Diablo 4: My Top 10 War Plan Tree Upgrades

Note that this is strictly an opinion piece. This has nothing to do with optimizing your activities for what you need during your journey. Instead, having gone through several characters in Diablo 4’s season 13, I feel reasonably confident in distilling my experience into a top 10 list. It really is more about my play style rather than what I ought to be doing. In addition to that, I want to add where I felt the developers did a good to great job and hope that they can see this post as a signal for where they can continue to flesh out more of these upgrades.

1. Helltides / Hellmouth – In general, I’m a huge fan of Chaos Portals in Helltides and this is where things start to take off in terms of adding a dynamic layer to the game. In particular, Chaos Portals are what I consider a good form of gambling in the Forrest Gump type of manner with the “Life’s a box of chocolates, Forrest. You never know what you’re gonna get” type of philosophy backing it. One of the best outcomes I’ve ran into was receiving a large number of uniques where one was a build enabling type that I had a hard time farming on a certain character. So this maybe confirmation bias but I still feel excited whenever one of these portals spawns at any difficulty in a Helltide.
2. Lair Bosses / Grigoire’s Gambit – This is a perfect example of how moving the claustrophobic setting of the lair boss encounter into the open world is fantastic especially for characters that need to farm a boss. It’s an instance of efficiency where you have a good chance of the boss showing up merely by opening a Tortured Gift in a Helltide. Although this spawn isn’t the exact same, you can still receive loot from Grigoire’s table as well as potentially having random help appear because of the open world nature of this encounter. The only annoying bit are the electrified spawns that appear after you kill him. I think you can get up to two which means increased potential for loot.
3. The Pit / Pit Butcher – This is a great modifier because if you encounter the Butcher early enough in a Pit run, you don’t have to waste additional time. Last night, I had killed the Butcher spawn without realizing it and only knew something happened when the protection bubble appeared over me.
4. The Pit / Choron’s Haste – This upgrade (and more of Choron’s related upgrades) offers increased chances to upgrade your Glyphs. These upgrades make The Pit far less painful than the previous versions. I think I’ve managed to get up to 9 upgrades in a single setting. If you have a significantly high Pit tier, you might be able to get a huge chunk of your Glyph upgraded.
5. Tree of Whispers / Corrupted Roots – I like that they re-added the idea of Corrupted Roots and Headrotten. I dislike that they made the mechanism an item you plant from your inventory though. I think these should be auto-spawned randomly in your journey in the world. That would make the general world encounters more dynamic. Like if these appeared during a World Boss encounter, it would add a new dimension for that fight. Also, while traveling from place to place, if these spawned or if a region suddenly became a Headrotten/Corrupted Root type of zone, then it makes exploring non-Helltide regions much more interesting. So the idea is right but the implementation needs more work. Also, it would be cool if they added the Witch Powers and/or Occult gems back in this manner. That way, there’s a clear benefit for farming this type of upgrade. But this is the type of thing I want to see for re-integrating old season mechanics. They just need to bring back old season rewards to compliment this type of mechanism.
6. Nightmare Dungeons – Altar of Avarice – I like the addition of these Altars in dungeons. The only issue I have is their visibility. I would have added the Greed is Good upgrade except that the portal is too rare of a spawn and/or is bugged.
7. Lair Bosses / Two by Two – The general idea of the Nemesis lair is pretty cool since you can get additional rewards. I would have ranked the other ones higher if the chances were better and the 30 second timer hadn’t been added. Again, I mostly am emphasizing the idea not the implementation here. I do think that these arenas should be bigger though to invite more chaos with other elements like mobs that get randomly spawned inside or having other events.
8. Tree of Whispers / Material Wealth – I feel like I’m constantly material starved. So having a place dedicated to obtaining material rewards is really great. This is a great option once you’re starting to focus on crafting gear after deciding on a build and getting reasonable bases.
9. Undercity / Gutter Filth – To be frank, I’m not a huge fan of Undercity but this is one of the few choices that isn’t bad to improve your ranking quicker.
10. The Pit / Choron’s Blessing – The other Choron’s upgrade that I think is a must have, at least early on when you’re pushing your Glyphs. It’s not fancy but anything to get out of the Pit is a good choice.

As you can see, most of the stuff I prefer are things that bring more life to the same areas I’m constantly in or adding a QoL layer such as the Pit upgrades. The other nodes are things I’m still working towards like the one for Helltides that add Profane Mindcages. I think if there were more nodes that cater towards a specific type of play list that can be curated, saved and/or adjusted then this system would be a little less clunky than what it is. But the overall implementation is a decent enough start.

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