DIABLO IV EXPLORATION GUIDE
Open World Events
In Diablo IV your whole adventure will take place within the same gigantic map, which represents the world of Sanctuary, home to the Diablo franchise ever since the first title. As opposed to all precedent titles, there will be MMORPG mechanics tied to such an enormous map, like real time open world Events such as World Bosses, random timed events of various types marked on the map as an orange circle, (always combat related in one way or another) like Tower defense mini-events. The world and its creatures are level synced to your character most of the time, and there are also events known as “Strongholds” which will have their own level regardless of your character level and for this reasons will be better to complete them once you reach the appropriate level range, as going into a level 35+ Stronghold at level 20 won’t be smart. Once you complete a Stronghold you’ll gain experience, gold, loot, obols, renown and it will turn the area into a Town, unlocking its Waypoint too in most cases.
Apart from World Boss Events and other generic Events, from Nightmare you will unlock the Helltide which is a zone where enemies are stronger and drop a special currency used to open special chests within the Helltide, while also giving nice experience. Pretty much a good way to level up while farming useful items, gathering and crafting materials too, assuming that you will not play on PS4 or barely sufficient hardware, cause otherwise Helltides have been reported as borderline unplayable because of the stuttering and screen freeze you will often experience without good hardware. In general this is a problem which plagues the whole game on older hardware and will be the biggest cons to Diablo IV if it won’t get fixed somehow, since also PvP and other activities are borderline impossible to play with such a poor performance.
PvP open world zones are also special zones where you can flag yourself as hostile and attack other players, while receiving increased rarity loot and there are few “extraction sites” where you will flag a message to all PvP participants in that area, informing them that you are attempting to extract the loot so that they can come to stop you if they wish to do so and fight for the loot.
Once you have accumulated enough “Whispers” from completing various activities and tasks you’ll be prompted to visit a specific “Tree of Whispers” marked on the World Map to select one of three rewards, usually containing chests with random gear ranging from rares to legendaries or more.
Finally, there will also be a myriad of sidequests to complete in each Region to gain more exp, renown (fame) and other resources, while they are optional I would highly suggest completing them if you can.
Renown System
The Renown system basically allows you to unlock extra skill points, potion slots, gold, exp and paragon points after reaching specific breakpoints, here are the exact values (same for each zone):
- 80 points to get +1 Skill Point
- 100 points (180 Total) +1 Potion Charge
- 120 points (300 Total) +1 Skill Point
- 200 points (500 Total) +1 Skill Point
- 300 points (800 Total) +4 Paragon Points
The bonuses you get are Account wide and shared with all the characters you have, plus each breakpoint gives an individual additional 10k Gold and some Experience points to any character reaching any breakpoint.
Strongholds
Strongholds are dangerous specific areas located in the Open World that do not level sync to your character but have their own level and thus initially you will need to Ignore most of them until you are around their level range. They grant 50 Renown points and Experience upon completion and are slightly harder than a random World Event regarding the difficulty of the objectives, while giving higher rewards than a common “Orange Circle” World Event. Once you clear the area you will often unlock a Waypoint and Dungeons too sometimes, which will grant even more Renown when attuning to it and upon Dungeons first completions, making Strongholds a priority target if you wanna rapidly increase your Renown.
NOTE: For older gen console players (PS4) or lower end GPUs, without good hardware PvP, Helltide and other competitive or challenging activities are unviable at high levels because of serious stuttering and performance issues (while enemies and opponents won’t be freeze so that you can easily get KO’d. Clearly competitive play on older hardware is not viable as it is right now). In PvM you can hope to survive to such eternal lag and stuttering spikes at high levels of difficulty only if you got all the proper defensive Aspects, such as the bubble who absorbs tons of damage and such barrier effects to take the hits that would otherwise kill you while frozen in the stuttering. Hardcore is also unviable for such reasons when running the game on old hardware consoles and pc, as you don’t wanna lose all your progress because of random circumstances.
