Diablo 4
If you have been pushing into higher and higher levels of The Pit in Diablo 4, you may be starting to run into a problem: survivability. While yes, you can glass cannon your way through many situations, you will end up in places where one wrong move is death, and this is even worse for closer range builds and classes.
Fortunately, there’s a solution for that. While armor and resistance have very clear caps and there are not all that many sources of Damage Reduction, it all comes down to one thing: Max Life. And while I sort of knew this before, I didn’t realize just how much it could expontentially spiral.
I was made aware of this by YouTuber Rob2628, who has a video explaining how and why this works and how you can get hundreds of thousands of health. I suggest you watch it below, but I will have some highlights after to explain the concept:
So, there are a few key pieces to this:
With the removal of “junk” affixes, in the new system every single piece of gear can roll Max Life now. And with enhanced perks, you can easily find 150% Max Life on each piece, given that Max Life is so common on…every piece of gear.
Once you start stacking Max Life, you then want to turn to increasing your Max Life percentage. This is done in a number of ways:
- Obviously putting Royal Rubies in all your armor slots will start the process.
- Look at all skills that increase Max Life and try to get rolls on gear that increase the passives in particular. For Barbarian, for instance, that would be Imposing Presence. With how many points you can find on defensive armor pieces, you can stack that very, very high for big bonuses.
- Then there is the Paragon Board, which includes very important nodes to increase Max Life. The most important are Tenacity Rare nodes which can give you 12% Max Life if requirements are met. Then, they are usually surrounded by 2% Max Life blue nodes. Once you really start scaling, even a 2% node can be something like 8,000 extra life.
- The Elixir of Antivenin will give you 15% increase Max Life for 30 minutes which again, will be an enormous amount due to scaling. It’s a basic potion that is cheap to craft so you can essentially have it running at all times.
One important reason Max Life is so good is because many healing elements scale on percent life, not individual values. The most prominent example of this is your basic healing potion, which heals 35% of your life over a few seconds. When you’re up at 50,000 health that’s 17,500 health. At 500,000 health, that’s 175,000 health. And this is true for skills that heal X% of your life per second, like modified Barbarian shout skills, for instance.
Downsides? Well, devoting this much to health may decrease your DPS, but at higher levels, it’s about slow and steady winning the race a lot of the time as you just want to survive, and this massive amount of life will allow you to do just that. However, another bad thing is that the more uniques you use, the less base life you can get as so many do not roll with that stat, which undercuts this whole idea. But with so many other defensive stats capped, Max Life is the way to go until…Blizzard nerfs it. Thanks to Rob2628 for the info.
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