Diablo IV‘s Nightmare Dungeon is a fantastic activity one can do once you’ve experienced the endgame stage. It’s by far the best thing you can do to progress your character mainly because it rewards you access to upgrading your Paragon glyphs. And of course, you get some potentially good loot which is always a nice thing to have in these types of games. However, there is a curse to it, and that is dealing with the dungeon’s negative affixes.
There are many different types of effects that Diablo IV will do to challenge the player. Some of them are certainly fun to do, and some of them are absolutely not worth taking. For this article, I want to talk about seven negative affixes you should avoid when doing a Nightmare Dungeon.
Not only they are going to slow you down, but they can potentially kill you which will hurt your chances to finishing the dungeon because there is a lives system. If you’re playing Hardcore mode, then your character will be dead and you have to start from scratch again. I will also be ranking these negatives affixes from being bad, but somewhat tolerable depending on the dungeon to an absolute skip.
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Armor Breakers
Armor in Diablo IV is extremely important for survivability. I would say it’s by far the most important defensive stat that you want to keep up to survive the harder content. The fact that these monsters can reduce your armor by 35% is certainly a problem if you’re trying to do dungeons that might be higher level than yours. Luckily, it is only related to the range mobs that can do this effect on you. Depending on the dungeon, it might be worth it to bite the bullet every now and then, but it is certainly a modifier I don’t want to see when I find a Nightmare Sigil. I’d say it’s okay to have the Armor Breakers affix in your dungeon if you’re handling content that is slightly lower level or being the same level as you.
Sooner or later, we won’t have to travel to our dungeons while mounting a horse. The developers plan on making the Nightmare Dungeon accessible towards teleportation.
Monster Life
I would generally avoid monsters that have increased health. The negative affix is fairly self explanatory. The hostile targets will have 30% more health, and they will become harder to kill. From my experience, it also seems like it affects the elite packs too.This can totally slow you down if you’re doing dungeons that might be more challenging than others like Aldurwood or Kor Dragan Barracks. Sometimes, it might be worth it take a dungeon with this modifier as long you know the mobs you’re fighting aren’t so threatening where the 30% health increased can have an effect on your survivability factor. But overall, every time this negative affix appears on my Nightmare Sigil, I get rather disappointed.
Monster Vulnerable Resist
If you’ve been playing Diablo IV deep enough in the endgame stage, you should know vulnerability is an important stat to damage dealing. The fact that this negative affix makes monsters being resistant towards the duration by 60% is enough reason to make you not want to activate your sigil. As a Sorcerer player, this is certainly an absolute salvage if I see this because I heavily rely on my Frost Nova ability to deal massive amount of damage. For some other classes, I could see this modifier might be worth taking, but at the end of the day, this effect overall just makes Nightmare Dungeons a slog to go through.
Vulnerable damage is extremely important for Sorcerer players.
Monster Critical Resist
As someone who’s been playing Diablo IV on World Tier 4: Torment difficulty a lot, I can say that having high critical strike damage or percentage is probably the most important factor for damage dealing. The fact that this modifier reduces to 60% is absurd, and it will certainly make dungeons not that fun to go through. Every time you see this modifier, I would say it’s an immediate salvage. Just don’t go through the hassle of having to fight large hordes of monsters and you know you’re critical strikes won’t perform as well.
Blood Blister
This negative affix is easily one of my least favorites to do and that is because Diablo IV can sometimes be chaotic with the heavy amount of density that it throws to the player. Due to that nature, the Blood Blister comes to play efficiently. When you kill an enemy, it spawns this fleshy bubble object and when it explodes, it deals massive amount of damage. The damage is so severe it can nearly kill you even if you have a lot of health. I haven’t tested how much damage it does in a dungeon that’s massively higher level than you, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it one shots you. Sometimes, the action is so chaotic that you don’t even realize a Blood Blister was spawned, and that means when you’re running a dungeon with negative affix, you have a high chance of dying. Skip any dungeon the moment you see this affix on your Nightmare Sigil.
When you are getting overwhelmed, Blood Blister is absolutely terrirfying!
Backstabbers
This one is also another big skip. The Backstabbers affix is probably the worst modifier to have especially if you bump into those areas where the game forces you to fight an onslaught of enemies. This is where the Backstabbers modifier comes to play. Enemies do a ridiculous amount of damage to you if they hit you from behind, and it is certainly not worth doing a dungeon that has this negative affix. Also keep in mind, on World Tier 4 difficulty, enemies hit harder and if you’re still doing your Nightmare Dungeons on World Tier 3 and you think it’s bad, it’s much worse on World Tier 4.
Empowered Elites (Cold Enchanted)
Without a doubt, the Cold Enchanted affix is by far the one that every player should avoid. I believe most players can agree that this negative affix is certainly not a fun one because there is no way a player can completely be immune to being frozen like in Diablo II. Keep in mind, on World Tier 4, the density of mobs is greater, so that means there is a higher chance of dealing with more elite packs. If you ever bump into multiple elite packs with the Cold Enchanted affix, you know how hard hitting they can be and they can also freeze you permanently. In a Nightmare Dungeon where it’s designed to be tougher than the standard dungeons, you simply don’t want to spawn your boss packs to have the ability to do high damage and freeze you.
Those are my seven negative affixes that I believe every Diablo IV player should avoid. Some of them might be worth it to do depending on the dungeon’s Tier levels or the actual dungeons you’re fighting. With that mentioned, these are the negative affixes that you shouldn’t go through if you want to run Nightmare Dungeons many times.
