With the launch of Diablo IV immanent, and some fairly positive reviews rolling out today, we thought anticipating players would like a few tips before they get started. Whether you win the game from our Diablo IV giveaway or picked this one up yourself, it’s never too early to prepare. Still, this is more immediate for those who pre-purchased the Deluxe or Ultimate edition of the game as they will be able to dive into Early Access on June 1st! So, here are our top 4 things that every DIV player should know to get the best experience out of the game.

Force Move: What Is It and Why You Should Use It

Force move is fairly easy to understand in concept as its function is self-evident in the name. It forces your character to move and only move, ignoring all other external interactions (except for unit collision). Why is this useful? Well, have you ever been attempting to run from an enemy in order to reposition, only to start attacking another monster or close a door and consequently meet your early demise? Force move helps to avoid this trap, as well as allows you to easily round up monsters or reposition around monsters with large hitboxes (think Ashava from the open betas/Server Slam).

This is especially useful as a melee character when avoiding Elite affixes or other death-inducing hazards. For a mouse and keyboard player, this will most likely become a requirement to be successful in higher difficulties (Force Move is always on for the controller) as Elite monsters become increasingly deadly, and accidental misclicks can mean the difference between success and victory.

Personally, I prefer to bind it to M5 on my mouse and just roll my thumb up to it when moving. Whichever key bind you choose to attach this to, begin using this from the very beginning of your playtime and it will soon become second nature.

Advanced Tooltip Compare: Making Differences Between Items More Apparent

Diablo IV has many interesting and powerful affixes on items. Choosing which ones are suitable for your build can be overwhelming. However, the developers have added an additional gameplay option to help you determine which stats are different between your currently equipped gear and a potential upgrade. This is more than just “green arrow good, red arrow bad,” in that some affixes will carry far more weight for your chosen playstyle. Enabling this feature will speed up your item comparisons and make your decision-making much more streamlined. Here is the definition of this setting as provided within the game:

• Enabled: When comparing item tooltips, properties gained, lost, and changes to equipped Skills will be displayed.

• Disabled: When comparing item tooltips, only the primary stat will be compared.

Enabling this gameplay setting will allow you to see exactly which properties are gained and lost when looking at upgrading your potentially outdated weapon. This setting is found within the “Gameplay” options menu. Here are 2 screenshots displaying the same item comparison. The first is with “Advanced Tooltip Compare”, the second is without.

Advanced Tooltip Information

Skills in DIV have many different interactions with monsters based on the state of the monster and other variables. For example, you might select an upgrade node in your skill tree for Charged Bolts which causes it to deal increased damage to stunned enemies, or a skill may have a chance to spawn additional Firewalls. In the default state, the game doesn’t display all this information on the Skill Tooltips and must be simply inferred rather than spelled out.

Enter Advanced Tooltip Information. This gameplay setting will enable the Skill tooltips to include more information about their effects, damage scaling, lucky hit, etc. Here is the definition of this setting as provided within the game:

• Display advanced information on tooltips such as item property ranges, Lucky Hit chance on Skills, and indicators as to whether modifications are additive [+] or multiplicative [x].

While many who play DIV will be able to do so while blissfully ignoring this information, it becomes incredibly helpful for those that are wanting to push to higher levels of difficulty and min/max their build.

Lucky Hit: What is it?

If you have played other ARPG’s and even MMORPG’s, you may be familiar with the term “proc.” This is a chance for something to happen under certain conditions within the game. For example, on a cast of Fireball, there is a 15% chance that it will pass through targets. In Diablo IV, this idea takes form as Lucky Hit.

Each skill has a given percentage, when dealing damage, to trigger a Lucky Hit; or “proc.” What happens when a Lucky Hit is rolled will depend on your gear, skill choices, and paragon board. For example, you might find a legendary item that says, “On cast of Upheaval, gain up to a 50% chance to trigger an additional Upheaval at 50% normal damage on a Lucky Hit.” Another example from the Sorcerer enchantment of Firewall is something along the lines of “Burning damage has up to an 8% chance to trigger a Firewall for 3 seconds.”

What you’ll notice in these examples is that there is a chance for something to happen on a successful lucky hit. In these cases, it is essentially a percentage of a percentage that something will happen. In the case of Hydra, the skill’s base Lucky Hit chance is 53%. If we then say that the Firewall enchantment will trigger 8% of the time that a Lucky Hit happens, then overall there is a 4.24% chance of Hydra damage that the additional Firewall will trigger.

Lastly, there are bonuses in the game that can be found which can increase the chances of a successful Lucky Hit. These might be on items, skills, passives, or paragon boards. Ultimately, the bonus they provide to a skills Lucky Hit Chance will be a multiplier that is the sum of your total bonuses from all sources. For example, if I find one that has a 4% bonus to Lucky Chance, a passive node fully maxed that provides 15% bonus to Lucky Chance, and a paragon glyph that provides 9% bonus to Lucky Chance, then the net result will be a 28% multiplier to my base Lucky Hit Chance.

Psst, with Hydra’s base lucky hit of 53% multiplied by the 28% multiplier will total ~68% total Lucky Hit Chance!

Were these 4 tips not enough to get you started? Check out our Top 5 Starting Tips video on Youtube!