Diablo 4 Skill Tree

Diablo 4 class Skill Trees

If you're looking for each class's Skill Tree (Open Beta data), see our individual class guides below:

• Barbarian Skills
• Druid Skills
• Necromancer Skills
• Rogue Skills
• Sorcerer Skills

Understanding the Diablo 4 Skill Tree design

Skill Points per level

When a character levels up, it's given 1 Skill Point to invest in the Skill Tree. This continues until the player reaches Level 50, at which time the player begins the Paragon Board end-game system. Also, note that players can receive a few extra Skill Points from the Renown System.

A player's Skill Point balance is shown in the upper-left corner of the Skill Tree menu. Players can choose to spend the Skill Points immediately or bank them, but, because the cost to respec Skills is so low early on, it typically makes sense to spend them immediately.

Skill Tree clusters

Each Diablo 4 class has a Skill Tree consisting of 7 Skill clusters. These clusters are connected in a top-to-bottom line. Players begin at the top of the tree, with the Basic Skills cluster, and, as they invest Skill Points into the tree, unlock the more powerful clusters below, like Ultimate Skills. Here's the series of clusters that all classes' Skill Trees follow:

Skill Tree nodes

Skill clusters are composed of Skill, Upgrade, and Passive nodes. Each of the three nodes has a unique shape to help with visual classification:

Skill nodes

• Node shape: Square
• Max points to invest: 5
• Directly branching off it: 1 Upgrade node
• Prerequisites: Must have its cluster unlocked with the necessary amount of invested Skill Points

Upgrade nodes

• Node shape: Diamond
• Max points to invest: 1
• Directly branching off it: 2 further Upgrade nodes, which the player can choose only 1. The exception is Ultimate Skills, which only have 1 further Upgrade node.
• Prerequisites: Must have at least 1 Skill Point invested in preceding Skill or Upgrade node

Passive nodes

• Node shape: Circle
• Max points to invest: 3
• Directly branching off it: Sometimes other Passive nodes. The exception is Key Passives, which are always standalone.
• Prerequisites: Must have its cluster unlocked with the necessary amount of invested Skill Points. For connected Passives, must have at least 1 Skill Point invested in preceding Passive node

Respec cost system

Players can easily refund points from a Skill they've invested in by right-clicking the Skill's icon in the Skill Tree. The Gold cost to refund a point from each Skill is listed at the bottom of the Skill's description:

Refund All Skill points

If a player wishes to completely do a Skill reset, they can click the "Refund All" button. While this will likely be cost-prohibitive later in the game, players will be using it more in the early game.

Early game respec cost

The Diablo 4 respec system was designed to be extremely forgiving in early game, which allows players to experiment with different builds. Although this could change, in Open Beta, the cost to respec a single Skill point was free up to around Level 10. Hitting the "Refund All" button at Level 25 cost 2,800 Gold.

Late game respec cost

As players get into the mid and late levels, Blizzard said that it wants a character's Skills to start to "cement," meaning that they become much more expensive to refund. Around Level 50, the cost will be so high that a player may think about creating a fresh charcter instead if they want to dramatically change their build:

Skill Tags & tag search feature

Although Blizzard has done its best to organize the Diablo 4 talents on the class trees as sensibly as possible, there's still a lot of Skills to manage. To alleviate this, each Skill will have tags that classifies its characteristics, like damage and casting type:

These tags integrate with a search bar in the upper-right corner of the Skill Tree menu, where a player can input a tag or keyword (e.g., Bleeding or Cold) and find all related skils:

Blizzard's philosophy on Skills: Synergistic Skills > items

Diablo 4 differs from Diablo 3 in that a character's build derives its power moreso from wise Skill choice than powerful items [1]:

Blizzard also wants Diablo 4 Skills to interact with each other more, so the Skills you choose earlier in the game have an impact on the power of your later Skill choices. This Skill "inheritance" or progression system harkens back to Diablo 2:

Evolution of Diablo 4's Skill Tree

Blizzard admits that arriving at the current Skill Tree system has been a long journey, which has taken at least four major revisions:

March 2023

Beyond UI polishing and the shuffling around of Skills, the Skill tree mechanics used in March 2023's Open Beta closely resembled those from October 2022.

October 2022

This iteration of the Skill Tree was a sprawling, but organized web of interconnected nodes. It's similar to Path of Exile's approach, but less complex.

September 2020

This iteration was the most wild -- the Skill Tree was a literal tree, with Skill and Upgrade nodes making up the tree's branches, and Passives representing the tree's roots. While the idea was novel and it looked cool, the tree form could have led to some confusion and overlap with the Tree of Whispers from the Whispers of the Dead end-game system. Also, the branch and root structure of the tree may have made it more challenging to sensibly group related Skills.

February 2020

At this stage in the game's development, Blizzard hadn't started using different shaped nodes to visually separate Upgrades and Passives. Given the much smaller scale of Skills shown on the tree above, Upgrades and Passives may not have even been in the game at this point, or were shown on another menu.

November 2019

The first incarnation of the Diablo 4 talent tree, shown during BlizzCon 2019, resembles the Skill Trees of previous Diablo games: allocate a Skill Point and unlock something directly under it. We're not sure what the arrows are at the bottom of the tree, but they were short-lived.