Classes

Diablo 2 Resurrected has seven classes and every one of them is built the same way underneath: three skill trees, four attributes, and a stack of gear. What actually separates them is narrower than it looks. Two things are genuinely exclusive. One is a single equipment slot that no other class can fill. The other is the moment your character stops being the thing you levelled and becomes the thing you keep, which happens at a different level for every class.

This guide sorts our twenty class pages by those two things rather than by class name. Read the first half if you are choosing a class and want to know what it hands you that nobody else gets. Read the second half if you have already picked one and want to know when you are supposed to tear it down and rebuild it.

The slot nobody else can fill

Five of the seven classes get an item type reserved for them, and each of those five has a page here listing every one of them. The Assassin gets claws, which are her weapon. The Barbarian gets Primal Helms, the Druid gets pelts, the Sorceress gets orbs and the Paladin gets shields. What makes these worth chasing is not the raw defence number. It is that they roll bonuses to your own skills, and they are the only slot that can do it across all three of your trees at once.

All five pages run the same ladder: Normal, then Exceptional, then Elite, then the set piece. Four of them march in perfect step, five items per tier. The Assassin is the outlier and gets sevens instead: seven normal claws from the Katar up to the Scissors Katar, seven Exceptional from the Quhab to the Scissors Quhab, and seven Elite from the Suwayyah to the Scissors Suwayyah. She has half again as many bases to choose from as anyone else, which is worth knowing before you commit to hunting a specific one.

One tier does not line up. The Paladin’s Exceptional shelf lists four shields where every other tier on that page, and every tier on the other four pages, lists five. That is a gap in our list rather than a quirk of the game, and it is flagged for an editor rather than filled in here.

When the Elite versions actually start dropping

The five pages do not agree on this, and it is the one thing you would most want a straight answer to. The Assassin page says Elite items are found on Nightmare only. The Barbarian page narrows it to Act 4 or 5 of Nightmare. The Druid page says Nightmare and Hell. The Paladin page says Acts 3 to 5 of Nightmare onwards into Hell. The Sorceress page just says Nightmare difficulty is required. Treat late Nightmare as the earliest realistic point and Hell as where you will actually see them, and check the individual page for the base you want.

The Barbarian page is the only one that explains the two level numbers next to each item, and the distinction applies to all five. Item Level is the level chests and monsters have to reach before the item can drop at all. Clvl is the level your character has to reach before you can put it on. Its normal helms show how far apart those can sit: the Jawbone Cap needs character level 3 and 25 strength, and by the Avenger Guard at the top of the normal tier you are looking at level 18 and 65 strength.

Every class guide tells you to throw the character away

This is the pattern that runs through all seven leveling pages, and nobody says it out loud on any of them. The build that gets you through the early acts is not the build you finish with. Each page picks a level, tells you to spend a respec, and starts again with a different tree. Six of the seven do this. They disagree only on when.

Two things fall out of that table. The first is the spread: the Paladin is told to rebuild at 18 and the Amazon and Assassin not until 35, so the early game you actually play is nearly twice as long on some classes as on others. The second is that six of the seven pages stop at exactly level 75. That is not a cap on anything, it is the point our leveling guides consider you finished and hand you over to the build pages.

The Barbarian is the exception on both counts. His page never asks for a respec at all. It starts you on Mace Mastery and Double Swing at level 1, moves you onto Frenzy, then layers Warcries on top of what you already have. If you dislike rebuilding a character you have grown attached to, that is a real argument for the class, and the Frenzy Barbarian is the build that early skill order is walking you towards.

Rebuilding costs you something. The free respec is a once-per-difficulty reward from the Den of Evil, so you get three of them across a full run. The Necromancer page is the only one that does the arithmetic out loud, warning that you will spend at least two of your three before the character is finished. On the classes that respec twice, you arrive in Hell with one left.

Eighteen builds, six pages, one class left out

Six classes have a builds page in this bucket, and every one of those pages carries exactly three builds. That consistency is useful: whichever of the six you pick, you get a cheap starter build, a damage build and a specialist.

The Sorceress has no builds page of her own, and she is the one class that does not need one badly, because her leveling guide already ends on a full endgame spread. If you want her written up as a finished character rather than a levelling plan, the Meteor and Frozen Orb Sorceress sits in the builds bucket instead, and the wider builds guide covers her alongside everyone else.

The two pages that start from nothing

Everything above assumes you already know what the class does. Two classes have a page that does not assume that, walking the skill trees one at a time before any build is mentioned. How to Play Amazon takes her three trees in turn, Crossbow and Bow, Javelin and Spear, and Passive and Magic, and gives the level and the prerequisite for each skill, so you can see that Guided Arrow needs Magic, Cold and Multiple Shot behind it at level 18, and that Valkyrie needs six other passives before it opens at 30.

How to Play Barbarian does the same for Combat Masteries, Combat Skills and Warcries, and is worth reading even if you plan to play something else, because it is the clearest explanation we have of why a mastery is worth maxing before an attack skill. The other five classes do not have an equivalent page yet. For those, the leveling guide is the closest thing to an introduction, since it starts at level 1 and names the skills in the order you will unlock them.

Picking a class

If you want the shortest route to a working character, the Paladin rebuilds earliest and the Barbarian never rebuilds at all. If you want the most gear to hunt, the Assassin has seven bases per tier instead of five. If you want the class our own pages lean on hardest elsewhere, it is the Sorceress: our general tips recommend her as a first character outright, and she turns up again as the safest way to run Mephisto once you get there.

Whichever you pick, the class item is the piece to keep an eye out for from the first act, because it is the only slot that can add points to skills you have not even unlocked yet. Everything else in your kit is shared with six other classes.