Is it possible to complete the Diablo 4 campaign without attacking enemies, AKA, a pacifist run on a brand new character without any Renown? The answer is no.
The main reason for this is that starting with Diablo 4, there’s now a prologue section that you are locked into. I spent a good couple hours trying to beat it without attacking anything, but it will just not happen.
Initially, the plan for this challenge was to build a Barbarian, stack a bunch of Thorns on her, and then boom. That’s it. Thorns is a passive ability that reflects a certain percentage amount of damage back to an enemy. We use this ability to let enemies use their own aggressiveness against us. And that way, we can gain experience and get through the campaign.
In Diablo 2, the common way to start a pacifist run is to leave the camp, go out, and find a bunch of super chests, which are chests that drop more items than the normal ones. After selling enough items, we can then go to charci the Blacksmith and keep resetting her inventory until she has an attacker take damage of X or Thorn’s item and then we’re up and running. Now, enemies can attack us and will deal damage to themselves by gaining us XP.
The problem with Diablo 4 is that there’s no way to gain an item that has thorns in this prologue. Thorns in Diablo 4 are on four types of Diablo 4 Items: amulets, chest armor, pants, and shields.
In the prologue for Diablo 4, there is a vendor. But he only sells weapons and white common ones on top of that. White common items don’t give additional affixes, like blue Magic or yellow Rare items do.
Alternatively, none of the chests either inside or outside the prologue dungeon will drop blue Magic items until we are at least level 4. Inside the dungeon, there are four barrels in this big room but no experience is gained if these barrels kill the enemies.
Regardless of whether or not they set the barrel on fire or if we dash into the barrel, which, in my opinion, dodging into it would kind of make the run that count anyway since we’re causing the barrel to explode directly.
Since there is no way to level up, there’s no way to get any magical items. Not quite. There is a special skeleton in the first area of the dungeon that drops Magic items. The problem is we don’t have a way to kill him. Even if we use all four barrels on him, he still has way too much health to be taken down. But even regardless of that, for some reason, this monster only drops blue Magic gloves, which isn’t one of the four items that can have Thorn affixes.
There’s a boss at the end of the dungeon. And since we can’t damage it in any way, there’s just no way to get out of this prologue section. Since we can’t gain any items that have Thorns on them and since we can’t get to level 8 to learn Outburst for the Barbarian, unfortunately, this run ends before can even start walking. And this was done with a character that has the plus 68 stats from the Altars of Lilith increasing her overall armor, which would have made this even easier.
Also Read: Diablo 4: Why Necromancer Is The Most Powerful Class In Season 1? - Reasons And Some Analysis
So, we know a brand new character won’t be able to get past the prologue. But what about a second character that is inheriting the skill points because of a previous character’s Renown?
This will easily allow us to start building Thorns on our Barbarian and get past the prologue and it was working. Bosses were getting cleared even if it was taking 10 minutes to chip their health bars down. And they will also drop some Diablo 4 Gold and items.
Unfortunately, our next roadblock came towards the end of Act 1 while pursuing Lilith in the central chamber where we have to destroy these Tumors of Hatred to get to the next area.
In Diablo 2, to get past doors or these kinds of obstacles, normally enemies can attack them. But in Diablo 4 there is none to be found in this area. We even have to leap from one platform to another, making it impossible for an enemy to follow us, even if one were to come all the way down here.
So, even with the Renown, this is where our pacifist run comes to an end. But even though the run stopped, there I did keep going all the way through Act 1 and was able to beat the boss without attacking.
So, if we did tweak the rule again, possibly the game could be completed without attacking other enemies.
