Another milestone has been reached in my Diablo 4 Hardcore journey. I finally reached level 50 which gives me access to so much more of what this game has to offer. This gives me access to a whole new difficulty tier as well as several features and activities that I wasn't able to access before. Let's take a look at all the new things I can do.
What's new at 50?
Reaching level 50 in Diablo 4 is a milestone for several reasons. Not only is it halfway to the level cap of 100 but there's a few new things that unlock. I would say the most important thing to unlock is the Paragon board. This is basically a whole new skill tree with a shit-ton of choices to keep on powering up your character. These are all passive skills like extra strength, armor and life though so they don't change how you play your character in any way. It only powers him or her up.
You unlock these with paragon points which you now get instead of skill points when you level up. You actually get four of them as you go through each level which means you'll have quite a lot of them once you reach level 100. Right now I'm mostly just picking anything that gives me extra strength for that damage increase and armor or life for the survivability. It's tempting to put everything into damage but I don't want to bite into the temptation only to risk dying and losing my character.
There are also something called glyphs that can be slotted into the Paragon board at certain nodes which give stronger bonuses than most of the nodes themselves but are also powered up even further depending on which surrounding nodes you've bought. These are supposed to drop now that I've started playing on the world tier 3 difficulty and can apparently be levered up by doing nightmare dungeons. I haven't done much of either yet so I'll have to wait and see how this works properly.
Clearing the capstone dungeon
Upon reaching level 50 one of the first things I did was to clear the capstone dungeon which gave me access to the world tier 3 difficulty. This is basically a challenge dungeon tuned a little harder than normal dungeon to see if you're ready for the new difficulty. I was a bit nervous going into it seeing as I have one life and all but I managed to clear it with relative ease. The extra time I've spent refining my build is definitely paying off.
Once in world tier 3 everything becomes harder and I also get more experience due to the added difficulty. This is basically essential seeing as the amount of experience needed to level up past level 50 spiked quite hard. I can now also partake in the Helltide events as well as run nightmare dungeons as long as I get a nightmare sigil to drop.
I haven't been able to try the nightmare dungeons yet but I've tried my hand at the Helltide event once. This basically transforms a random area of the world. The entire area goes red, enemies get stronger and the rewards get better. Most of all I noticed that the experience you gain from these events seem to be the best in the game at the moment.
The whole event is all about killing monsters. As many as you can. Monsters drop something called Aberrant Cinders when killed which acts as currency for opening up really strong and good chests around the Helltide area. These chests seem to always contain some legendary and even sacred items. The chests also specify what they contain meaning you can target jewelry chests or chests with only boots. Really cool when you're looking an upgrade for a specific gear piece.
Goal upon goal
My next goal now is to complete the renown rewards in all of the regions. Having unlocked world tier 3 I can now progress my renown past the 3rd reward to also claim the 4th and 5th reward. This will increase my murmuring obol cap by a total of 400 while also netting me 20 extra paragon points.
I will most likely also target any Helltide events that pop up to try and get some gear upgrades. Farming those renown levels is kind of grindy and not that exciting seeing as it mostly consists of exploring the map, completing side quests and clearing dungeons. It's repetitive work but it needs to be done. Luckily these rewards are account wide so I won't have to redo them on future characters. Unless this character dies before I manage to complete them in which case I'll have to redo most of the grind.
I'm also gonna focus on not dying along the way.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.