Diablo 4: Leveling, Skills & Talents Explained

Welcome to our Diablo 4 leveling, Skills & Talents guide: We’ll show you everything you need to know about leveling and how to spec out your character, as well as all details about Skills and Talents.

Diablo 4 gameplay 2
Diablo 4 Leveling Skills & Talents Guide | © Activision Blizzard

Diablo 4 is shaping up to be a fantastic Action RPG, which changes quite a few things from its controversial predecessor and brings back some good old features and systems. Among those is the brand-new leveling and skill system, which is much closer to something like Diablo 2. It can be a bit confusing though, so we’ll show you everything you need to know about it here.

Diablo 4: Leveling and Skill System Explained

Obvious things first: when you do pretty much anything in this game, you gain experience points (XP), after earning enough of them you level up. Wow, revolutionary! Diablo doesn’t reinvent the wheel here, and leveling up works as it does in pretty much every game.

If you want to get a friend into Diablo 4, check out this video:

The level cap in the betas and Server Slam was 20, which a lot of players felt they reached pretty quickly. The full game will keep you active a lot longer, as the final level cap will be level 100. This has been confirmed by Game Director Joe Shely in an interview in 2022. With level 50, you unlock the Paragon system, which has also been completely reworked and now resembles the sphere grid from Final Fantasy 10.

With every level up, you get a skill point. You can then invest a skill point into two things: Skills or Talents. You can refund skill points if you’re unhappy with your choice and want to try something else – however, this get's more expensive the higher your character level.

Skill Tree

Every class has six different sections in their skill tree, of which they all share three types: Basic, Core and Ultimate Skills.

Diablo IV Barbarian Gameplay
Diablo 4: Having the right skills will make the game a lot more fun. | © Activision Blizzard

Basic Skills are exactly this: your most basic attacks and moves. They usually don’t affect your special meters, like Fury or Mana and are good for dealing with easy enemies.

Core Skills are the first type of class-specific special moves, which are tied to each class’ special meter. They do more damage than basic attacks and usually have special parameters and attributes, like the Barbarian’s Whirlwind or the Rogue’s Rapid Fire.

Ultimate Skills are particularly powerful and rare abilities. You can choose between three per class and only have one equipped at a time. You unlock your first ultimate with level 25.

Here are all the unique skill tree sections per class:

Barbarian

  • Defensive Skills
  • Brawling Skills
  • Weapon Mastery Skills

Rogue

  • Agility Skills
  • Subterfuge Skills
  • Imbuement Skills

Sorcerer

  • Defensive Skills
  • Conjuration Skills
  • Mastery Skills

For a more detailed look at each class in Diablo 4, check out these guides:

Skills

Skills are your active abilities in Diablo 4. You can invest up to five skill points in every skill, making it stronger with every level. Like with the runes in Diablo 3 you can further imrpove your active skills up to two times. This will give them some special effects, like knockback or the like.

All in all, you can slot six Skills at once into your hotbar to trigger them in-game. You can swap them out at any time in the skill menu.

Diablo 4 Skill Tree
Diablo 4: The big icons show skills, the small circles are the talents. | © Activision Blizzard

Talents

Active skills aren’t the only thing you can (and should) invest your skill points in. Diablo 4 also has so-called Talents, which are basically passive skills. They are part of the same skill trees as the active skills and can be upgraded up to three times. In the image above, Talents are the smaller, round nodes, while Skills are the big squares.

While active skills are cool and fun, don’t neglect the talents. These can give you extremely useful buffs, like increased Fury generation or reduced cooldowns.

That's all there is to the Skills and Talents in Diablo 4. If you want to know more about the reworked Paragon system, check out this article:

Faris Delalic

Faris has been obsessed with gaming since his childhood and is now the Gaming lead at EarlyGame. He is a self-described FromSoftware shill, but also loves games like Tears of the Kingdom, Baldur's Gate 3 and Resident Evil 4....