Diablo 4 is a game about gaining a numerical edge over your foes in every way that you can. Small upgrades on existing gear, minor stat boosts from Altars of Lilith, and even nodes on the Paragon board all go towards this singular purpose: turning your humble wanderer, by degrees, into the most efficient killing machine known to man, or demon, kind.
Elixirs go a long way towards achieving this goal as well. They're easy to forget about since you usually need to craft them yourself, and they're tucked away in an easy-to-miss menu, but the experience gains and other benefits they offer can pay dividends throughout a grind session. Here are the most potent potions in Diablo 4's medicine cabinet.
10 Assault Elixir
Attack speed is one of the most important stats in Diablo 4. Not only does it increase your overall damage by letting you cram more attacks into each fleeting second, but it also raises the regularity of on-hit effects. For some strategies, such as vulnerable-focused Rogue builds, raising your attack speed can let you bring down foes exponentially faster.
The Assault Elixir lets you do just that. Depending on the potency, it can raise your attack speed by up to 20 percent. Combined with passive skills and gear buffs, you can spam your favourite moves with impunity and clear out dungeons more efficiently than ever before.
9 Iron Skin Elixir
RPGs often feature a bit of dissonance when it comes to item names. A rare sword called Deathbringer might only be able to scratch late-game foes, while a humble Quick Knife could be used in a game-breaking combo that destroys the same foes in no time. Luckily for you, the Iron Skin Elixir bucks this trend.
This powerful Elixir does exactly what it says on the tin: makes you nigh-impervious to damage. You’re still very much mortal, so don’t let the extra protection go to your head, but if you play as normal, you’ll be able to take on challenges several levels above you and survive even the most severe misplays with health to spare.
8 Precision Elixir
Unlike many RPGs, where critical hits are a rare treat that can turn the tides of a battle in a pinch, in Diablo 4, they’re a staple part of many builds and frequently occur multiple times a second in late-game scenarios. Some active and passive skills rely entirely on regular critical hits to function, which makes the Precision Elixir a must-have for your apothecary arsenal.
This Elixir raises not only your critical hit rate but the damage boost that your critical hits deal when compared to regular hits. This works particularly well with high attack rate characters and can result in some truly brutal damage when the red mist clears, and you can see the dungeon floor clearly again.
7 Expertise Elixir
No matter which of Diablo 4’s classes you choose to play as you’ll have a core resource to manage at some point in your quest. Be it Mana for Sorcerers, Fury for Barbarians, or Spirit for Druids; you’ll come to rely on this resource, sloshing around in the right-side orb on your screen, for your class’s powerful core skills.
The Expertise Elixir makes this much, much easier. By reducing your resource costs by up to 20 percent, it lets you get a lot more use out of your valuable core skills and sustain ongoing ones, such as Barbarian’s Whirlwind, for 20 percent longer. It’s a great Elixir and a real game-changer in many builds.
6 Slaying Elixirs
Sun Tzu said, “Know your enemy.” Baden-Powell said, “Be prepared.” Two great maxims for life and two principles that you can apply to your time with Diablo 4 through proper use of the Slaying Elixirs. These are available in four fun flavours: Beast. Demon, Man, and Undead, each offering a significant damage boost against enemies of particular types.
Using these well requires a bit of advanced scouting, as you’ll need to know the types of foes you’ll be facing in the dungeon or area you’re heading to in order to pick the right one for the job. This makes them ideal for the late game, where you’ll largely be running Nightmare Dungeons you’ve conquered before and will therefore know which Slaying Elixir you’ll need to drink to take the edge off.
5 Iron Barb Elixir
Thorns are one of Diablo 4’s more interesting mechanics. Since they require the player to be taking frequent hits to be effective, they’re largely restricted to the realms of the game’s tankier classes, such as the Barbarian and Druid. With such classes, however, the extra damage these Thorns can provide can shred groups of weaker mobs around you into bloody confetti.
The Iron Barb Elixir gives you a nice coating of Thorns and a generous layer of armour to go with it. This is a great combination and can even allow squishier classes like the Rogue or Necromancer to get in on the Thorns fun, if only for half an hour. This is the ideal drink right before a spider-infested dungeon, such as the Blind Burrows.
4 Elixir Of Fortitude
There are a lot of stats to worry about in Diablo 4, and wherever you go online, you’ll find evangelists of a different one. In some corners, damage is all that matters; in others, it’s the ability to apply vulnerable and land critical hits. No matter what you believe, however, the simple truth is that without a good health stat, your character won’t be around for very long.
The Elixir of Fortitude helps hugely in this regard. Offering up to a 30 percent increase in your maximum life, it gives you a lot more leeway to make mistakes, turning what would be frustrating deaths into exhilarating close shaves. Since the increase is percentage-based, it works best with characters already well-endowed in the health department, but all can benefit from a swig of this fine Elixir.
3 Third Eye Elixir
It may be hard to see in the mess of numbers and particles that Diablo 4’s battles tend to descend into later on, but you actually dodge attacks completely fairly frequently in the game. Your dodge chance is based on your Dexterity stat, which will be particularly high if you’re playing as a Rogue, but you should have a solid base no matter your class.
Raising your Dexterity is a reliable, if expensive, way to get more dodges in, but alternatively, you can chug a Third Eye Elixir. This cuts out the middleman and gives you raw dodge chance: up to 10 percent of it too, depending on the potency. For dungeons where you expect to be taking frequent small hits, this can save you a lot of pain and suffering.
2 Elixir Of Combatant Fortune
While they sound similar to Critical Hits and functionally act very similar as well, Lucky Hits in Diablo 4 are actually a completely separate entity. Certain skills will have a chance to trigger additional effects when you land a Lucky Hit, the chance of which is usually based on the skill itself.
There are some nasty nested maths to do to fully understand the system, but for our purposes, all you need to know is that the Elixir of Combatant Fortune makes Lucky Hits more likely. If you run a build that can benefit from this, then chug one of these bad boys to load the dice in your favour.
1 Elixirs Of Resistance
While elemental resistances in Diablo 4 may not be particularly effective when applied to gear items, getting a large chunk of extra resistance from an Elixir feels much, much better. That’s exactly what the Elixirs of Resistance offer: an up to 40 percent resistance boost to either fire, cold, poison, lightning, or shadow damage.
The wide range on offer here lets you specialise, dulling the edge of cold damage in icy caves or turning down the heat on fire damage when running Helltides, to give but two examples. Use them wisely, and these colourful cocktails will ensure you live to grind another day.