One of the most important RPG series has made a return, and that means there's an entire list of Diablo 4 terms and status effects to learn as you level up your favorite class in the demon-filled world of Sanctuary.
Diablo 4 Sorcerer build: Element-ary
Diablo 4 Barbarian build: Stay buffed
Diablo 4 Druid build: Air and weres
Diablo 4 Necromancer build: Stay undead
Diablo 4 Rogue build: Need for bleed
Diablo 4's loot has familiar primary character stats like strength and dexterity, which are helpfully explained if you scroll over them in your character window. All of the primary stats are useful for every class regardless of what kind of attacks they use, so you don't have to worry about wearing gear that doesn't help you at all.
Each class gets unique bonuses from those primary stats, which will gradually become more important as you make your way toward the endgame and start to refine your build. Certain stats are more valuable than others, so it's important to know exactly how they work so you know what kind of items to seek out.
Once you start to shape your build, you will run into Diablo 4's many status effects—the words that hover over you and your enemies when you use certain skills. These are essentially the backbone of how each class works and the skill trees are designed for you to invest in skills that cause or synergize with specific status effects, like Rogue attacks causing Vulnerable.
Whenever a skill or piece of gear involves that status effect the tooltip will explain it but certain effects, like crowd control, aren't as obviously explained by the game. I've put together a list to explain Diablo 4's most important terms and status effects so you don't have to hunt around in the menus.
Diablo 4 primary stats
Primary stats
- Strength: Increases your armor, or incoming damage mitigation
- Intelligence: Increases resistance to all elements
- Willpower: Increases healing received and increases your overpower damage
- Dexterity: Increases your dodge chance
Diablo 4 summary stats
Summary stats
- Attack power: A rough evaluation of the total damage you deal based on your weapons damage and speed
- Armor: The total armor you have from your equipped items
- Life: Your total amount of health
Diablo 4 basic terms
Basic terms
- Maximum Life: Diablo's name for the total amount of red health you and your enemies have
- Close: Targets within melee range
- Distant: Targets outside of melee range
- Healthy: When you or an enemy have over 80% Life
- Injured: When you or an enemy have below 35% Life
- Dodge chance: A % chance for incoming attacks to miss, or deal zero damage
Diablo 4 Crowd Control status effects
Crowd Control status effects
- Chill: Reduces movement speed and repeated applications can cause enemies to be Frozen
- Frozen: Prevents movement and attacks
- Daze: Prevents attacks or skills but not basic movement
- Fear: Prevents attacks, skills, and movement, and causes the target to run in a direction
- Slow: Reduces movement speed based on what skill or effect applied it
- Immobilize: Prevents basic movement
- Knockback: Prevents attacks or skills and pushes target outside of melee range
- Knockdown: Prevents attacks or skills for a short duration, can be removed by unstoppable or immune effects
- Pulled: Pulls target into melee or close range of the caster
- Stun: Prevents attacks, skills, and movement
- Tether: Prevents movement outside of the effect's radius
Defensive status effects
Defensive status effects
- Barrier: A temporary amount of light blue Life that depletes before your regular red Life
- Fortify: A bright red layer of Life that takes 10% reduced damage while its amount is greater than your normal health (indicated by a thick shield around your Life orb)
- Unstoppable: Removes and prevents control impairing effects, or crowd control effects
- Immune: Gives you temporary invulnerability
- Stealthed: Prevents you or enemies from being targeted and breaks when attacking or taking damage
- Crowd Control: A number of movement impairing effects, including Chill, Daze, Fear, Freeze, Immobilize, Knockback, Knockdown, Slow, Stun, Taunt, Pulled, and Tether (works differently for bosses)
- Elemental resistances: Reduces a specific elemental type of damage by 0.2%, up to 50%, and further reduced by armor
Offensive status effects
Offensive status effects
- Vulnerable: Increases damage taken by 20% (indicated by a purple glow on enemy Life bars or purple cracks on your Life orb)
- Overpower: Bonus damage based on the sum of your current Life and Fortify values (light blue damage numbers)
- Lucky Hit: A chance for a skill to trigger a bonus Lucky Hit effect (skills with a chance to cause a Lucky Hit can trigger another chance roll to activate a Lucky Hit effect)
- Critical Strike chance: A chance for skills to deal 50% bonus damage, increased by the Critical Strike Damage stat
- Taunt: Forces enemies to attack only the caster for a short duration
- Thorns: Damage automatically dealt to an enemy when they've attacked you
- Damage over time: A set amount of periodic damage (cannot critically strike)
Other useful Diablo 4 terms
Other useful terms
- Boss stagger: A brief period where bosses can't attack or move and are susceptible to crowd control effects. Stagger is caused by using crowd control effects to fill the stagger bar below their health bar (lasts until the blue bar fully depletes)
- Aspect: A unique skill or class-specific passive effect found on Legendary items
- Elite enemies: Strong enemies including Champions, Elites, Bosses, and Bloodmarked players (PvP)
