In the endgame of Diablo 4 you are tasked with a number of things, all of which can be considered "fun" depending on the kind of person you are. The idea in the endgame is to continue to up your powers until you have the best possible gear and then, well I don't know what you would do but it probably involves kicking the absolute crap out of everything the game has to offer in the season.
One thing that you are going to need a lot of in order to upgrade your equipment is a crafting material called Obducite, and while there are a number of ways to get it, just like in any game, some ways are faster than others.
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Any experts out there that are reading this please note: This is information from my own personal experience. I do not claim that this is in fact the best and fastest way, statistically speaking. I don't have a masters degree in Diablo, I am a normie casual player that only knows what I have seen on screen and experienced :P If you want to do that path that is statistically fastest, you can find that here. For me, I want the game to be fun, not a chore. So i made my own way.
So you can get obducite a lot of different ways, but the path that it is actually a major feature of is running Nightmare dungeons that are accessible by keys that you will randomly find in endgame. Once you have a few, most of the time completing nightmare dungeon gives you a key to another nightmare dungeon a the completion.
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The really cool thing about nightmare dungeons is that if you have the key in your inventory, it gives you the option to just warp there instead of going through the rather senseless forcing you to walk there or ride your horse through trash mobs. I don't know if it was always this way or not, but it is certainly convenient.
Nightmare dungeons are very similar to regular dungeons, in fact other than a few modifiers that are meant to mix things up, they are basically exactly the same. The big difference is that mobs, especially elite mobs, are much more likely to drop obducite.
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Most nightmare runs have final bosses but not all of them do. The boss drops more of it than normal elites, but the boss-less dungeons have more elites so I would imagine that the total drop of what you are there for in the first place is a lot more likely.
Now here is where the filthy-casual in me comes out. According to Blizzard's own information, the liklihood of drops that you actually want increases as you upgrade the difficulty level
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This should be pretty obvious that it would work that way. But here is the deal for me. I am able to complete a Torment 4 dungeon, but it takes strategy and a lot of time, like half an hour. For all that I will get around 1000 obducite at the end of it and for the most part, trash gear that I don't even bother to look at anymore.
However, I can run the same nightmare dungeon on Torment 2 in about 4 minutes and unless I decided to abandon the controller mid boss fight, there is zero chance of dying or even needing to hit most enemies more than once. These runs will give me around 200-400 obducite. For me, the decision is a pretty easy one to make if I am just lying on the sofa and grinding for materials.
Is this fun? Well, that's a matter of perspective. I really enjoy upgrading my gear and there is no other way to do it other than this. So for me, a filthy casual, going at the dungeon in an easier way is the right way to go. For the most part the equipment drops are extremely unliklely to be good on any of the Torment levels, including Torment 4 in nightmare dungeons.
You do theoretically have a greater chance at getting some ancestral items, but honestly, it doesn't happen very often even at Torment 4 level. For me, the ONLY times I have gotten a mystic item drop was at Torment 1 in a boss fight.
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This gear makes me crazy-fast once I stop attacking, and none of the enemies can see me. Great for escaping or just skipping entire portions of dungeons.
I defeated the boss that dropped this item by simply activating my ultimate skill and stood near him and melted his health bar. It took less than 1 second. When I tried to play that same boss on Torment 3 it took many minutes and I ended up using all of my potions to survive it.
So in summary, gathering obducite for a filthy casual goes like this
- find out what level of torment you can endure normal play in - like a level that is challenging just for you to survive.
- step it back 2 notches
- lather, rinse, repeat
And just for added good measure use a potion that gives you a 5-8% xp bonus. You should have dozens of them by the time you get to the level I am at.
Happy hunting, you fellow filthy casuals!