Editor’s Note
This article outlines core progression systems in Diablo Immortal, focusing on character skills and equipment enhancement. It serves as a foundational guide for players seeking to understand how to grow their power within the game.
As an MMORPG, Diablo Immortal is a game where the fun lies in growing stronger as you develop your character. Fundamentally, as your level increases, you can use a wider variety of skills, and thanks to the skill rank-up system tied to level, you also see the effect of your skills becoming more powerful.
The scope for growth through equipment is also quite broad. Some equipment, like weapons, can be enhanced regardless of its grade, and additional growth is possible using various gems. It’s characteristic of the game that it not only features such item enhancement and gems but also various convenience systems like the ‘Transfer’ system, which reduces the burden of equipment replacement.
There are a total of 12 equipment slots in Diablo Immortal. The left side of the equipment screen consists of accessories, gloves, boots, etc., while the right side consists of helmet, pants, main hand weapon, and off-hand weapon. Basically, normal gems can be socketed into accessory slots, while legendary gems are socketed into equipment slots.
The six equipment items on the right side can be enhanced using materials. Each enhancement tier increases the item’s stats, and from tier 6, additional random effects are granted. Items used as enhancement materials can be obtained by salvaging equipment. For some materials, salvaging higher-grade items or specific dropped items is required.
For the right-side equipment where enhancement values apply, when replacing equipment, you can use ‘Transfer’ to move the enhancement level and gems to the new item without any penalty.
For the left-side equipment, which corresponds to accessories, unlike the right-side equipment, the items themselves cannot be enhanced. Another difference is that they can socket normal gems instead of legendary gems. Normal gems have predetermined colors that can be socketed into each slot, and similar to right-side equipment, it’s possible to transfer previously socketed gems to other items via ‘Transfer’.
Accessory sockets are distinguished by color. ‘Red sockets’ can hold red gem types (Ruby, Tourmaline), ‘Blue sockets’ can hold the blue gem (Aquamarine), and ‘Yellow sockets’ can hold yellow gems (Citrine, Topaz). Since normal gems boost various effects from damage to health, it’s better not to have empty sockets.
Normal gems can be upgraded by synthesizing three gems of the same rank. As the stat increase upon rank-up is significant, upgrading normal gems is also considered important. Similar to normal gems, legendary gems can also be upgraded, requiring additional identical legendary gems and runes obtainable from ‘Elder Rifts’. For legendary gems, upgrading grants stat increases and additional effects.
The highest grade, Legendary items, can be obtained randomly through certain content or by hunting elite monsters. True to their highest grade, they feature unique effects exclusive to Legendary items. Since these Legendary items are fundamentally untradeable, you must engage in various content to obtain a Legendary item with the desired effect.
The unique effects of Legendary items can be broadly divided into two categories: skill damage increase and skill effect alteration. Skill damage increase simply enhances the damage of a specific skill by a certain value, while skill effect alteration changes the mechanism of the original skill.
Skill effect alteration applies to various skills, offering effects such as changing a channeling skill into an instant-cast skill. Therefore, skills that had low utility or were somewhat difficult to use in practice can be elevated through Legendary item effects.
Since Legendary items must be obtained directly through various content, it seems it will take considerable time to achieve the desired setup. Also, there may be cases where you obtain overlapping Legendary items or ones with different effects than desired. In such situations, ‘Essence Transfer’ can be used to mitigate the difficulty.
‘Essence Transfer’ can be performed through the ‘Essence Transfer’ NPC in town. You can find it by opening the map and looking for a flame-like icon. Through this NPC, you can extract and imbue Legendary item effects. To extract a Legendary item effect, you need a Legendary item to be used as material, and the equipment is destroyed upon extraction.
The extracted Legendary item effect becomes available for imbuement onto another Legendary item at any time. However, the effect cannot be imbued onto an item of a different slot than the one from which it was extracted. This is because the effect can only be imbued onto equipment of the same slot as the extracted item. For example, if the extracted equipment was a weapon, that effect can only be imbued onto a weapon. As a feature that increases setup flexibility, it is considered an important system.