Diablo 4 Season 4: Know These 8 Things To Improve Your Combat Effectiveness

These 8 tips are useful, especially for newer players, but perhaps even Veterans of the game will find them valuable too.

Before entering Diablo 4 Season 4, if you have enough Diablo 4 Items in your inventory, they will help increase your likelihood of defeating your enemies.

Let’s jump right into it.

1. Auto-cast Abilities

In case you wonder: Auto casting skills do not require any macro, special mouse or external software. You can turn on auto-cast by simply using your keyboard.

And here is how: First, go to “options”, then “controls” window.

Assign the secondary button of a skill you want to auto-cast to one of the numeric keypad buttons. Those are the 1 to 9 buttons on the right side of your keyboard.

Next, with the “Num Lock” function turned on, Hold the assigned numeric key and press “Num Lock” button to turn off the functionality. And there you go.

Your character will now auto-cast the ability whenever it’s ready!

To disable auto-casting, simply turn on “Num Lock” and press the skill button again.

2. Seasonal Journey Rewards

The seasonal journey rewards are account-wide, while Iron Wolf’s rewards are character-based. So when you level your first character, you may be wondering which seasonal rewards to pick up and which ones to leave for later, or perhaps for your alts.

You certainly want to pick up all Iron Wolf’s rewards as soon as you unlock them. Each character can level and pick up their own rewards from that vendor. The level of rewards from Iron Wolf’s also seem to be tied to the level you had when you unlocked them, not when you opened the box.

So there’s basically no point in holding back. It’s a bit more tricky when it comes to seasonal journey rewards since they are account wide. This means that if you picked a couple of seasonal chapter rewards for your first character, but let’s say then decided to switch a class, you won’t have seasonal journey rewards available on that new character.

It’s not a big deal. Besides the potential cool Legendaries, and Uniques that could drop from rewards caches. Luckily, though, the drops are very generous in Season 4, so don’t lose sleep over that.

3. Use Favorite Function

The third tip I have for you: use “favorite” functionality. In case you didn’t know, you can mark aspects and items as favorite. When you mark aspect as favorite, it will show up first when you are selecting legendary power from Codex of power. This is a big quality of life thing for overtime. You will replace legendary powers Time and time again.

And here’s how I like using this feature for aspects: When I start a new character and get an idea for a skill or build that I want to use, I go to the “collection” section on the pause menu. It’s the only place where you can actually mark aspects as favorites.

By the way, the marking is done with a space bar on the PC. Then I go through all the available aspects and mark those that seem applicable to my build.

It is a bit of a pre-work, but makes your life so much easier in the long run. So you don’t have to search for a specific legendary power. Every single time you want to switch an item, which is a pain in the ass. Now let’s talk about pieces of gear. You can also mark them as favorite to avoid accidentally selling good items to a vendor or stopping you from mass salvaging items at Blacksmith.

To mark a piece of gear, hover over the item and press the button assigned to mark items as junk twice!

The first press marks an item as junk, while the second press marks it as favorite. On PC, that’s again a “space bar”. Personally, I like marking all my current equipment as favorite to prevent losing accidentally an item while I am trying out different pieces of gear.

4. Craft Seasonal Potions

You can craft seasonal potions with Obols. If you haven’t used seasonal potions yet, make sure to give them a try! Holy Bolt is a particularly strong potion to use as it turns you into a permanent artillery machine.

Obols are currency that you normally used to gamble for items. You get Obols from Helltides chests. And considering you will probably spam Helltides all the damn time, you will quickly accumulate a lot of Obols. Once you get a decent set, it’s a good time to spend some Obols on potion crafting. Beware, though, that the cost is quite high with 350 Obols per potion. But I would still suggest that you use Holy Bolts despite the high cost.

The power gain justifies the cost as they provide a massive boost to your damage, especially when playing Minion Necromancer.

5. Aspects’ Icons On Items

The next tip I got for you is to pay attention to symbols on the items at Blacksmith. So you get inventory full of legendary items. How do you know easily which ones to sell and which to salvage? Go to Blacksmith and salvage the items with the white icon on them.

This icon means that the legendary power on this piece of gear is either not unlocked in your Codex of Power, or the value of legendary power on the item is higher than the one you have unlocked in Codex of Power.

So whichever is the case, you definitely want to salvage this item unless you want to use it. There is also another red-ish icon, which means that salvaging this item unlocks a new cosmetic look. These icons, unfortunately, were not visible so easily when opening inventory, without going to an NPC like Blacksmith or vendor.

To see them in your inventory. Without going to NPC, you have to hover over an item and look for an icon with a text explanation at the bottom of the item description. This can be unfortunately easy to miss, especially when you have to compare function turned on.

This way, the item description often does not fit into the screen and requires you to scroll down to see the icon. It’s kind of annoying and I hope they will change it in the future.

6. Enchanting Affixes Preview

You can check possible Affixes when enchanting an item. So you get a nice piece of gear but want to change one affix on it. You go to Occultist and enchant that statistic, but how do you know whether you should keep that new Affix or perhaps roll further?

Here’s where the icon located at the top-right corner of Enchanting Window comes to the rescue. It shows the list of all possible Affixes to be rolled and also their ranges! You can actually also access this information on consoles. To do that, simply press “triangle” or “Y” button at the Enchanting window.

7. Farm Blood Maiden

Spam Blood Maiden in Helltides for great XP and loot! Helltides has been an awesome place to both level up and get great loot in the process. I strongly recommend you to check out this place Located in every Helltide invaded area, which has an Altar with three pillars. Pillars can be activated by inserting Baneful Hearts, which are dropped across Helltides.

By the way, you keep Baneful Hearts after Helltide finishes while all unused Cinders are lost after the current Helltide event ends. When all three pillars are activated, waves of enemies will spawn in that location.

And when enough demons are defeated, the boss will spawn the Blood Maiden.

She can be a tough enemy who has three main mechanics: First, she spawns disciples who are tougher Elites mobs. You definitely want to deal with them fast so you don’t get overwhelmed later on.

She also casts fire rings around random players. When you get one on you, move away from the boss and other players to avoid killing everyone.

And lastly, she will create an expanding circle, dealing with quite high damage. Just simply dodge it. When defeated, Maiden will drop a lot of items with some legendries plus crafting materials. And players who contributed more Baneful Hearts to activate pillars may get more loot. So don’t be a cheap bastard.

8. Use Profane Mindcages

Speaking about Helltides, use Profane Minds to boost experience and cinders. Have you noticed Profane Minds in your second inventory tab?

This item increases the level of enemies in Helltide by 10, for 60 minutes! As far as I know, ten levels above yours is the cap for bonus experience in Diablo 4, so the boost works great.

Using Profane Minds is a great way to level up faster and get tons of cinders in the process. Don’t be too stingy with them as you will drop Profane Minds in Helltides, anyway.

And here are a few things to consider: First, the boost lasts 60 minutes, so activate it when you are planning to have a bit longer session.

Next, dying with Profane Mind actively disables the boost, so use it when the current Helltide enemies are not posing too much threat. And enemies level is capped to 50 in World Tier 1 and 2. So it does not make sense to activate this boost if you are in that Tier while being above level 40.

These are my gaming experiences, I hope they are useful to you.