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Diablo Immortal: Tips and tricks for beginners

Diablo Immortal has a lot of things going on. Learn more about them here.
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Published onJuly 1, 2022

Diablo Immortal Combat Screenshot 3
Joe Hindy / Android Authority

Diablo Immortal is one of the biggest RPG releases of 2022. It is a mobile game, but has a lot more depth than you would find in a typical mobile game. It’s very long, there are a ton of things to do, and the game systems are always working. You can exploit some of those game systems to your advantage and it really helps you have a better time. Here are some Diablo Immortal tips and tricks to help you play better. This tutorial is for beginners who aren’t well versed in the game. As you progress, there are more detailed guides specifically for endgame content.

Read next: How to play Diablo Immortal on PC


Every stat in Diablo Immortal and what it means

Diablo Immortal was designed for its endgame. Believe it or not, that means the game isn’t terribly difficult to beat because the developers want you to get to post-game as quickly as possible. The website HowLongToBeat.com estimates that the Diablo Immortal campaign with every side quest is beatable in about 30 hours. It’s probably a little bit longer unless you really fly through it. So, let’s help get you there. First up, let’s explain how the Diablo Immortal stats work.

How base stats work in Diablo Immortal

Diablo Immortal Base Stats
Joe Hindy / Android Authority
  • Strength — Strength increases physical damage as it does in almost every RPG.
  • Intelligence — Intelligence increases magic damage as it does in almost every RPG.
  • Fortitude — Fortitude increases your armor as well as armor penetration.
  • Vitality — Vitality increases your health total.
  • Willpower — Willpower increases potency and resistance.

A lot of this stuff is fairly obvious. Melee-oriented players should spec into stats like Strength, Fortitude, and Vitality, while magic-oriented characters should spec into Intelligence and Willpower.

However, don’t let that prevent you from having multiple Diablo Immortal builds. For example, as a wizard, I have a build that increases my intelligence so I can be hyper-aggressive. If I’m somewhere where I’m struggling, I’ll use my Fortitude, Vitality, and Willpower build to help me survive tough segments of the game. Multiple builds don’t hurt and the game has saved loadouts for quick swaps.

Secondary and additional Diablo Immortal attributes

Diablo Immortal Secondary Atrributes screenshot 2
Joe Hindy / Android Authority

Hold on to your seats for this one because there are a lot of these. However, they are quite important, especially for buildcrafting. A lot of Diablo Immortal’s mechanics are determined by these stats.

  • Combat rating — Your combat rating is compared to your enemy’s and the difference determines how much extra damage you do. You can also go into the menu, view attributes, tap More Attributes, and tap on Combat Rating. It’ll tell you how much higher your Combat Rating is compared to the monsters in your current area.
  • Armor and Armor Penetration — Armor and Armor Penetration are counterbalancing Diablo Immortal stats. Armor reduces damage from all sources, while Armor Penetration lets you ignore an opponent’s armor stat. When attacking, these two stats are compared and that helps determine how much damage you or your opponent takes.
  • Potency and Resistance — Potency and Resistance are counterbalancing stats. Potency determines how harmful a harmful effect is, while Resistance protects from harmful effects. When attacking, these two stats are compared and that helps determine how bad the effect is for you or your opponent.
  • Accuracy Rating and Evasion Rating — Again, these are two counterbalancing stats. Accuracy determines how often you hit and Evasion determines how often you can make opponents miss. These two stats are compared during combat to determine if an attack hits you or if your attack hits an opponent.
  • Critical Hit Chance and Critical Resistance — Yes, these are two more counterbalancing stats. Critical Hit Chance determines how often you land a crit, while Critical Resistance reduces the odds of being hit by a crit. These two stats are compared during combat for both you and your enemies.
  • Critical Hit Damage — Standard critical hits do double damage. This stat increases that threshold to deal even more damage.
  • Attack Speed — This stat determines the speed of your primary attacks.
  • Cooldown Reduction — This Diablo Immortal stat determines how fast your special skills cool down.
  • Movement Speed — This stat determines how fast your character moves.
  • Block Chance — Increases the odds that you’ll flat-out block an attack. However, it cannot block critical hits.
  • Life Drain — Regains a percentage of health when you deal damage to opponents.
  • Cheat Death — Increases the chance that you’ll survive an attack that should kill you and instead reduces your HP to one.
  • Life Regeneration — Lets you recover a percentage of your health when you’re not in combat every five seconds.
  • Damage Increase and Defense Increase — These two stats only work during PvP. The names are fairly self-explanatory.
  • Magic Find — Magic Find increases the odds of enemies dropping higher-quality loot.
  • Resonance — Resonance grants a blanket boost to all base attributes.

Yeah, that’s a lot of information, but it’ll help you create builds to better suit your playstyle. That should help you complete more difficult tasks better once you reach the endgame. Obviously, you’ll want to build into some of these stats based on what you’re doing. For instance, if you’re farming for gear, you’ll want to spec into Magic Find.


Combat Rating: Does it matter?

Diablo Immortal Combat Rating
Joe Hindy / Android Authority

Yes and no. A large percentage of your time involves grinding for gear that increases your Combat Rating, or CR for short. It serves a few primary purposes within the game.

  • How to calculate Diablo Immortal Combat Rating — CR is calculated by adding up all of your five base stats, your legendary gem CR boost, and Helliquary CR boost. There are a lot of folks who think more goes into it than that, but we tested and that’s it. After a period of time, legendary gems are your biggest CR booster.
  • Minimum CR — A lot of activities require a minimum CR for you to be effective. Going into an activity above the recommended CR means you’ll deal extra damage, receive less damage, and generally have more fun. Those who go into activities below recommended CR can complete the activity, but they’ll have a game-induced handicap while doing it.
  • Extra damage — Higher CR directly correlates to extra damage. You won’t seem too much of a difference in some circumstances. You’ll want to be as high as possible for a few activities, such as the Path of Blood or Challenge Rifts.
  • Player vs Player — There is a second CR that is specifically for PvP. It’s calculated differently from PvE CR. Generally speaking, though, a higher PvP CR means you’ll deal more damage to PvP opponents, but the effect isn’t big.

There are a lot of conversations about Diablo Immortal Combat Rating, but the above are the basics and they should help you understand the game slightly better. CR is very similar to other games, such as Destiny 2’s light level system, where it acts as a gatekeeper to more difficult content so players don’t just rush through the game. In other words, it artificially inflates play times so players don’t get to the end and get bored too quickly.


Where and how to grind in Diablo Immortal

Diablo Immortal Experience Globes
Joe Hindy / Android Authority

The grind is one of the biggest elements of any mobile RPG and Diablo Immortal is no different. Depending on your level, location, and experience, there are a few different places to grind to get the best results. Also, grinding for different things requires different approaches. Here are some general guidelines on grinding in Diablo Immortal.

  • Very early game — The best grind spot for very early game in Diablo Immortal stuff is the Ossuary in the Ashwold Cemetery. There are tons of bad guys there, other low-level adventurers who usually jump in to help, and plenty of rare spawns.
  • Early to mid-game — Around level 35, the game starts to slow you down quite a bit. The best thing to do is save early stuff like Codex rewards, battle pass rewards, etc. to give you a short boost. Then you can usually just grind in whatever area you’re in to goose you the rest of the way.
  • Early endgame — After finishing Diablo Immortal at level 60, your first and best bet is farming all of the dungeons, rifts, and raids you have unlocked. That’s where you’ll find the best gear and grinding rifts can earn you runes for Legendary Gems. Around here is when you’ll want to start finding a gear set that works well for you and start working to level up that gear set. Otherwise, the endgame grind is going to get really annoying.
  • True endgame — This is where things get weird. After level 60, you unlock Paragon Levels as well as new difficulty levels, Hell 1, 2, 3, and 4. The key to leveling up is setting it to the hardest Hell difficulty you can muster and then redo old content. Variety is key here and running a bunch of different activities gives you the greatest chances at the best loot.

How do Diablo Immortal Legendary Gems work

Legendary Gems are a point of contention among players. You can get them as a free player, but it takes forever as they are exceedingly rare. The fastest method is to pay for them with real money, but even then it’s not guaranteed. There are already reports of people spending thousands of dollars and getting little for their investment. We recommend just taking the free route because you will get there eventually.

In any case, legendary gems in Diablo Immortal have their own set of explanations, as they add another layer of complexity to the game. We’ll do our best to explain the various aspects in as few words as possible.

Where to acquire Legendary Gems in Diablo Immortal

Diablo Immortal Eternal Legendary Crests
Joe Hindy / Android Authority

Legendary Gems are difficult to get in Diablo Immortal but have a lot of sources.

  • Free players can unlock a few through the storyline, battle passes, and daily login rewards.
  • Opening the Elder Rift with a Legendary Crest will 100% grant you a Legendary Gem. You can buy Legendary Crests once per month from the Hilts Trade. Sometimes the Hilts Trader will have limited-time events where other Crests are available.
  • Opening Elder Rifts with Eternal Legendary Crests will also drop Legendary Gems. Eternal Legendary Crests work like regular Legendary Crests, but you have to pay 160 Eternal Orbs for them. You can buy Eternal Orbs for real money.
  • Pro tip — There is a pity system in place for Legendary Crests and External Legendary Crests. The two are tracked separately. After 50, you’ll get a ?/5 gem guaranteed.
  • You can buy them from the Auction, although that is a very expensive method and it’s kind of annoying to do.
  • Finally, you can craft Legendary Gems using Runes. This is the most consistent method for free players. You grind Elder Rifts for Fading Embers, trade the Fading Embers for Runes, and then use the Runes to craft gems. There is a weekly limit on this, but at least it’s consistent.

In addition, the game tells you the drop rates for various types of Legendary Gems. To see these rates, head to the Shop and tap the “i” icon in the top left corner. You can find information about drop rates there.

What do Legendary Gems do

Diablo Immortal Legendary Gem 3
Joe Hindy / Android Authority

Legendary Gems are one of the most powerful items in Diablo Immortal. It’s not just the only reliable way to increase resonance, but it can also increase your CR a lot faster than armor grinding. Here’s a comprehensive list of things that Legendary Gems do.

  • Increase CR — Every Gem has a bonus to CR. Lower quality Gems don’t give you very much, but higher quality Gems can increase your CR by a fair amount.
  • Increase resonance — Resonance gives you a boost to all base attributes and there doesn’t seem to be a cap for it. Thus, the higher your resonance, the more powerful you are.
  • Additional attributes and abilities — Legendary Gems also have some unique combat effects, like making enemies explode, granting powerful conditional shields, and other stuff.

It seems like a short list. However, Resonance can stack almost forever it seems, so the more powerful your gems get, the more powerful you get without a theoretical ceiling.

How to upgrade Legendary Gems

Diablo Immortal Apprentice Jeweler
Joe Hindy / Android Authority

Legendary Gems are upgradeable and the process isn’t terribly complicated. You can rank up gems to increase their power.

  • What you’ll need — There are two materials you need. The first is Gem Power and the other one is various copies of the same Gem. You can obtain Gem Power by recycling unsocketed Legendary Gems and Gem Fragments. Click here for some very detailed and useful graphs about how much Gem Power and gem copies you need to reach rank up.
  • Step 1 — Head to an apprentice jeweler. You can find them all over the game.
  • Step 2 — Tap on the Gem you want to upgrade and hit the Upgrade button. The game shows you a green arrow when you have enough materials to upgrade a specific Gem.
  • Step 3 —  Tap the boxes where it says Required and slot in the required components.
  • Go ahead and finish the process.

To be honest, this is one of the worst upgrade systems we’ve seen and we’ve played a lot of gacha games. You need an absolute ton of duplicate Gems and Gem Power to fully upgrade a Gem so make sure to use your components wisely.


Other Diablo Immortal tips and tricks

Diablo Immortal Combat Screenshot 2
Joe Hindy / Android Authority

General Diablo Immortal gameplay and combat tips and tricks

Each class has its own set of abilities and each player has their own playstyle. Thus, it’s rather difficult to give tips for this kind of stuff. You should play how you want because it’s a video game and it’s supposed to be fun. That said, there are some general Diablo Immortal tips and tricks that you should use to make your life easier.

  • Do your dailies and weeklies — Even experienced players who are way higher leveled than you do these as often as possible. They provide good rewards and, more importantly, materials for crafting and upgrading.
  • Learn how to kite enemies — Kiting is when a player makes the enemies chase you in order to avoid them attacking. Doing so requires a lot more movement than typical combat, but it reduces the number of times an enemy attacks you, thus helping your HP last longer. Classes with ranged main attacks can even hit enemies barely on the screen without drawing aggro and reducing enemy group sizes before engaging in combat.
  • The only death penalty is restarting — Console and PC Diablo games usually have death penalties. For example, Diablo III makes you lose item durability and Diablo II required you to recover your corpse to get your loot back. Diablo Immortal has resurrection stones and, once you’re out of those, the worst it’ll do is put you back at a prior checkpoint.
  • Use auto pick up — The option automatically picks up any loot laying on the ground. It’s accessible by opening the menu, then clicking the cogwheel, and it’s under the General settings.
  • Learn the mechanics — Many endgame stuff like raids have boss mechanics for players to complete. Those who just try to go in and attack will almost certainly fail. You can do most raids on an easier difficulty. We recommend doing that until you learn the mechanics and then try the harder difficulties.
  • Learn how to play with other players — This one is pretty big. Each class is good at something else. If a wizard is leading the pack and there’s a barbarian there, it’s a suboptimal arrangement. Melee characters in front and ranged characters in the rear.
  • Use your potions wisely — Potions recharge when killing mobs and when returning to town. If you’re farming near a town or you’re just killing regular mobs, use your potions more often. They will recharge more often and you’ll keep your health up.
  • Learn how to combo your skills — Every class has the ability to chain attacks for maximum effect. For example, wizards can shoot beam abilities like Ray of Frost into an Ice Crystal and it’ll refract the beam in different directions for maximum mob clearing. There are dozens of them.
  • Join a clan – Joining a clan has some great benefits, including having people to play with and some extra rewards. You can create a clan at level 40 with 1,000 Platinum. If you intend to become a Shadow, we recommend waiting until after you do that to create a clan. There have been issues in the past with people getting booted from their own clans for switching sides.

Up next: The best RPGs and JRPGs for Android


FAQ

Because there are so many things to do and there aren’t really any super-efficient ways to do them without spending real money. Diablo Immortal is a very long game with a lot of gatekeeping. Blizzard designed it that way. The bad news is that efficient routes to endgame don’t exist. However, the good news is that leaves you free to play how you want for the most part.

Nope. In fact, the Legendary Gems grind is among the worst RPG grinds we’ve ever seen. You’ll get them eventually. It just takes patience.

Yes, but the answer is more complicated than that. You don’t need the best stuff in the game to do the highest-level activities. It’s like other RPGs. Once you hit a certain level and CR, you can do everything in the game. The $100,000 thing only matters if you’re a hardcore completionist.

The best advice I can give you is to play with a little more patience and maybe grind a few more levels or for a little more CR. The game seems to punish players who try and brute force their way through the game. Despite being a free-to-play game, there is actually an element of skill to Diablo Immortal. Keep playing, you’ll improve.