), while reverting a few points will usually be affordable even in the later levels. Resetting all the Paragon Boards instead might not be as easy and for this reason complete respecs at maximum level won’t be as easy or common to see happen in my opinion, but we’ll see in the long run they will result more affordable.