In Diablo 4 Season 3, a new dungeon called Vaults has been introduced, providing players with the opportunity to battle monsters while navigating through traps. Upon reaching the end of the dungeon, players can reap substantial rewards, including Diablo 4 Gold, items, and multiple chests containing Legendaries and Uniques.
This guide aims to highlight 3 crucial mistakes I encountered at the beginning of Season 3 and share strategies to consistently maximize rewards when running Vaults.
Vault Rewards
The most important thing first, why should I run this new dungeon Vault?
We can get up to all 3 rewards at the same time by running 1 Vault, 5 Grim Favors, Glyph XP and tons of Legendary Drops including Uniques.
By completing the designated Vault housing the whisper quest, players receive 5 Grim Favors. Opting for the nightmare version of the same Vault, identifiable through matching the name from the sigil, grants Glyph XP. Successfully evading trap damage allows players to unlock up to 4 chests at the Vault's conclusion, yielding 6-10 Legendary drops, with notably high probabilities of obtaining Unique drops.
But it is not easy to get all of them.
1. Stuck On Seasonal Questline
My initial misstep, or more accurately, an oversight by Blizzard, was the inability to access Vaults altogether.
Due to a bug in the Seasonal Questline, I find myself stuck and unable to interact with the Brazier, hindering any further progression in the Seasonal Questline. Initially, I hoped that acquiring Diablo 4 Items from the Seasonal Content would resolve the issue, but unfortunately, it appears to be a persistent and problematic bug.
After searching a bit, I fixed it by going back to the Character Selection menu, then the Options menu, Connect, Toggle the Disable Cross-Network Play, and going through the experience twice. Then, I can progress the Seasonal Questline and finally unlock the Vault access. Try this if you get stuck, too.
2. Pearls To Use
The second mistake to avoid is to use too many Pearls for the Zoltun’s Warding Buff, which is used to unlock the extra chests. Because there aren’t that many chests at the end of the dungeon.
The Pearls can be farmed by doing these seasonal content on the map. And each pearl can be transformed into 3 Zoltun’s Warding Buff stacks. I was once wearing 25 stacks of the buff. But there was only 1 extra chest requiring only 1 stack. What a disappointment and waste.
So I made this chart after running a few Vault runs. For example, if I run a Nightmare Vault in World Tier 3, I recommend using no more than 3 Pearls, which is 9 stacks to get the final 2 chests that requires 5 stacks, meaning that we can get hit by trap at most 4 times.
The good news is that getting hit by monsters would not reduce the stacks, just getting hit by traps will. But in general, getting hit by trap only 4 times throughout the whole Vault seems difficult. How do we achieve that?
3. Safe Spots In The Final Fight
This comes to my final tip on the safe spots in the final fight.
There are 2 parts of the Vault. The first part is where we go through some monster fights, then a trap location, then some monster fights with some traps.
To avoid trap damage as a Sorcerer, I recommend waiting a bit and using Teleport to skip the traps while keeping an eye on the ground for small traps.
The second part is where we need to fight monsters while avoiding a lot of traps together, before getting the chests that are usually the part I lose all my buff stacks.
After running a few Vaults, I noticed that there are usually 5 safe spots, 1 in the center and 4 on the side. We can teleport between the 5 spots to stay out of the trap attack range completely.
So, instead of fighting the monsters in the whole area, we fight them among these 5 spots and then rotate between them through Teleport. Dying is OK too as it doesn’t reduce the buff stacks at all.
I recommend to use 8 Pearls, as 24 stacks, for the World Tier 4 Nightmare Vault as to harvest all 4 chests as long as we take less than 9 hits from traps in the dungeon progression and the final fight.
Once we get more proficient in trap escaping, we can use just 7 or even 6 Pearls instead.
Final Thoughts
The Vault mechanics isn’t superb at its current state. The rewards are decent, but it is just too difficult to get everything.
In my opinion, Blizzard should triple the buff stacks from Pearls, like 1 Pearl equals to 9 stacks, in order to make it a slightly more enjoyable content for us players
Right now, running Vaults in Diablo 4 Season 3 feels like just getting punishment and too risky to get enough rewards.
