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An often overlooked part of making a powerful character inDiablo 4is deciding on your defensive skills. Staying alive is the most important part of gameplay and newer players might focus more on building up their damage rather than shoring up their defense. Barrier is a powerful mechanic that provides temporary maximum health, keeping you alive against powerful hits.
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While not as plentiful as other defensive options, Barrier should not be forgotten about. This guide will take you through how Barrier works and the primary sources of generation you’ll want to keep an eye out for.
How Does Barrier Work?
Put simply, Barrier is ashield that is applied on top of your actual life. It will lower upon taking damage but preserve your underlying life total.
Your life can regenerate using effects such asHealth Potions, but it will not heal your Barrier. Most Barrier effects only last for a limited time, but they canstack on top of each otherto build up a large shield.
Barrier works differently fromFortify, in thatit will not lower any incoming damage amounts, but will instead prevent it. It is typically applied faster, whereas Fortify normally takes a while to build its strength.
This makes Barrier more useful foron-demand bursts of damage,where you know you need a quick defensive to survive, such as an AoE Explosion.
However, while Fortify applies itself in percentages of your maximum health,Barrier is a flat amount.
This means thatit does not scale with stats such as maximum life, and it is possible for Barrier to fall behind in its effectiveness, certainly while leveling, or before you’re able to obtain someBarrier Generation.
How To Generate Barrier
Barrier can be generated via a few different methods, but perhaps the most effective is theAspect of the ProtectorLegendary power.
This will grant you a sizeable Barrier whendamaging an Elite enemy, which is typically where you’ll be wanting the majority of your shields in the first place.
Although it has a cooldown, the Barrier laststen seconds, usually long enough to take down most non-boss enemies. This Aspect is great because it is not class locked, meaning any character can make use of the power onceImprinted.
For more specific sources of Barrier, these classes also have learnable skills that can generate a shield on demand.
These are fantastic defensive tools, and it is no surprise that all three of these skills arecore talent choices for the majority of top-tier builds.
Sorcerer is probably the best class when it comes to creating Barriers, as multiple talents will extend the size and duration of each shield. Being able to proc it manually is also very powerful, as you may pre-defensive a dangerous pack of enemies.
Barrier Generationwill increase thesize of any Barrier applied by that percentage. There are a couple of ways this can be achieved, the simplest being to equip items with the Barrier Generation stat. This can be found on certain item slots:
This skill will only increase thesize of applied Barriers,not the duration or cooldown.
Alongside some class skills, there is another way to increase Barrier Generation. TheDiamond Gem grants this stat when applied to Armor pieces, up to a maximum of five percent from a Royal version.
If you are running a Barrier based defense, then you will probably want totry socketing Diamonds into your Armor, as the stacking increases can really begin to add up.
Gems can beupgraded and unsocketed at Jeweler NPCs, so try to socket the highest-quality versions you can find.
If you are instead running a defense based aroundFortify, then you will most likelyfind more value from socketing Sapphires. Fortify is generally much easier to generate and keep up, albeit at a lower defensive benefit than Barrier.
