Here’s a guide I’ve put together with my thoughts on hardcore progression in Diablo 4. I discovered the joy of hardcore probably 12 months ago and have written about it before. I now have more experience under my belt and want to share what I’ve learned. One of the most notable things I’ve learned is that it’s kinda hard to find D4 Hardcore content. So this is my step to solving that problem.
The guide is split into topics that start with the broadest
possible thinking then get more and more detailed and specific. It assumes that
you know the game well and have experience of the endgame in softcore mode.
Exposure:
In hardcore mode, you always run the risk of dying and
losing all your progress. At any given time you run the risk of fully wiping
out and having to start from scratch. Which, if it’s your fault, is all fair
and part of the game. You just need the lesson to make fewer dumb mistakes.
However, this is an online game that you are probably running on windows. Once
you’ve got your head around the hardcore game play, technical issues are the far
more likely cause of death.
To manage this, we want to think about the duration of a
given activity. At any given point your internet could drop, or the client
could crash or windows BSODs. Once you log back in you see the character has
died. That’s a seriously unfun way to lose a HC character! The idea then, is to
minimise the time spend doing anything and do activities that are short and
sharp. You want mobs to die in one or two shots and ideally, the bosses are
dead in under 5 seconds.
This way you are spending as little time as possible exposed
to the risks of technical issues. I refer to this idea as reducing “exposure”.
Leveling:
The trick here is Level smooth. Slow is smooth and smooth is
fast. Don’t examine every item as a possible upgrade, only swap out gear
between long sessions of leveling fill a stash tab with interesting items till
you hit 20 then spend some time building a set for 20+ then do it again around
30, 40 and 50. Constantly stopping to fiddle with gear slows you down. Once you
have a good set keep in the stash for the next generation.
Use potions and incense for XP bonuses, you know that though
it’s the basics of leveling.
When you hit 40 that’s a good time to do the strongholds.
They are great sources of XP and will see you through to 55-60 easily. Don’t do
the ones with long cutscenes. You just want to smash them out as quick as
possible.
Leveling will happen mostly in Helltides, get the embers,
open chests, get the baleful hearts, kill the blood maiden, get the embers... A
self-reinforcing loop. I have had many happy times holding back the hordes of
hell in hardcore. It’s a good time!
Don’t forget the Ashes from the season journey! They’re a
good boost to XP.
Early End Game:
Eventually you hit 60 then all sorts of things come online
to increase your power.
- Higher tier gear: Helltides are still good to run till you’ve got ancestral gear with mostly the stats you want. Helltides are a good source of Whisper Caches too, which is a sorta halfway decent way to target farm for the right upgrades.
- Glyphs: Drop Everywhere (levelled in Pits)
- Obducite for Master Working: Nightmare Dungeons, Infernal Hordes, Undercity (tribute of refinement)
- Paragon Levels: Just XP from doing stuff (Pitt is fastest source of XP)
- Gem Upgrades: Just play the game
- Upgrade Legendary Aspects: Just play the game
- Upgrade Tempering recipes: Just play the game
- Killing Bosses for Mythics: Don’t try this as a fresh 60.
At this point the best way to scale up power is Glyphs and Obducite. What I do is build my confidence up, one level at a time, to a level 20 pit, to unlock Torment 1. Then I chain-run nightmare dungeons. If you want to make it more efficient, you can stack up the dungeons that are offering Grim Favors. You can do this by picking a zone (Nahantu) and spamming as many Sigils as you can at the occulist. Salvage the ones not in the zone we are not interested in (so only keep the green ones). Doing this you can pretty quickly build up a good collection of NMD Sigils and then when the dungeons refresh you are able to open a nightmare dungeon that also gives Grim Favors! More Whisper Caches!
So in those initial NMD runs you are earing: Obducite, collecting Glyphs (alas not leveling them), Paragon
XP, Gear drops, gem fragments, tempering recipes, legendary aspect upgrades and
Whisper Caches! Look at all the sources to improve you power all through one activity! The fresh 60 in torment 1 is the fastest you can build your power!
That’s what you want! Do the thing that stacks as may ways
to build your power. It won’t be long till you are oneshotting bosses in T1
dungeons that’s the time to hit some of the bosses you’ll probalby have some have materials to summon them that’ll have dropped from your activities. Undercity is a good place to
get some if you have the tributes, but really, you can just zone out in a Helltide
for an hour or two and you’ll get plenty (mind your exposure though).
Keep an eye on the boss that is offering whispers to stack
up that even more power progress.
Once you’ve got a few whisper caches (don’t open them) roll
an alt and open on that one. This will become your extra life. Don’t salvage
gear you are upgrading on your main this goes to your alt as hand me downs.
The Pit:
This is the grindy phase where you are probably at most risk
if you are not careful. Keep doing the activity that gets you the most power
sources we’ve described above but once you’ve got all your glyphs also integrate
some pit runs to level them up.
Here’s how to safely progress the pit in hardcore. Once
you’ve got all the glyphs that you want to level you are right to start this
process. To pick the pit level you want to take the safe route and level up one
rank at a time. You want to be finishing you run in under 3 minutes to reduce your
exposure. One or two shotting the bosses. If you are starting to stress on the
bosses take a break from pushing pits and farm Obducite till you’ve got a bit
more power. Pit levels are important relative to your glyph levels. If your pit
is 10+ levels above your Glyph level it’s 100% guaranteed to upgrade one level.
This is great and easy to achieve. If you are completing pits 20+ levels over
the glyphs it’ll give you 2 levels and 30+ gives three. (I think this bonus
caps at 15 for the plus 3 and 40 for the plus 2) but it’s plenty of head room
to get the glyphs to where they need to be quickly.
There are two important points to hit level 15 has a bit
power bump and then level 46.
So my process goes like this. Check my glyphs (look at the
second from the left) add 20 (10 if you are conservative) to that and that’s
the pit level I want to target. So if my glyph is level 5 I want to run level 25
pits (15 if being safe) so it gains levels when I upgrade it. When opening the
pit (particularly on a torment boundary) check Armor and resists to ensure
they’re still capped. Then when finished upgrade all the glyphs I am using from
right to left (the game sorts them in descending order so if you keep doing
that it’ll evenly level your glyphs. You only need to do the highest pit level
that is going to level your glyph. Anything else will be slower and thus unnecessary
exposure.
Changing it up with Infernal Hordes:
So once you are sick of pits and NMDs, try infernal hordes.
These take a long time to run so are the biggest exposure of all activities.
But the Obducite makes them tempting. The trick with these is to always pick
the Hellborne upgrades (if there are none pick, exhaulted hordes, then elites,
then spires, then masses) the best ones to get are “Surging” that increases the
number of mobs dropping aether as well as the amount of aether they drop, which
scales nicely once you stack other upgrades that increase the drop rate. Always
pick max Obducite in the reward chest. Everything else you can source
elsewhere.
Torment Progression:
Knowing when you are safe to bump the difficulty can be hard.
Get a good stack of resist gear so you are always maxed.
Armor: 100
Resists: 70%
Each torment level drops resists by -25% and Armor by 250,
so keep an eye on that as you push upward. Use Gems, Tempers and Masterworking
rolls to get the numbers you need. It’s never worth the risk of going in
without the best possible protection. Get to know the alchemist, particularly
for his incenses song of the mountain (Armor) and soothing spices (resists)
They can help fill a gap in gearing for a while.
Once resists and Armor are at the caps, you are 4/12
masterworked everything and level 15 on the glyphs it’s time to think about
torment 2. Which you can inch your way up to. Work your way up to level 35 pits
one level at a time which you’ll have done already if you’re following the
glyph level + 20 rule and they’re at 15.
Then you do it all again in torment 2 till you hit 8/12 MW and level 30 glyphs.
If that level 49 pit boss is going down quick, it’s time to work on T3.
Now don’t rush into T4! The Obducite drop rates are tempting but even if you
are surviving ok. If it’s taking a long time to down mobs, you are increasing
your exposure. It is ALWAYS better to grind in lower Torments than risk the
increased exposure trying to get a bigger but slower pay off.
Get your stuff 12/12 MW in T3 use the NMD whisper stacking
trick, so it feels like a good time investment, trick your monkey brain that’s
trying to convince you to push into T4.
Andriel:
I avoid her in higher torments. The difficult to avoid mechanics, with the tormented debuff that punishes not being able to avoid mechanics, combined with her fights structure, means even if you one or two shot her you still have to do that totem phase at least once. These all add up to just too much exposure. To be safe I want to be killing bosses in a couple of seconds not toptoeing through bruning tulips! I don't think I am alone there either. There's always people in trade selling shackles and pin cushioned dolls so it seems like a fight that a lot of people chose to avoid. However, those summoning materials do stack up in your bags screaming "we're potential runes! Or better turn us into Mythics!" well that starts to get on my nerves.
Eventually I roll up an alt and kill her in T1 just to clear the bag space of her summoning mats, and slience those voices. It’s easy in T1 to one hit her, kill the totems and then smack her once more before that horrific Giant Flame Laser is summoned. It is a good source of runes and it’s always nice when she drops a mythic. The best builds to use here are minion based they will(might) split up and kill the totems quick and get back on her for the killing blow allowing you to keep an eye on that giant flame laser beam bullshit.
Alts:
Alts are your extra life. Invest in them as soon as you can. Once you have a satisfactory level of gear horde Whisper Caches to open on your Alts. Open 27 caches and your bam your Alt is 60! Which is a bit of grind, buuut, it only takes 14 to hit 50! Then with your hand-me down gear (and maybe a lucky mythic) It's only a few Strongholds and a helltide or two away from being a fresh 60. Just saying. It’s good to have a backup character for when disaster strikes.
My alt choices this season was easy, Spiritborn is so OP
almost every alt was some variant of the jaguar hall / viscous shield bugged builds. Although it
is fun having a minion build for Andarial T1, that does require a whole
other gear set so only worth it if you can manage the stash space. Otherwise
they should be the same class and build as your main (or at least have stats and
tempers in common) so you can get the most out of your hand-me-down gear.
Groups:
I don’t bother I always solo bosses and just lol at all the “400m
for a Duriel carry” posts in trade. Like, why can’t people do this themselves?
Also, I am on the AU servers and joining people in the US means my ping goes from
50 to 200 which massively increases my exposure. The downside is that I have no-one
to brag to.
I am not saying don’t group, grouping can offer safety in
numbers, faster clear times, reducing exposure and shared knowledge, which can be lifesaving in
hardcore mode. I just don’t. So there.
Summary:
So that’s it! Limit your exposure. Level smooth and steady
to 60, leveraging fast XP by completing Strongholds. Save your gear for the
next generation. Stack as many power increasing activities as possible to
progress through the torments. One pit level at a time bringing the glyphs up
at the same rate. Start preparing the next generation by opening whisper caches
on them and using hand me down gear.
I hope you get something out of this guide. Trying Hardcore
is well worth it. If you can mitigate the risks of exposure to issues that’ll
kill you. The rush of narrowly avoiding a death that would wipe days or weeks
of effort is among the best available in gaming. My best highs have been with
this mode (also my worst lows) and well, hopefully this guide makes the game mode
seem more approachable.
Stay safe out there!
