Diablo IV Guide: All Essential Terms, Phrases, Figures & Skills

Since its announcement, Diablo IV has been discussed among genre fans. Blizzard seems to have done well listening to the communities and making Diablo IV a solid action role-playing game. Due to the game's rising popularity, many newcomers have joined the game, and many of them seem to be puzzled by the game's countless terms. There's no denying that Diablo IV has a significant number of terms, phrases, figures, and skills to discover. Many of these numbers have in-game explanations, but finding them all together in one place is nearly impossible.

So, this article is an effort to clarify matters by defining as many of these terms as feasible. This list will be kept current as the game develops with other additions.

Healthy/Injured:

Healthy is when you or the enemy has Over 80 life, and injured means under 35 life.

Evade:

Evade is the barrel roll Dodge ability that every class has by default in Diablo IV.

Close/Distant:

Close enemies mean that they are within melee range, and distance enemies mean that they are outside of melee range.

Vulnerable:

And during that time, you take zero damage; anything that is vulnerable takes 20 extra damage. The enemy life bar glows purple to indicate that they are vulnerable, and if you're vulnerable, you have a purple crack in your life globe.

Unstoppable and Immune:

Skills in Diablo IV with unstoppable remove and present all crowd control, and it literally gets you out of being stunned. Immune is the same as unstoppable but usually lasts for a few seconds.

Barrier:

Certain items and skills give you a Barrier; it turns your life glow blue, and enemies have to get through the barrier before you start losing life. As you get attacked with the barrier active, the blue outline will slowly go down, and once it's at the bottom, you start losing life again.

Fortify:

Fortify is a way to get tankier. Basically, it's a form of damage reduction and makes your life tougher to get through. But only when your current amount of fortify is higher than your current life. This is indicated by the shield around your life globe, which means that you're now fortified, and whatever damage you take while this shield is there will be reduced by 10% or more, even more than 10%.

Overpower:

Depending on your gear and skills, your attacks in Diablo IV have a fixed u,nscalable 3% chance to overpower. Although some effects can guarantee you to overpower, it's basically a type of critical strike that does more damage the more life and fortifies you have whenever you see a light blue damage number that overpowers or if you happen to overpower and critical strike with the same attack the damage number will be orange.

Critical Strike:

Critical Strike in Diablo IV means you have a 5% chance to do 50% bonus damage. You can increase both of these numbers with skills and gear. You know you just got a Critical Strike when you see a yellow damage number.

Lucky Hit:

You have a chance to trigger lucky hit effects when you attack; the percentage of the chance depends on the skill you're using since each skill has its own lucky hit percentage. So, let's say you're using a skill that has a lucky hit chance of 50%, and you have an item with an effect that says there's a 20% chance to stun an enemy. When you are lucky to hit, the skill will stun enemies on average 10% of the time. You're basically rolling two dice, the first one to see if you trigger a lucky hit, then another one to see if you trigger the effect itself.

Now, if you don't have any lucky hit effects in your skills or gear, then nothing will happen when you lucky hit, and since you can also boost your chance to like a hit with your gear and other passives, things get way more complicated as this boost is applied multiplicatively here's the lucky hit equation, skill% * (1 + Gear + Bonuses) * Effects % = Actual proc %

The game uses if your skill has a 50% chance to like a hit, and your gear and passives together boost your lucky hit by 20%. Each of your attacks with that skill will have a 60 chance to lucky hit and let's say you're using two pieces of gear with lucky hit effects, one with a 5% chance to instantly execute an enemy and one with a 5% chance to stun the enemy you end up with a 3% chance to execute and a 3% chance to stun each time you attack hack using that skill.

Crowd Control:

There's a long list of things that count as CC  or Crowd Control. Basically, anything that affects the enemy's ability to move or attack. Bosses, however, don't get affected by CC like you can't slow the Butcher, for example. But all CC skills add to the stagger bar underneath the boss's health, and once that little yellow stagger bar is full, the boss falls to the ground for a couple of seconds, and in this state, until that blue bar goes to zero, they are affected by all CC types.

Aspect:

Once the special effect in the orange text on a legendary item is what's called an aspect, throughout the game, there are only two ways to find the legendary aspect. You either just find a legendary item, or you unlock it by completing specific dungeon engines for the first time. You can extract the effect from a legendary you find all now that the aspect is loose. This allows you to then imprint it onto any rare item to make it legendary. Note that aspects you've extracted from items are for one-time use. So once you've imprinted it into a rare item, the aspect is now used up, and you can't extract it.

Codex of Power:

Codex of Power is basically a collection of all of the aspects you've especially unlocked from dungeons.

Murmuring Obols:

Murmuring Obols is a purple type of currency that you use to gamble gear.

Cellar:

Cellars are indicated by the trapdoor icon on your map. These are quick to complete, like one minute or less, and your average reward is a golden chest.

Dungeon:

Dungeons have a gate as their icon, and these are slower, like 5 minutes, give or take, but at the same time, they come with a bigger reward than a seller.

Stronghold:

Strongholds have a red skull icon, and only a few are in each zone. Once you've completed a stronghold, you can't do it again. You basically turn an enemy camp into a friendly town.

Open World Event:

Open world events are indicated by a red circle on your map. They happen on fixed spots around the world, and they are public events, meaning you might run into other players, and you can complete the objective together. It usually takes about one minute or two.

The World Boss:

The World Boss starts at a specific time. Your map will give you a heads-up if you're paying attention, and you automatically join a group of other players to fight it once you go to the location.

Altar of Lilith:

The Altar of Lilith are hidden collectibles around the world that give you renown for that area as well as boost things like your stats and maximum ovals capacity.

Renown:

Renown points for exploring more of the map and doing various tasks like finding those hidden Altars or completing a stronghold. The renown points you get are tied to each zone in the world, and each zone has five stages of rewards. Some rewards are account-wide, while others are specific to each character.

Main/Priority/Side Quests:

There are three types of quests in there before the main quests are golden; like the main story of the campaign, there are priority quests that are light blue, and these introduce or unlock new features like the class-specific quests at level 15 or 30 or the basic tutorial quest at the start showing you how to upgrade your potion, etc. and then the classic side quests these have a dark blue icon the more or these you complete, and the more of the zone that you explore, the more of these side quests will become available to you.

Capstone Dungeon:

The rewards range from XP and gold to crafting materials or Murmuring Obols. Once you complete the campaign, you unlock a Capstone Dungeon. It's longer and more challenging than a regular dungeon, but you unlock the next difficulty tier once you complete it.

Unique Items:

Unique items are the rarest items to find in Diablo IV, and there are only a few of them that exist in the entire game. They always have the same name and role with the same affixes on them.

Sacred/Ancestral items:

Sacred and Ancestral items are better versions of all items. Let's say that normal items you pick up can roll up to 20 fire resistance. A sacred item would be able to roll 30 and Ancestral 40.

Nightmare Sigils/Dungeons:

In theory and in the end game, you'll start finding items called nightmare sigils. These sigils are tied to specific dungeons, and you can use these sigils to turn regular dungeons into nightmare dungeons. This adds special modifiers to it, like increasing the danger of the monsters inside and providing better loot.

Tree of Whispers:

The Tree of Whispers gives you quests, with the reward being a cache of your choice full of one specific type of gear.

Hell-tied Areas:

Hell-tied areas are a PVE event with extra strong monsters, and fields of hatred are a specific zone for PVP where you need to navigate both killing monsters and other players, all while collecting shards that need to be purified.

Paragon Board:

After you reach level 50, you go beyond your standard skill tree and unlock the paragon board. As you progress, you'll access multiple boards that can be strategically spun to your preference. You get four paragon points each time you level up between level 50 and 100, and these points can be spent on various nodes, normal magic or rare notes, and a few nodes will be glyph sockets. This means you can put a glyph inside to boost your character based on the surrounding notes.

Also, check out our Diablo IV Review, Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred DLC Review, and other guides below:

• Diablo IV Beginner's Guide
• Diablo IV Guide | Gameplay Tips and Tricks
• Diablo IV Guide | Tips For Faster Leveling
• Diablo IV Guide | Mistakes To Avoid Early In The Game
• Diablo IV Guide | Best Sorcerer Build Early Game To Level 100
• Diablo IV Guide | Most Powerful Build From Each Class
• Diablo IV Guide | Which Class Should You Pick
• Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred | Mercenary Guide
• Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred | Spiritborn Guide
• Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred | Dark Citadel Guide