Race to World First Softcore Interview: rob2628

World First 100: rob2628

After hours and hours of grinding, rob2628 has finally reached level 100 on his Barbarian on Diablo 4. Only sleeping once, he and his group blasted through the leveling process on stream in order to be the world's first

Leveling Strategy

In our interview with rob2628, he told us he was quite surprised at how leveling was much faster than he expected. Playing in a group is much faster than playing solo, but the new strategy they had found made things really speed up. The Cairn Downfall dungeon in Scosglen was the perfect dungeon for him and his group to farm. There are three pedestals that you must activate in the dungeon. So, they would divide and conquer to blast through the dungeon as fast as possible. Since XP is shared throughout the whole dungeon, regardless of your distance from your party members, splitting up in the dungeon is the most efficient way to grind for XP.

Rob’s Leveling Build:

Lvl 1-8

Lvl 8-55 (respec to Rend, two-hand axe technique)

Notable Aspects:

• Edgemaster’s Aspect: Due to high fury generation, this aspect is a nice damage increase and should be placed on your amulet. This can be found in the Oldstones in Scosglen.

• Aspect of Echoing Fury: This aspect is reliable for the majority of your Fury generation. This causes your shouts to generate fury per second while they are active. You can find this in the Sirocco Caverns in Kehjistan.

• Aspect of Numbing Wrath: Due to high Fury generation, the Aspect of Numbing Wrath will grant you Fortify based on how much you generate past the Maximum Fury value. This can be found in Heathen’s Keep in Hawezar.

Lvl 55-75

Putting the Build Together:

Paragon:

• Starting Board

• Weapons Master

• Warbringer
  

Lvl 75+

The skill tree will not change, but we will be hunting for some Unique items to really make this build shine.

Paragon:

• Decimator

• Bone Breaker

• Flawless Technique

Live Nerfs

During leveling, rob2628 noticed that his Gohr’s Devastating Grips unique stopped working. The item had been disabled and Blizzard was pushing live changes to the game to make some balance changes. During this, Barbarians took a hard hit. According to Rob, these changes were very noticeable. His Gohr’s stopped working and his shout cooldowns were not resetting properly. This started to slow him and his group down quite a bit. Here are the nerfs from the Blizzard Patch Notes.

Legendary Aspect Changes

• Bold Chieftain's Aspect

  • Cooldown reduction per Nearby enemy reduced from 2.7-5.4 seconds to 1.0-1.9 seconds.
  • Maximum Cooldown reduction from 12 to 6 seconds.
• Aspect of the Dire Whirlwind

  • Increased Critical Strike Chance per second reduced from 5-10% to 3-8%.
  • Maximum Critical Strike Chance bonus reduced from 20-40% to 9-24%.

Item Changes

• Gohr's Devastating Grips

  • Explosion damage gained from Whirlwind reduced from 50-70% to 16-26%.
  • Damage against wreckable objects no longer increases explosion damage.
  • Explosion damage is only increased by the first 100 hits of Whirlwind.

Closing Thoughts:

Rob said he had an amazing time participating in this race. He looks forward to future races in Season 1 and spoke about his excitement towards Blizzard officially adding Leaderboards to help push the competitive aspect of the game. He said that his next plans are to play his Barb for a few more days before switching over to blasting on a Sorcerer.