Player exploration in Diablo 4 Season 9: Sins of the Horadrim is currently in the middle stage, with some high-level players having completed most of the game’s content and ready to move on to the more challenging endgame content.
In this explorable content, you need to pay attention to some completely different defense types from the previous leveling stage to adapt to the more difficult combat challenges and Diablo 4 Gold and precious loot with lower drop rates.
So, this guide will list several defense strategies suitable for you to use in the endgame of the current season, as well as some precautions, which will make your exploration easier and smoother. By the way, the properties and statistics of some of these Diablo 4 items may be changed in the future, subject to the game.
1. Armor/Resistance
In the endgame content, the first problem that players often encounter is that they will encounter insufficient damage ability and frequent deaths when using leveling builds.
This is because the monsters you encountered during the previous leveling process had low health and damage capabilities, and you could easily defeat them, even elite monsters or bosses.
Not only that, the purpose of your previous exploration was to farm Diablo 4 gold and experience points as quickly as possible for upgrades or items with higher rarity to improve the strength of your build.
So, after encountering stronger enemies and exploring content, you need to immediately enhance your defense capabilities, such as making your armor value, resistance or damage reduction higher.
But unfortunately, it is a bit difficult to reach the armor and resistance caps in S9, even if you pile up Mythic Uniques and Uniques in your build.
What I can recommend here is to go to Alchemist to open a defense instance, which will increase your defense by 300 points in half an hour. The best thing is that you can also open a resistance copy that can increase your resistance by 10 points and 2% of the maximum resistance.
If you don’t want to improve your defense through the above training, you can also achieve the same goal by modifying the core stats directly. For example, after you increase the character’s Strength, your armor will increase; after increasing Intelligence, resistance will increase.
Of course, some options you put in the build will also provide you with some additional armor or resistance gains, such as gear and all consumables with potions as the main ones. It is worth reminding you here that all three elemental resistances (fire, lightning and cold) need to be covered, and none of them can be missing.
2. Barrier
Although energy shield can reduce your exposure to elemental damage other than Chaos damage, most enemies in the endgame are not afraid of your shield at all, so it is recommended that you increase your Barrier.
Take the currently very popular Spiritborn build as an example. You can pay attention to Bottled Wind in Arcana option of Horadric Spells. It can give your Catalyst a strong barrier after activation, and its effect is 34% of your maximum health.
However, it should be noted that this barrier cannot be stacked, and you can only defend for the 4 seconds it is active. So, you may need to spend more D4 gold to reduce the cooldown of the core skill so that the idle time between the two barriers will be reduced.
Or you can use Que Rune to get another barrier, which will summon a Druid Earthen Bulwark for you, so as to achieve stronger defense capabilities. It is worth mentioning that this rune requires you to use 300 Offerings.
To farm these Offerings more quickly, you can use Neo Ritual Rune, which not only allows you to gain some damage reduction in combat, but also allows you to gain 200 Offerings per second.
With the help of these runes and gear options, your barrier is always active, and with a higher maximum health, your defense capabilities are fully sufficient to support you through the more difficult exploration levels and the new nightmare dungeons.
3. Damage Reduction
In addition to the above two types of defense, your damage reduction ability also requires your attention. But the way this property works doesn’t make sense, you can’t get 40% damage reduction with two build options that both give you 20% damage reduction.
For example, if an enemy deals 1,000 total damage, then after the first 20% reduction, you’ll take 800 damage. Then after the second 20% reduction, the damage will drop from 800 to 640, because it reduced the damage by 160.
If you reduce it by 40%, it’s 1,000 to 600, which is 40 less damage than before. While this stacking isn’t powerful, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some value, because each 20% is trying to reduce the serious damage you take as much as possible.
Other Notes
In addition to paying attention to the above defense types, you must not forget to increase your maximum health as much as possible, because it is the most important prerequisite for you to complete all combat and exploration tasks healthily and safely.
In view of this, you should activate all nodes related to this attribute on the passive skill tree as much as possible, and spend some Diablo 4 gold to upgrade those gear and potions that can increase your maximum health.
If you really experience multiple deaths or run failures, you can enter Horadric Lapidary in the town and make a Liminal Echo Gem. After placing it on armor or rings, it can help you avoid some fatal damage and enter the invincibility effect.
These are the types of defenses you need to focus on when exploring the endgame content in Diablo 4 Season 9 Sins of the Horadrim. I hope you can get the best experience in this brand new season with their help!
