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Diablo 4: Vessel Of Hatred – 10 Ways To Maximize Your Demon-Slaying Fun In Sanctuary
Diablo 4’s major expansion is now out, and after weeks of playing through it, it’s safe to say that you should get into it.
Provided you have the base game, you can jump into Vessel of Hatred and play through the new content like the new class, new continent, and new modes of play. Even if you only have the base game, you can still reap the benefits of the current Season (Season 6 as of right now in October until 3 months or so have passed) which lets you kill unique enemies and partake in new types of quests exclusive to the Season.
Each new Season lasts 3 to 4 months, so it’s best to play these as much as possible while the rewards are red-hot and limited. Here is a top 10 guide on maximizing your Diablo 4 enjoyment in 2024 and beyond!
Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred costs RM190 which is arguably steep for an expansion. We can assure you that you will be getting a lot out of it for this month and the next few for the game’s subsequent Seasons.
Having said that, if you are still hesitant about spending that much money on an expansion, we suggest you try out the game’s current Season 6 via the base game. The game’s current Realmwalker events and base game buffs/nerfs are accessible right now for you to play through if you own the original. If you feel that you want more out of it and really want that next Class, the Spiritborn, pony up the cash and dive right in. If you would rather wait a bit until there is a discount or an Xbox Game Pass/PC Game Pass deal, go ahead.
Long story short: try before you buy. Once you like what you’ve played and decided to jump in, go through the following steps below.
The Spiritborn is an awesome new class in Diablo 4. It’s a hybrid between a melee, a tank, and a ranged attacker, featuring four Spirit Animals they can channel to power their abilities up. Imagine the best bits of Diablo 3’s Monk class, but amplified further with parts of Diablo 2’s Crusader and Diablo 3’s Demon Hunter, and you have a clear reason to play the heck out of the class in the new expansion’s story.
Once you start the new Season with a new Spiritborn, just pick Skip Story and you’ll pick up from the expansion’s storyline and plot, similar to past Seasons. Only in this case will the expansion’s new story reward you with tons of experience points and skill points when you cash out the quest objectives, boosting your Spiritborn close to the level cap of 60. As for the story itself? It’s a good follow-up to the original and focuses on the new continent of Nahantu, your Horadrim colleague Neyrel, and the Lord of Hatred Mephisto.
You can’t do much with your newly-purchased Class if you cannot make a plan to create a powerful Spiritborn warrior. Luckily, there are many resources to help you out.
If you check out action RPG-dedicated sites like Maxroll and Icy Veins, you will find a good amount of builds for Spiritborn. Here are our top picks:
Quill Volley Spiritborn: A lightning build using Gorilla and Eagle Spirits to shoot rebounding Quill Volley projectiles like a super-fast shotgun, while using passive buffs to strengthen your blasts.
Touch of Death Spiritborn: A Poison-focused build where you summon a Centipede Spirit and use your Centipede skills to flood the screen with high Poison damage output.
Crushing Hand Gorilla Spiritborn: Use Gorilla Skills and combine extreme speed with high Area of Effect (AoE) damage by spamming Crushing Hands.
For each of these Spiritborn guides, start with the Torment 1 (T1) Starter setup, then work your way up to Ancestral and then Mythic. The T1 Starters feature equipment that you can get while you’re leveling up your Spiritborn to Level 60. For the full setup of Quill Volley Spiritborn, head over to our guide.
If you want to get past the higher difficulties (just below Torment) and not die so much, you need to Temper your Rare/Legendary equipment. Just head down to any Blacksmith, pick the Temper tab, and choose two upgrades. We’d go with Damage and Elemental Protection as a default, with Class-specific passives to help amplify your build. For example, picking anything that boosts your Resolve or reduces your Ultimate cooldown can benefit your Spiritborn.
Runes are a new feature in Diablo 4 where you can get additional abilities triggered regardless of Class, as long as you do one specific ability to build Offering with. To make a Rune ability work, you need both a Ritual and Invocation Rune slotted into a piece of armour; maximum is two Rune sets (2 Ritual, 2 Invocation). For example, combining the Tam Ritual Rune and Ohm Invocation Rune lets you gather a good amount of Offering by casting non-channeled Core skills. Once you get enough Offering, you trigger War Cry to buff up your damage.
For the best Runes set to equip for any Class, check out our tier list.
Generally, you want to complete all sorts of limited-time Season events in Diablo 4 to get the most XP boost and the most loot to help prep your character for Torment difficulty, to get even better Ancestral Uniques/Legendaries and Mythic Uniques to get higher within the power curve. In Season 6, you need to partake in timed Realmwalker quests and boost up your Season rank to get more rewards and loot caches. You find a Realmwalker boss, tag it along while it’s heading to a random direction, kill anything in your way, then kill the Realmwalker when its protection is gone. You then head into the portal it spawns and clear that dungeon to get special Opals that bump up your gold/item/boss material drops for 30 minutes.
Blizzard has patched Season 6 further so that Realmwalkers can walk faster and the event goes by quicker than usual, meaning your leveling/material-gathering quests will go faster and faster.
You should also do Kurast Undercity quests, where you clear a level as fast as possible and turn on light braziers to get better loot and boss materials. To get the best Uniques, you need boss materials for specific bosses you want to farm. Both activities are short and net you the best drops once you apply your buffs.
Even if you’re at Level 60, you still have Paragon Levels to earn and a Paragon Board system to fill up for power-ups. And you need Obols to power up your equipment via Masterworking. So once you’re getting your first few Paragon levels, play through Nightmare Dungeons to unlock Legendary Aspects and also score Obducites for Masterworking.
You also need to bump up your Paragon nodes specific to your classes, because a level 1 node isn’t going to cut it for higher difficulties. To get them past 15 or even to 45, you need to play through the Pit and climb the levels. It’s a minion-clearing boss rush mission: fill up a meter by killing bad guys, then head to the boss once that’s full, kill it, and get your Paragon Node levels. Note that like in Diablo 3’s Nephalim Rifts, your chances of leveling up Nodes get lower if you’re playing at lower Pit levels, so you need to aim higher once your Nodes reach a particular threshold.
You will need to play through Nightmare Dungeons to get the Legendary Aspects you need for your Class build. However, a majority of them can only be received through getting random Legendary drops you then need to salvage. To get these dropping more for you, you’ll need to:
Don’t forget to drink elixirs and use Opals to get the buffs you need to get more Legendary Items and Aspects than usual.
Once you get the boss materials you need and get equipped with the Legendary Equipment and Aspects, you can get to fighting all the post-game Bosses. Each different Boss have dedicated drops, though they are random within their own loot pool. For example, the Echoes of Varshan drops the Spiritborn Uniques like Craze of the Dead God gauntlet and Ring of the Midday Hunt. However, they also drop specific Multiple Classes loot too and won’t exactly drop the aforementioned items from the get-go. Unless you’re really, REALLY lucky.
For more on bosses and their loot table, head here.
Once you’re done with the Spiritborn, it’s time to max out another Class of your choosing for variety’s sake.
Your Paragon and map bonuses carry onto other characters in a Season, meaning you don’t have to farm for Paragon points or map bonuses again for each new character beyond the first. You did all the legwork for the first class, so you deserve the shared benefits for your subsequent classes.
We suggest playing the following in this order if you want to play through all the base classes in Season 6 and the expansion:
Spiritborn naturally comes out on top since it’s the highlight of the expansion (and also Activision Blizzard’s priority sales-wise), so it’s a shame that at least one of the base classes needs to take a backseat (ie: the Barbarian).
These 10 tips should help you get into the groove of Diablo 4’s Season play and its expansion Vessel of Hatred. So go forth and slay Hell all across Sanctuary!
Diablo 4 Season 6 and Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred is out right now for PC, Xbox Series, and PlayStation 5. For more on the latter, head to our guides.
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