Choosing the right difficulties is important in Diablo 4 or any Diablo title. These difficulties decide your progression, as they are crucial to your character’s development.
Knowing when to switch to the other difficulties is important apart from the first two difficulties. It is because certain items don’t drop if you aren’t at the correct difficulty.
In this guide, we’ll show you a quick overview of how the difficulties work so that you can adjust your playthrough and progress in a smooth manner.
All Difficulty Options
Adventurer
- Level 1 – 50
- Easy to defeat enemies
Veteran
- Level 1 – 50
- Monsters give 20% more experience
- Monsters drop 15% more gold
Nightmare
- Level 50 – 70
- Sacred items and unique items can drop
- Nightmare Sigils can drop that unreal Nightmare Dungeons
- Helltides can appear across Sanctuary
- Champion monsters with damage resistance auras can appear
- Enemies are more formidable
- Monsters give 100% increased experience gain
- Monsters drop 15% more gold
- Monsters overcome 20% resistance
Torment
- Level 70+
- All item drops from Nightmare
- Ancestral items and new Unique items can drop
- Monsters give 200% increased experience gain
- Monsters drop 15% more gold
- Monsters overcome 40% resistance
Changing Difficulties
To change difficulties, you need to go to the World Tier Statue. These statues are located inside the town and other villages.
Interact with the statue and choose the appropriate difficulty you want. Nightmare will be locked until you reach 50, while Torment is locked to level 70.
Leveling Progression
When you start playing the game with a new character, you have two difficulty choices – Adventurer and Veteran.
If you want to level up fast, Veteran is the best option. However, the difference between Adventurer and Veteran is a bit weird.
From levels 1-20, you’ll find it easy on both difficulties. The problem shows up when you start leveling up higher. This is because the enemies scale to your character’s level.
If you turn 21, the enemies turn 21 as well. Things will get harder if you don’t get stronger when you level up from 20 to 21 (gear-wise).
The best way to level up and progress is to switch to tier 1 or adventurer once it gets harder. You can use the experience bonus at the start on Veteran because the start is quite easy.
The biggest power level increase will come from your weapons. They bring the most damage to your build, while the other gear pieces help with survivability more than increasing your damage.
Builds that don’t scale with the weapon’s DPS are difficult to play. As you level up, you’ll consistently find yourself weak because your skills might rely on a specific aspect to become strong.
Here are some of our builds you can try out:
- Burning Arc Lash Sorcerer – Starter build with strong endgame
- Twisting Blade Rogue – Starter build with extremely high endgame DPS
Level 50 – 70 Nightmare
When you reach 50, you want to make sure you won’t often die when you are thinking of switching to Nightmare.
Replacing your oldest pieces of gear would be the main priority. Once you are able to clear monsters on Nightmare, you should run it until you reach Torment.
The difference in experience gained and the added item drop pool will catapult your character to newer heights.
Level 70+ Torment
As you reach Torment, the biggest hurdle will be both your maximum life/damage reduction stats and your main offensive stat for your build.
After fixing your defenses, you also need to stack up on maximum life.
Gauge whether your fortification (if you are running this defensive) is high as well. You can offload some maximum life rolls for attributes you need when running fortification.
Defensives just focus on damage reduction rolls, armor, and maximum life. Other defensive stats are quite useless.
Apart from defensives, you also need more damage output. You want to clear the enemies fast and efficiently. Otherwise, you are better off farming better items first on Nightmare difficulty.
