Diablo 4's open beta kicks off soon, so naturally you're gonna want to break it over your knee as quickly as possible. Luckily, thousands of players already spent last weekend's closed beta figuring out how to do just that. Players only had three days with Diablo 4 over the course of last weekend, and only had access to three of the game's five classes, but YouTube, Reddit and plenty of other places are already awash with clips and tales of borderline broken builds.
The king of them all has got to be the frost Sorcerer. Diablo 4's spell-slinging class has drawn criticism—including from Blizzard itself (opens in new tab)—for being a touch overpowered, and for good reason. Players have already managed to compile all sorts of guides to putting together an ice-wielding magic build that makes mincemeat of the beta's bosses.
Most of the builds revolve around the Sorcerer's Ice Blades ability, and particularly around spawning as many of them as possible at any one time. These frost Sorcerer builds (opens in new tab) from a Reddit user named Truckermouse, for instance, use the Ice Blades passive ability—which spawns an extra blade for every 20 seconds you spend in cooldown—to turn every combat encounter into some kind of nightmarish, icy blender.
When you combine that with a set of maxed-out active Ice Blades skill and the Ice Armor ability, you basically become an unkillable Mr. Freeze. If you don't believe me, here's another Reddit user—named unexpectedreboots (opens in new tab) —using a similar Ice Blades build to annihilate one of the beta's toughest bosses in 20 seconds.
So it's no wonder that Blizzard has explicitly called out the Sorcerer's frost abilities as needing a bit of a nerf. But don't worry, just because ice skills are easy to exploit doesn't mean you have to restrict yourself to a Sorcerer if you want to bulldoze your way through the beta. Inventive players have been making hyper-powered builds for each one of the classes in the Diablo 4 closed beta, even the Barbarian, who most players (and Blizzard) agree is sorely in need of a buff.
For example, here's a Barb build that managed to do about 26K damage in a single blow using personal buffs and an aspect (opens in new tab) that converts excess fury into damage, which should probably be banned by, like, Congress or something.
Barbarian 26k without crit/overpower from r/diablo4
Or if you do want to roll a Sorcerer but find frost too gauche to busy yourself with, you can head down the fire path, find a legendary that lets you summon multiple hydras, and, I don't know, just walk away from the game at that point. You've ascended.
Rogue's not left out either, although you'll have to master and juggle quite a few different skills, rather than just hitting the 'Make 'Em Cold' button on all your foes. By combining the right set of legendaries with skills like Heartseeker, Rapid Fire, Dash, Dark Shroud, and Shadow Imbuement, you can pretty much make anything and everything die very quickly. Here's a Rogue build that uses all that stuff plus the Combo Points specialization to output 2K damage with Rapid Fire, because why should your enemies be allowed dignity?
Those aren't the only overpowered builds players have come across in the closed beta, but they're the ones that are keeping me up at night. When the Diablo 4 open beta kicks off tomorrow (opens in new tab) at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET / 4 pm GMT, we'll all get access to the Necromancer and Druid classes, which weren't available in the closed beta. I suspect it won't be long before players have ginned up some absurd bone-based and vegan builds to supplement the ones they found last weekend.
