Diablo® III

Resources

Most skills are powered by your class resource, a limited reserve of strength, like your Life, that depletes as you use your most powerful attacks and abilities. You can keep your eye on that resource—and, by extension, how much power you have left to use your abilities—by glancing at the colored globe opposite your Life, in the lower right of your screen.

All classes possess their own unique resource. You can find out more about them on the appropriate class pages.

Fury (Barbarian), Hatred/Discipline (Demon Hunter), Spirit (Monk), Mana (Witch Doctor), and Arcane Power (Wizard).

Using Your Skills

Use the proper skill to slay your foes.

To get the most use out of your skills, you should place them in your action bar. You can do this by opening your Skills menu (default key “S”) and clicking on the skills you’d like to use. Your skills will be automatically assigned to a number key on your keyboard or a button on your mouse.

Not pictured: Khazra orphans.

You can use any skill in your action bar by clicking on the icon or by pressing the corresponding number key or mouse button. To target a monster with an attack skill, make sure it’s highlighted (hover your mouse over the monster), then press the key or mouse button that corresponds to the skill you want to use.

If you’re successful, the foe you’ve set your sights on should melt away into a ruin of smoking flesh and burnt blood. Well done.

Experience and Leveling

When you gain a level, you'll know it.

As you kill monsters and complete quests, you’ll gain experience, a numerical representation of your increasing power. Reaching a new experience threshold (for example, going from level one to level two) is called “gaining levels.” Often, you’ll unlock one or more new skills when you gain a level. The new skills you’ve unlocked appear on your screen; you can view them at any time on your Skills menu (default key “S”).

You unlock more space for skills on your action bar at levels 2, 4, 9, 14, and 19, up to a maximum of 6 active skills, so you’ll grow in versatility as well as power.

Passive Skills

Select passives on the Skills menu.

Once you reach level 10 (and again at levels 20 and 30), you’ll unlock a passive skill slot, up to a maximum of 3 passive skills. Passive skills don’t appear on your action bar and aren’t used by clicking on them or hitting number keys. Instead, they grant bonuses that enhance you at all times. For example, they might make you harder to hit or make your defensive spells last longer.

Changing Your Skills

Click on skills to change them.

You’ll increase your repertoire of monster-slaying skills quickly, and you’ll soon find yourself with more options than you can place on your action bar.

Changing the skills at your disposal can be done from your skills menu: simply choose the skills you’d like to use. If you want to assign your skills in a non-standard configuration (for example, choosing four defensive skills), first open your game menu, choose “options,” then “gameplay,” and check the “elective mode” box. If you try to swap active skills while you’re roaming the wilderness or crawling through a dank dungeon, you’ll incur a cooldown before you can use them, meaning that they'll be unavailable for a brief recharge time based on the difficulty level you’re playing on:

• Normal: 5 seconds
• Nightmare: 10 seconds
• Hell: 15 seconds
• Inferno: 30 seconds

Skill Runes

Skill runes are a means to customize your skills beyond their basic powers. Beginning at level 6, you’ll start unlocking runes for your skills, allowing you to drastically modify their functions. For example, you might increase the range or duration of a particular skill or change it so that it sends enemies flying away (where previously it only did damage). A skill that you once had to carefully aim at a group of foes might now seek them automatically.

Choose runes from the Skills menu.

You can access your skill runes in the Skills menu. After selecting the skill you’d like to use, you’ll see a list of the runes below it: just choose an unlocked skill rune you’d like to apply. You can only apply one rune to a skill at a time.

To experiment with the full list of Diablo III’s skills and runes, try out the
Skill Calculator.

Life

While you make every effort to dispatch and dismember your foes, they’ll be doing the same to you. If a monster hits you, your Life (represented in the red globe on the bottom left of your screen) will be reduced.

Your Vitality attribute (in conjunction with any passive skills or vitality-boosting gear you're using) dictates how much Life you have. You can recover lost Life quickly by snatching up health globes dropped by slain monsters.

Health globes restore your Life.

Walk over a health globe and you (along with any nearby allies) will receive a small portion of healing. More dangerous foes will drop more potent, larger health globes. There are other ways to recover Life: some equipment and skills increase your regeneration rate, and certain friendly characters and allies can restore you to full Life both in and out of combat, but health globes are by far the most common way to heal yourself.

When your Life gets dangerously low, you’ll see a red halo encompass your screen: that’s a sign that you need to escape from battle, heal, or both. When the red globe is empty, you’re dead.

Health Globes

The chance of health globes dropping–and precisely when they’ll drop during a battle–is tied to the type of monster you’re fighting. The triangles in monsters’ health bars represent points where they might drop a globe, so keep your eyes peeled to predict when you’re likely to get a lifesaving infusion of health.

• Normal monsters: chance to drop a health globe on death varies by monster type.
• Champion monsters: 60% chance to drop a health globe at 50% life and on death.
• Rare monsters: 100% chance to drop a health globe at 50% life and on death.

Death

You will die.

Death isn’t the end in Diablo III, but neither is it something to be taken lightly. When you die, you are returned to the last checkpoint you reached: checkpoints are invisible spots on the map that track your progress through the game.

You’ll return to life with full health, but any consumables you’ve used will be gone permanently, and any items you have equipped will suffer a small amount of damage (10%) to their durability. Damage to your items’ durability will cost gold to repair. More information about item durability can be found in the Equipment section of this guide.