I am sure it has not eluded you that a rather large title was released this week, that being Blizzard’s Diablo 3. After my first couple of play throughs I thought it would be worthwhile sharing some tips and knowledge that I have picked up along the way.

There are several settings in Diablo 3 that seem so critical that they should be enabled as standard, however they are not. I will start off by going through them as they are a great help to have on. All of them can be found in the gameplay section of the in game options menu.

1) Enable elective mode.

Elective mode allows you to essentially put any skill onto any key bind. This allows you to make more diverse builds with any number of abilities from any particular school/tree. This will be essential for making late game builds where you may find that you greatly favour having an increased number of utility skills. However it is still important to maintain a balance in your skills, for example with the Demon Hunter you will always want to have hatred generation, hatred spending and discipline spending abilities.

Youtube user EonSkiKeno goes into more detail on elective mode in this short instructional clip.

2) Enable enemy health bars and damage numbers.

This is very straight forwards, being able to see the health of all enemies makes your life a lot easier when killing champion groups, especially in higher difficulties. Having damage numbers on lets you compare ability damage when looking to refine and improve your build and it can also make the game a lot more fun, who doesn’t love seeing huge crits?!

3) Turn on health bar numbers.

This allows you to quickly assess how formidable an enemy is rather than having to rely on seeing how much your skills take from their HP bar. It can also be very helpful against champion packs that have the “illusionary” skill. Aside from this it can also be very helpful for monitoring the HP of friendlies in your multiplayer games.

4) Enable advanced tooltips.

From the start, to most experienced RPG players, the tooltips in diablo 3 will seem very basic. Enabling advanced tooltips in the gameplay options menu will give more detailed descriptions of your various attacks and specifically show up numerical data such as percentage chances to trigger effects. When looking at your skills for the first time this is essential as it is that information that will allow you to make informed decisions on what may be a better addition to your current build.

An advanced tooltip (left) vs a basic tooltip (right).

5) Towards the end of Normal mode, start collecting some vitality gear.

This caught me out a little, in normal mode I found it very easy to just stack max damage gear and keep cutting through hoards of easy demons. However when I jumped up to nightmare my health pool was so low that when creatures reached me, they could pretty easily take me down. Don’t make the same mistake as me and make sure you have a somewhat reasonable health pool when making jumps up in difficulty or expect to die a couple of times as you adjust to the new difficulty.

6) Even though defensive abilities are not critical in normal mode, get used to using them.

It is no secret that normal mode is pretty easy in Diablo 3. However that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn and gain some worthwhile skills while playing through it. It may be tempting to just use a ton of huge damage abilities to blast through the game, however it is always worth taking some time to get used to using your classes defensive abilities as you will need to be able to use them well when tackling higher difficulties.

7) Sharing is caring!

Chances are that you will have at least a couple of friends playing Diablo 3 too. Even if you do not feel like playing in multiplayer games together, there are various other ways to help each other out. You can collect gear for one another or set up a system such as swapping gems that are more effective for one another to ensure you both have the top tier of gems available to you.

This was a very welcome gift from a friend during my nightmare playthrough.

8) Pay attention to the special abilities of champion groups.

All of the special "champion" groups in Diablo 3 have random special abilties that are displayed below their names. Spend some time learning what each of these does as you go through the early difficulties as they become a real challenge on higher difficulties. With the right selection of random abilities these groups have the potential to pose far more of a challenge than some bosses on inferno difficulty.

I hope these quick tips were of some use to you, good luck in Sanctuary and happy demon slaying!