Classes Leveling Overview Diablo 4 Guide

Diablo 4 Early Leveling Guide

General Tips & Tricks

This guide will help you to level up your Classes until at very least level 50+, when you will finally unlock Paragon Boards and stop gaining Skill points. Past level 50 you will gain more power by investing Paragon Points and improving Glyphs, which will specialize your build way beyond the power granted by your skill points alone. 

In Diablo 4 the Open World remains  synced to your actual level, so at first you’ll just need to follow the campaign while completing as many sidequests as possible, while clearing dungeons, cellars and Open World Events.

Later on you’ll need to unlock and change the “world tier” or difficulty to level up further and to also unlock the special Sigil to transform a regular dungeon into its Nightmare, Hell or higher difficulty version. You’ll also unlock pvp areas and Helltide areas to gain even more exp and options to level up your paragon boards. Up until level 50 you gain skill points, after level 50 you’ll start gaining Paragon points for the Paragon Boards.

Enemies give experience values 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)

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.

Before taking a look at the specific Classes, here are the Class generic best legendary powers or “Aspects” from Codex of Power 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.

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)

Barbarian Leveling

Barbarians can feel a bit clunky early on due to resource generation not being high and movement speed/general sustain to spam skills, but you will gain access to the Fortify buff (strong defensive buff for damage reduction that increases effective Life). Probably out of all the classes, Barbarian is the one benefitting the most from having exploration skill points available early on, so I ideally wouldn’t start the game as Barbarian although it’s perfectly viable to do so.

Among your best Basic skills to generate Fury, your main resource, there is Flay with its chance to proc Vulnerable on enemies or Frenzy which grants Berserking, a powerful buff exclusive to the Barbarian which increases damage and movement speed. Core skills such as Hammer of the Ancients or Whirlwind to deal damage while on the move will be great choices to level up early on. From the Defensive section of the skill tree Rallying Cry is a good buff, Iron Skin grants you a barrier with 50% of your missing Life for 5 seconds, Challenging Shout is useful to tank nearby enemies with 40% extra damage reductions for 8 seconds every 25 seconds, specially in teamplay and Ground Stomp to Stun in an area of effect. General leveling strategies for any class will be to run Open World Events, Dungeons, Cellars and once you’ll start reaching higher difficulties you’ll be able to start grinding Sigils to improve your Glyphs too.

Among Brawling skills, War Cry granting 15% damage bonus buff to the team for 8 seconds on a 25 seconds cooldown is great, Leap can be useful for extra mobility, knockback and slow, Charge for an unstoppable low damaging gap closer. Weapon Mastery skills are pretty powerful, Deathblow is an amazing single target ability to one shot Minions and lesser enemies as it resets its cooldown after a kill, so that you can spam it against weaker enemies for much higher average damage compared to using Basic + Core attacks combo, and faster too, while Steel Grasp is used to pull in enemies. Barbarian Ultimate skills are extremely powerful in the right scenarios, Wrath of the Berserker enables stronger Unstoppable burst windows, Call of the Ancient instead has a beautiful animation but also brings great area of effect damage

to a Class which generally lacks a bit in that department and for this reason is often used as Ultimate skill.

Barbarian Ultimate passives are build defining and will likely modify your playstyle a bit depending on which you use, in order to maximize your performance.

Unconstrained increases Berserking max duration and max damage bonus, particularly good for Berserking focused Barbarian builds, while one of the strongest passive here in my opinion is Unbridled Rage, increasig the damage of your Core skills by a whopping +135%, at the cost of 100% increased Fury cost, since with endgame gear your resource generation will be much higher this passive enables a lot of extra damage to skills such as Whirlwind or Hammer of the Ancients.

Barbarian is extremely gear dependent and as such you’ll want to update his weapons everytime you can while trying to focus specific types of weapons to also increase its Arsenal level. Here are the suggested Codex of Power Aspects for leveling Barbarian:

• Ancestral Echoes, The Dire Whirlwind for Whirlwind builds
• Berserk Ripping and Relentless Berserker’s for Berserking builds

Sorceress Leveling

The Sorceress has a wide array of powerful offensive and defensive passives, equipment and Life shields gained through various skills and mechanics, providing multiple layers of defense that can make the Sorceress a surprisingly tanky Class when properly built.

Your main resource is Mana and early on you’ll have to decide which element to “main”, as hybrid elemental builds are harder to optimize and less effective than single element builds since the latter can focus on all the passives and mechanics tied to a single element. Thanks to the innate ability to kite enemies, leveling as Sorceress should be easier than leveling a melee Class, as long as you successfully kite and crowd control enemies, you should emerge victorious.

From the Basic skills go with Fire Bolt or Frost Bolt depending if you wanna go with a Fire or Cold Sorceress build, from Core skills Frozen Orb will be amazing from the very first levels while Fire Ball or Incinerate will be good for fire early builds. All passives from this section of the skill tree are pretty good (Potent Warding, Devastation and Elemental Dominance) while from the Defensive section Flame Shield got his uses to proc Vulnerable status for fire builds and works as a pseudo cheat death, Teleport is kinda trash early on honestly but the 30% damage reduction enhancement available after it can be very useful to have at times, Ice Armor is instead an extremely powerful skill for a cold Sorceress as it adds 10% of Cold damage dealt to its barrier, which when used wisely can give some crazy high survivability boost. Frost Nova is the usual crowd control skill for the cold Nova lovers, while the Glass Cannon passive is one of the best from this section but it also increases the damage you take,  be careful.

From Conjuration skills the Hydra is extremely strong also as one point wonder for cold or lightning builds, (not only pure Fire). Align the Elements in particular will be an extremely powerful defensive layer to have against Elites and in PvP. Among Mastery skills Blizzard is great for cold builds, Meteor or Firewall are good for fire builds with Firewall being the most popular between the two.

Sorceress usually will choose depending on the build main element an appropriate Ultimate skill: Deep Freeze gives immunity for 4 seconds every minute and chilling enemies around you (with increased utilities by choosing one of its enhancements between a shield or reduced non Ultimate cooldowns when using the skill), or Inferno is instead a very strong fire spell which can Immobilize enemies. Finally you’ll need to choose one Ultimate passive eventually, with Icefall or Shatter being great for cold builds and Esu’s Ferocity for fire builds.

Sorceress' unique Class specialization is the Enchantment Slots system. Once you put a skill into such slots, that skill will gain special properties, you’ll get up to three of these slots. Hydra is one of the most popular enchanted skill choices as it allows an extra mini-Hydra to spawn where an enemy has been killed by a Hydra, for a few seconds.

Best Class specific Codex of Power Aspects to level up Sorceress:

• Biting Cold, Control, Storm Swell, Prodigy’s are good for a Cold Sorceress (Snowguard’s being more niche)
• Conflagration, Control, Elementalist’s, Three Curses, Incendiary, Seared Flesh, Flamewalker’s are most suited for a Fire Sorceress build

Rogue Leveling

Early on the Rogue might seem pretty average as it’s not as occult and esoteric as a Sorceress, nor does look as brutal as Barbarians, but still don’t be fooled, Rogue is one of the strongest Class in the game once properly built, capable of executing and erasing whole screens full of enemies in a single rampage of combinated explosions triggered by the magic Imbuements, particularly the Shadow Imbuement is among the strongest skills in the game thanks to its “Corpse Explosion” proc upon killing an enemy imbued with it.  Best Basic skills to use will be Blade Shift if you are choosing a melee setup for their movement speed buff and selecting the +15% non-physical Resistances or Forceful Arrow for ranged builds instead as it is a reliable source of Vulnerable and optional knockback upgrade is also useful.

Moving on to Core skills, (your higher damage Energy spenders that will be further empowered by your Specialization) Flurry is probably the best choice for melee builds and Barrage for Ranged builds when dealing with packs of enemies (resulting particularly good to spread Imbuements), while Rapid Fire will be your ideal multi-hit Ranged single target damage skill, specially when paired with Vulnerable and other damage multipliers, creating powerful “burst windows”.

From the Agility section of the skill tree Dash is the most popular mobility skill that you’ll use a lot, while Weapon mastery is a great passive to max  in general. From Subterfuge skills Dark Shroud is a very powerful defensive tool for any Rogue build who can keep the stacks count high, while Smoke Grenade can have its useful niche uses too as 1 point wonder in dangerous situations. Imbuement skills are among the strongest in the Rogue kit and I suggest leveling with an Imbuement build, Poison Imbuement enables strong DoT builds and kiting playstyles, Cold Imbuement can be used for crowd control but the most powerful skill from this section is Shadow Imbuement which makes enemies hit by it explode with a Corpse Explosion whenever killed, dealing massive area damage. This skill can be really overpowered when you build your Rogue around Imbuements damage, allowing domino effect explosions by targeting a weak minion with your Forceful Arrow to proc Vulnerable status and unleash a Shadow Imbued Barrage, Rapid Fire or Flurry to start the “domino” chain reaction effect.

Consuming Shadows will be a fundamental passive when combined with Shadow Imbuement playstyle, as it will refill your resource bar to full easily whenever you can kill a few monsters with Shadow damage, from an imbued skill or a Shadow explosion, Potency passive is a must for Imbuement builds as well as Rapid Imbuement passive to reduce cooldowns.

Rogue Ultimate skills are flexible and situationally great, Shadow Clone is very powerful for most Rogue builds during burst windows, Rain Of Arrows synergizes well with Ranged Imbuements builds and the reduced cooldown per energy spent Specialization on top of the Codex Aspect always imbuing the skill with all available Imbuements, while Death Trap can be good but is designed mostly for trap builds. Notable passives from this skill tree section are maxed Aftermath to recover resources upon using an Ultimate skill to ensure you’ll have a sustained burst period after calling the Shadow Clone for example, Haste is very useful and adds a bit of rotational playstyle based on how much Energy you have, while Impetus is decent for builds with burst windows farming in large areas but otherwise outshined by other better options and finally Innervation helps with Resource management since will recover 8 Energy with a 10-30% chance upon executing a Lucky Hit.

Ultimate passives are found at the bottom of the skill tree and you can only select one since they are very powerful, Precision can be decent for Ranged builds but Victimize providing a sort of Diablo 3  “area damage” will be better in most circumstances.

Class Specializations  differentiate your playstyle quite a bit, Combo Points are better for boss fights and builds having “burst windows” to align all damage bonuses and procs during a Vulnerable window.

While leveling your Rogue you can prioritize the aforementioned skills based on the type of build that you wanna play while upgrading your equipment anytime you find upgrades.

Finally, here are the best Class specific Codex of Power Aspects:

• Enshrouding, Uncanny Resilience and Ravenous will be great possible Aspects to support and make your Rogue tankier
• Arrow Storm, Branching Volley’s, Vengeful are good for Ranged builds
• Encircling Blades, Vengeful, Volatile Blades, Siphoned Protection, Cheat’s are best on a melee build
• Corruption, Sleeting Imbuements, Unstable Imbuements are designed with Imbuement builds in mind
• Blast-Trapper’s, Explosive Verve and Trickster’s for Trap focused builds 

Note: All the informations in this guide are taken from Diablo 4 Beta and might be subject to changes for the official release