The sudden release of Diablo 4 Paladin in Season 11 rendered many pre-season build rankings obsolete. It boasts multiple builds that dominate all game content, excelling in speed farming, boss battles, and rushing The Pit.
Let's take a look at the builds currently available in Season 11 that combine extremely high damage and survivability, and they will be the most powerful builds for challenging higher levels of The Pit and The Tower.
10. Evade Spiritborn
This build revolves around Eagle primary spirit hall effect, which fires feathers that automatically attack enemies when using the eagle skill or evading.
Early on, basic attacks need to be interspersed between dodges; later on, the goal is to maintain a high frequency of dodges throughout to trigger feather attacks. In endgame, near-infinite dodges can be achieved by stacking cooldown reduction.
9 .Shadowblight Necromancer
Shadowblight Necromancer doesn't require unique equipment to function. Its core idea is to stack multiple damage multipliers, causing enemies to simultaneously suffer multiple types of continuous shadow damage, triggering Shadowblight explosion damage at high frequency.
Shadowblight is Necromancer's key passive skill. Shadow damage dealt by the player infects enemies, triggering a high-damage explosion every eighth instance of shadow damage. This damage benefits from corrupting damage and shadow bonuses.
8. Crackling Energy Sorcerer
Compared to the previous two builds, Crackling Energy Sorcerer requires core unique equipment to reach its full potential. It primarily uses Ball Lightning to generate Crackling Energy, which is extremely fast and deals high damage, but its maximum stack count in The Pit is lower than Paladin.
Esadora's Overflowing Cameo
It provides damage reduction based on Crackling Energy stacks, movement speed upon pickup, significantly increased Crackling Energy damage, and automatically releases all charges to nearby enemies upon reaching maximum stacks, dealing 80% bonus damage.
Galvanic Azurite Ring
Lightning damage magnetizes enemies, continuously generating Crackling Energy and increasing all lightning damage they take by 60%.
7. Heartseeker Rogue
Heartseeker Rogue is a basic attack build. While not the fastest, it boasts high single-target and area-of-effect damage and is relatively durable among ranger builds.
Its damage stacking is heavily reliant on equipment:
- Shard of Verathiel: Significantly increases basic skill damage but consumes primary resources.
- Paingorger's Gauntlets: Increases basic skill levels. Furthermore, when you damage an enemy using a non-basic skill, the enemy will be marked, and additional damage will be dealt to them.
6. Hammer Of The Ancients Barbarian
HotA Barbarian build primarily revolves around stacking damage with the core ability, Hammer of the Ancients, requiring high maximum fury.
You need to utilize skill and equipment synergies to transform Hammer of the Ancients into a large area-of-effect (AoE) ability, increasing its damage and attack speed.
The required equipment for this build is as follows:
- Aspect of Ancestral Force: Increases the quake damage of Aspect of Ancestral Force, tripling its effect against bosses.
- Mantle of Mountains Fury: Increases the level of HoTA. After an earthquake explosion, increases the damage of the next HoTA by 100%.
5. Lunging Barbarian
Lunging Barbarian build is another basic skill build that uses Lunging Strike as both an attack and a gap-closer ability.
It primarily relies on equipping Hammer of the Ancients. To gain the effect of “10% increased Rage and maximum Rage per enemy hit,” allowing you to stack extremely high Rage values to enjoy various Rage-based damage bonuses.
Required equipment is as follows:
- Hooves of the Mountain God: When Fury is full, using a basic skill will enter a Rage-consuming state, during which the basic skill gains Cleave effect and deals double damage.
- Paingorger's Gauntlets and Shard of Verathiel: Both enhance basic skills.
- Ramaladni's Magnum Opus: Skill damage increases with Rage, but consumes 10 Rage per second.
4. Pulverize Druid
Pulverize Druid gameplay is somewhat similar to HotA Barbarian, a build with a large area of effect, high damage, and relatively high resilience. Current variants utilize a new mechanic to generate a poison pool for additional bonuses.
Pulverize Druid primarily utilizes the Survival Instincts legendary paragon node and the Ursine Strength passive to gain increased damage based on life difference and Bear Form. It primarily focuses on stacking synergistic benefits from Overpower, Poison damage, and Critical Strike. It also requires Calm Before the Storm effect to reduce the cooldown of Grizzly Rage.
3. Blessed Hammer Paladin
Blessed Hammer Paladin requires Disciple Oath to maintain Arbiter Form and trigger related buffs. Its unique equipment allows summoning more Blessed Hammers.
Key Equipment:
- Herald's Morningstar: Increases Blessed Hammer level and damage, with a chance to deal double damage and generate an additional basic hammer at the hit location.
- Argent Veil: In Arbiter Form, evasion automatically triggers the equipped core ability every certain distance traveled, increasing core ability damage during and after the event.
2. Blessed Shield Paladin
Blessed Shield Paladin build is somewhat similar to Captain America, requiring you to throw your shield to attack enemies. However, it's essentially a Thorns build. By stacking Thorns damage and utilizing Oath mechanic, it frequently throws Blessed Shields to deal massive damage.
Key Items:
- Ward of the White Dove: Increases Blessed Shield level, damage, double damage chance, and reduces cost.
- Aspect of the Juggernaut's Covenant: Grants bonus damage when consuming Resolve.
1. Judgment Paladin Build
The core of this build is to trigger Judgment effects as frequently as possible. Judicator Oath increases the damage taken from you each time you judge an enemy, stacking up to 80%. It can effectively handle large groups of enemies through chain explosions and also has a strong damage amplification effect on single targets.
Key Items:
- Aspect of the Judicator: Increases the damage and range of Judgment explosions.
- Aspect of the Golden Hour: Judgments deal double damage, and Judgment explosions can prematurely detonate other Judgments.
- Seal of the Second Trumpet: Increases Judgment damage, double damage chance, and has a chance to cause Judgment to explode twice.
The above are the current meta builds for the game. It's clear that Paladins are currently too strong and may be nerfed in the future.
