Diablo 3 basic beginner tips

Today’s guest article comes from NinjaLemon. Read more NinjaLemon tactics and reviews at his blog!

With the recent release of Diablo 3, thousands of fans – both new and old – have been running through Sanctuary, trying to push back the darkness.

It was very surprising to me that many of my friends that have been logging hours into Diablo 3 still didn’t know much about the basic mechanics of the game.

It’s pretty easy to get through the Normal difficulty mode without knowing a thing about how stats work and what “DPS” means, but once you hit the higher difficulties it becomes quite a challenge if you have no idea what you’re doing. So, here I am to help with some general information about how some pretty basic game mechanics work.

Before I get into stats, two very important things you should do first (if you haven’t already) are:

1. Turn on elective mode. It’s in the gameplay options somewhere, and it allows you to put any skill in any skill slot. You can make a pretty average build without doing this, but if you want to be as effective as possible, you’ll definitely want to map any skill to any key.

2. Turn on advanced tooltips. I honestly don’t know why this is off in the first place. With this turned on, if you hover over your skills it will tell you how much damage is does (For example, it will say “This skill does 110% of your weapon damage”), and without this it will simply tell you what the skill looks like. Also, it tells you some extra information about weapons, like if it gives you more damage or not. In other words, it tells you information you need to know, and I don’t understand why it’s an option to have these tooltips off anyways.

After having those two options enabled, you will probably already find yourself better able to kill the demons around you. However, there are still some more pretty important tips that the average gamer should know:

Stats

Diablo 3 has 4 main stats: Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, and Intelligence.

Each class has a primary stat. Raising your classes primary stat is the most important way to increase your damage, because for each point of the primary stat you have, you get 1% more damage.

Strength– This stat is the primary stat for Barbarians. So, if you are playing a Barbarian, 1 Strength = 1% more damage. This stat also increases your armor, so for every 1 point in strength that you have (regardless of your class), you gain exactly 1 armor.

Dexterity– This stat is the primary stat for Demon Hunters and Monks. So, if you are playing either of those classes, each point in Dexterity will give you 1% more damage. This stat also increases your percent chance to block (Again, regardless of your class), and the amount of block percent that you gain is based on how much dexterity you have (I will find a small chart and link it here if possible, but I believe from 1-100 dexterity you get 0.1% block, 100-500 you get 0.025% block, and it keeps decreasing in this way).

Vitality– This stat is not the primary stat for any class, however it is still extremely important and invaluable. Every 1 point of dexterity is equal to 10 points of health. This seems like it’s not a big deal, but later in the game you find armor and weapons with +500 or more of each stat, and 5000 health is nothing to laugh at. Especially because in the hardest difficulty, Inferno mode, you will get 1- or 2-shotted regardless of how many thousands of health points you have.

Intelligence– This stat is the primary stat for Wizards and Witch Doctors. Again, for these classes, 1 Intelligence = 1% more damage. This stat also increases all resistances by 0.1 for each point in Intelligence that you have (regardless of your class). There is a formula for how armor and resistance affects your damage reduction %, but to put it easily: 1 armor provides the same damage reduction that 0.1 in all resistances provides.

So, at the end of the day, all stats are very important for any class. The classes primary stat will want to be your focus for most of the game, with Vitality second, but it’s important to not forget about the other two stats that will definitely increase your chances of survival.

Damage

Maximizing damage is very important to survival in Sanctuary. Monsters hurt you, so it’s natural that you want to hurt them back. The most important thing to remember when trying to maximize your damage is balance. In order to get the most out of your gear, you’ll need to make sure your damage per second (DPS) and primary stat are being balanced.

If you have very low DPS (Lets say, 10), but you have 1000 of your primary stat, your damage is 10 * 1000%, which is only 100 damage total. If you have a more balanced build though, with say 50 DPS and 500 of your primary stat, your damage is 50 * 500%, which is 250 damage.

I will post some slightly more advanced tips soon, so look out for that coming up in the next few days. I feel that these tips are very basic things that even casual gamers should know, in order to save yourself a lot of frustration and so you can feel super OP while you’re bashing demons on normal mode*.

*You’ll have to trust me though when I say you won’t feel OP for long – Normal mode makes the game look too easy, but as soon as you hit later Nightmare mode and especially once you get into Hell mode, you will die a lot.