- May 30, 2023
- 8
- 10
- 3
dunno if there's a guide yet since I only see 2 forums? but figured I'd do a quick writeup so I can just point my friends at it rather than re-explain:
Use a helltide tracker of choice.
I use: https://diablo4.life/trackers/helltide
It shows the potential spawn locations and then the actual spawn locations circled in green.
https://d4armory.io/events/ is automated too
Like in the screenshot above, I try to find 2 obol events and then path between them (in orange) blowing up packs .
I'm playing a qt tanky bear so I'm not concerned about dying and losing cinders, just trying to farm as many cinders as possible before the top-of-the-hour reset.
As soon as I have enough to get all the boxes I'll run around turning in, blowing up big packs as I come across them.
If you're squishier, perhaps turn-in after 250 so you're not losing progress if you eat a meteor or something. It'll just mean less time spent at obol events.
I'm mixed on whether or not it's worth extending the events by not completing the objectives. You can get 6 boxes w/o doing that so I don't feel it's strictly necessary, but it may be a helpful crutch if your build is weak or you're partying with someone so the mobs have more hp (such that you can't 1-shot a pack).
After turn-in, I'll go back to farming more for the batch after the reset.
Until you get an idea of your farming speed, try to minimize time spent in town, between obol turn-ins and npcing stuff. Just npc it all, or huck anything you want to sort into a stash tab.
e.g. I have fairly slow movespeed compared to my friend, so I usually get around 150/10 min.
I can't quite do a full box/10 min without events. But with event cycling it's possible to do 6x 175 w/ change leftover.
There's also 4 special / altered map elements:
Fiend Roses spawn naturally on the map (reward: roses + a few cinders)
These wretched souls, or the ones hanging from a pole, with the red aura around them reward 3-4 cinders usually.
There's also a special mineral pile called a Screaming Hell Vein.
I don't search these out but if I see them it's a quick click (and souls can be popped with a ranged skill).
Salvage vs vendor?
Helltides comboed with NM dungeons really changes the outlook of material availability.
The "rare" salvage materials you'd normally get from legendary items drop like candy in NMs (and normal dungeons) as regular mats on the ground, from obol events, in-dungeon events like corrupted shrines, and WBs.
As it's necessary to farm NMs to upgrade glyphs (and a large source of your post-50 power spike), you'll gain a lot of these mats via incidental farming.
The bottleneck will almost always be the forgotten souls or gold (increasing cost every enchant).
As such, while I think it's preferable to salvage legendaries pre-WT4, once there, you can just npc it all unless the town portal square is really close to a blacksmith.
A couple maxed-out helltides will net way more forgotten souls than you'll have the gold to use as enchants very quickly ramp into the millions, and gold becomes the limiting factor.
With this in mind, there's also not as much impetus to hoard materials otw to WT3 and they can be freely spent on upgrades. Salvaging upgraded equipment also refunds a portion of the upgrade mats (mostly veiled crystals).
Atm at 88, I have ~2.6k veiled crystal, 650 coiling ward, 500 abtruse, capped sigil powder, 600 baleful frag, with only occasional legendary salvage. Like way more than I'll use.
One play session of ~6hrs nets me about 25m gold, and you can burn through that quite easily whilst enchanting.
Enchant strat
can just look for good 3/4 mod items. item lvl matters more for weapons (base dmg), but the tiers are the same post 725, so for example, an i777 ring would have the same vuln rolls possible as an i820 ring (24.8 - 35.3% at +25). But that said, some mods (like life) scale with ilvl.
The better gear you get, the pickier it makes sense to be. Since my gear is like "90%" ideal now, I npc everything below whatever arbitrary ilvl threshold I feel like setting.
for example, my current gear.
The gloves are fairly good but all-stats hit a low roll. Earth %cdmg would also work.
I'd like to get boots with more armor, but the implicit comboed with those top 3 mods is really hard to come by. Injured %dr is a semi-wasted mod for my build since it only applies at 35% hp or below (1shot territory) and I'm not stacking enough of it to matter.
The pants are comfy (and vastly better than Temerity imo) but the dodge is wasted and it'd be nice to get all-stats (important for paragon thresholds).
So it kind of feels like layered rng checks that need to be met:
- is the item high enough ilvl that it makes sense to even look at it
- does it have 3/4 mods
- are those mods high enough within their ranges to warrant the resources rerolling them?
e.g. this ring that just dropped I would consider as a 3/4, as poison damage doesn't help my build.
The earth % crit is low-rolled so I'm not sure I would go all-in on this, but it's probably worth rolling it until it costs a couple mil or so.
The spirit difference vs my current ring would add an extra attack (which also has low-roll earth crit), outweighing the overpower. Ideally I'd be looking for high-roll vulnerability or generic crit dmg (end result).
While a storm druid is probably using poison, it's likely using it as utility to get "while poisoned" amp, rather than scaling it. If scaling poison, a 10% roll is still sort of a waste of an affix slot compared to the overall %increased pool you'll have access to, so it'd be better to pick up life or vuln% or maybe barrier gen.
While it's possible that a lower-ilvl item can drop that has 4 perfect mods, where you'd only lose a little armor due to ilvl diff, the opportunity cost of that is a bit of a turn-off. Having to slog through manually filtering items every town trip is compounding mental damage over time and time spent not generating more items. But the base armor on the items is often immaterial compared to the potential of getting high 3/4 or 4/4 rolls, which can happen > 725. That is until you're chasing the absolute best of the best, it's probably worth checking through all your sub-800 loot.
Despite the lower ilvl & base armor difference (and unfortunate implicit), these pants ended up giving me ~900 extra armor, equivalent to 11% on-level DR. I'd highly recommend watching this series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5GXa9pP7xwVf7V6K4Xh55s6nU8W7XBC9 to understand the relation of DR, armor, and ehp in D4 if that's something you're curious about.
If you have a 4/4 mod item you can also consider enchanting (and not changing the result) for the purpose of hitting a higher roll within a mod tier. For example, the un-upgraded spirit range is 6-12, so if I had a ring that was really good everything else but 6 spirit, it'd possibly be worthwhile trying to hit a 10-12. https://www.d4craft.com/ shows the odds of hitting a particular roll while enchanting.
patch 1.1.1 seems to have removed the priority mods, so all affixes roll equally now. This is unfortunately a heavy nerf for amulets where affixes such as CDR or wolf armor have gone from being 1/16 to 1/48, however it does make it easier to roll DR on less-polluted affix pools.
- available in WT3/4
- necessary to farm in order to get Forgotten Souls, which are used for the enchant system
- souls also rarely obtained from salvaging legendary weapons at the blacksmith
- Fiend Roses can also be found, but are more common than souls
- can also get roses via NM dungeons / WBs too
- hour-long event where Aberrant Cinders drop from mobs similar to motes from the Tree of Whispers events
- collect a bunch of cinders -> turn in for a chest
- "lesser" chests are visible on the minimap - low priority cinder dump
- not guaranteed to drop a legendary (sometimes only get a sacred rare)
- can still drop fiend roses / forgotten souls
- can now drop uniques from a general pool (not tied helmet -> helmet chest)
- Mysterious chests cost 250 cinders, are only visible on the minimap when you get close enough, and are 1st priority
- drop: Fiend Roses, Forgotten Souls, sometimes yellow/rare items, always guaranteed legendaries (4-5 ish), sometimes uniques, crappy xp potions
- e.g. loot: https://files.catbox.moe/m0euef.png
- Mysterious chests reset at the top of the hour, 1 per zone
- can spawn across 2 to 3 zones (up to 4/6 mysterious chests if the reset time is amenable)
- can stack with Tree of Whispers quests (or other blue qs in zone)
- can leave the zone (to sell stuff) or pop into a cellar without losing your cinders
- dying halves your current cinder count
- all cinders are lost at the end of the hour (countdown top-right of the screen by the mini-map)
- sometimes associated world bosses spawn (e.g. Kixxarth)
- meteor showers deal moderate damage, and spawn an elite about 15-20s after they start
Use a helltide tracker of choice.
I use: https://diablo4.life/trackers/helltide
It shows the potential spawn locations and then the actual spawn locations circled in green.
https://d4armory.io/events/ is automated too
Like in the screenshot above, I try to find 2 obol events and then path between them (in orange) blowing up packs .
I'm playing a qt tanky bear so I'm not concerned about dying and losing cinders, just trying to farm as many cinders as possible before the top-of-the-hour reset.
As soon as I have enough to get all the boxes I'll run around turning in, blowing up big packs as I come across them.
If you're squishier, perhaps turn-in after 250 so you're not losing progress if you eat a meteor or something. It'll just mean less time spent at obol events.
I'm mixed on whether or not it's worth extending the events by not completing the objectives. You can get 6 boxes w/o doing that so I don't feel it's strictly necessary, but it may be a helpful crutch if your build is weak or you're partying with someone so the mobs have more hp (such that you can't 1-shot a pack).
After turn-in, I'll go back to farming more for the batch after the reset.
Until you get an idea of your farming speed, try to minimize time spent in town, between obol turn-ins and npcing stuff. Just npc it all, or huck anything you want to sort into a stash tab.
e.g. I have fairly slow movespeed compared to my friend, so I usually get around 150/10 min.
I can't quite do a full box/10 min without events. But with event cycling it's possible to do 6x 175 w/ change leftover.
There's also 4 special / altered map elements:
Fiend Roses spawn naturally on the map (reward: roses + a few cinders)
These wretched souls, or the ones hanging from a pole, with the red aura around them reward 3-4 cinders usually.
There's also a special mineral pile called a Screaming Hell Vein.
I don't search these out but if I see them it's a quick click (and souls can be popped with a ranged skill).
Salvage vs vendor?
Helltides comboed with NM dungeons really changes the outlook of material availability.
The "rare" salvage materials you'd normally get from legendary items drop like candy in NMs (and normal dungeons) as regular mats on the ground, from obol events, in-dungeon events like corrupted shrines, and WBs.
As it's necessary to farm NMs to upgrade glyphs (and a large source of your post-50 power spike), you'll gain a lot of these mats via incidental farming.
The bottleneck will almost always be the forgotten souls or gold (increasing cost every enchant).
As such, while I think it's preferable to salvage legendaries pre-WT4, once there, you can just npc it all unless the town portal square is really close to a blacksmith.
A couple maxed-out helltides will net way more forgotten souls than you'll have the gold to use as enchants very quickly ramp into the millions, and gold becomes the limiting factor.
With this in mind, there's also not as much impetus to hoard materials otw to WT3 and they can be freely spent on upgrades. Salvaging upgraded equipment also refunds a portion of the upgrade mats (mostly veiled crystals).
Atm at 88, I have ~2.6k veiled crystal, 650 coiling ward, 500 abtruse, capped sigil powder, 600 baleful frag, with only occasional legendary salvage. Like way more than I'll use.
One play session of ~6hrs nets me about 25m gold, and you can burn through that quite easily whilst enchanting.
Enchant strat
can just look for good 3/4 mod items. item lvl matters more for weapons (base dmg), but the tiers are the same post 725, so for example, an i777 ring would have the same vuln rolls possible as an i820 ring (24.8 - 35.3% at +25). But that said, some mods (like life) scale with ilvl.
The better gear you get, the pickier it makes sense to be. Since my gear is like "90%" ideal now, I npc everything below whatever arbitrary ilvl threshold I feel like setting.
for example, my current gear.
The gloves are fairly good but all-stats hit a low roll. Earth %cdmg would also work.
I'd like to get boots with more armor, but the implicit comboed with those top 3 mods is really hard to come by. Injured %dr is a semi-wasted mod for my build since it only applies at 35% hp or below (1shot territory) and I'm not stacking enough of it to matter.
The pants are comfy (and vastly better than Temerity imo) but the dodge is wasted and it'd be nice to get all-stats (important for paragon thresholds).
So it kind of feels like layered rng checks that need to be met:
- is the item high enough ilvl that it makes sense to even look at it
- does it have 3/4 mods
- are those mods high enough within their ranges to warrant the resources rerolling them?
e.g. this ring that just dropped I would consider as a 3/4, as poison damage doesn't help my build.
The earth % crit is low-rolled so I'm not sure I would go all-in on this, but it's probably worth rolling it until it costs a couple mil or so.
The spirit difference vs my current ring would add an extra attack (which also has low-roll earth crit), outweighing the overpower. Ideally I'd be looking for high-roll vulnerability or generic crit dmg (end result).
While a storm druid is probably using poison, it's likely using it as utility to get "while poisoned" amp, rather than scaling it. If scaling poison, a 10% roll is still sort of a waste of an affix slot compared to the overall %increased pool you'll have access to, so it'd be better to pick up life or vuln% or maybe barrier gen.
While it's possible that a lower-ilvl item can drop that has 4 perfect mods, where you'd only lose a little armor due to ilvl diff, the opportunity cost of that is a bit of a turn-off. Having to slog through manually filtering items every town trip is compounding mental damage over time and time spent not generating more items. But the base armor on the items is often immaterial compared to the potential of getting high 3/4 or 4/4 rolls, which can happen > 725. That is until you're chasing the absolute best of the best, it's probably worth checking through all your sub-800 loot.
Despite the lower ilvl & base armor difference (and unfortunate implicit), these pants ended up giving me ~900 extra armor, equivalent to 11% on-level DR. I'd highly recommend watching this series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5GXa9pP7xwVf7V6K4Xh55s6nU8W7XBC9 to understand the relation of DR, armor, and ehp in D4 if that's something you're curious about.
If you have a 4/4 mod item you can also consider enchanting (and not changing the result) for the purpose of hitting a higher roll within a mod tier. For example, the un-upgraded spirit range is 6-12, so if I had a ring that was really good everything else but 6 spirit, it'd possibly be worthwhile trying to hit a 10-12. https://www.d4craft.com/ shows the odds of hitting a particular roll while enchanting.
patch 1.1.1 seems to have removed the priority mods, so all affixes roll equally now. This is unfortunately a heavy nerf for amulets where affixes such as CDR or wolf armor have gone from being 1/16 to 1/48, however it does make it easier to roll DR on less-polluted affix pools.
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