Diablo 4 Guide: Advanced Tooltips
These expanded stat breakdowns reveal how your skills scale, how damage multipliers interact, and what hidden mechanics are at play. If you want to push higher Nightmare Dungeons, climb the Paragon Boards efficiently, or optimize your build for endgame, learning how to read advanced tooltips is essential.
This guide will break down what advanced tooltips are, how to enable them, and how to use the information they provide to maximize your effectiveness in Diablo 4.
What Are Advanced Tooltips?
Advanced tooltips are expanded descriptions for skills, items, and modifiers. Instead of giving vague explanations like "Increases damage" or "Improves defense," they provide exact numbers, percentages, and conditions.
For example:
A basic tooltip might say: "Increases Fireball damage."
An advanced tooltip would clarify: "Fireball deals 20% increased damage, plus an additional 10% damage against Burning enemies."
This deeper layer of information allows you to:
Understand how abilities scale with stats.
Identify synergies between skills, gear, and Paragon nodes.
Optimize builds by choosing the best modifiers for your playstyle.
How to Enable Advanced Tooltips
By default, Diablo 4 hides advanced tooltips to avoid overwhelming new players. Luckily, enabling them is quick:
Open the Game Menu (press Escape on PC or equivalent on console).
Navigate to Options, Gameplay.
Scroll down until you see Advanced Tooltip Compare and Advanced Tooltip Information.
Enable both options.
Once activated, holding down a designated key (like Shift or Alt) while hovering over an item or skill will display the advanced version.
Why Advanced Tooltips Matter
Understanding advanced tooltips transforms how you approach builds. Here's why they're so important:
Clarity on Multipliers: Damage in Diablo 4 is layered across additive and multiplicative modifiers. Tooltips help you see exactly what contributes to total output.
Gear Optimization: Instead of blindly equipping a weapon with higher DPS, tooltips let you compare hidden bonuses like "Critical Strike Damage" or "Vulnerable Damage."
Skill Synergy: Advanced descriptions show when skills gain conditional bonuses (e.g., dealing extra damage against Frozen or Stunned enemies).
Stat Prioritization: You'll know whether stacking +Intelligence, +Dexterity, or Critical Chance actually benefits your current build.
Breaking Down Advanced Tooltip Information
Let's look at what you'll typically find when enabling advanced tooltips.
1. Skill Scaling
Skills show exactly how much damage they deal relative to weapon damage or stat multipliers. For example:
"Deals 45% weapon damage, increased by 20% per 10 Willpower."
This tells you that Willpower scaling is critical for that skill, shaping your gear and Paragon decisions.
2. Conditional Damage
Many abilities scale under specific conditions:
"Deals 30% more damage to Vulnerable enemies."
"Critical Strikes against Chilled enemies deal 50% more damage."
These conditions inform your playstyle-if your build can reliably apply Vulnerable, stacking that damage modifier becomes very powerful.
3. Damage Types
Advanced tooltips clarify elemental or physical damage sources. This matters because many bonuses are type-specific:
Fire skills scaling with Burning damage.
Shadow skills benefiting from damage-over-time modifiers.
4. Cooldowns and Resource Costs
Instead of vague phrases like "short cooldown," advanced tooltips give exact numbers:
"Cooldown: 8.5 seconds."
"Mana Cost: 25."
This precision helps with planning rotations and Diablo 4 Items management.
5. Multiplicative vs. Additive Modifiers
The difference between additive and multiplicative bonuses can drastically change damage. Advanced tooltips highlight these distinctions.
Additive: Adds directly to a pool of similar modifiers.
Multiplicative: Applies after all additive modifiers, creating much higher scaling.
Advanced Tooltip Compare
This setting expands item comparison beyond raw item power. When hovering over a new weapon or piece of gear, you'll see exactly how equipping it would affect your stats:
Gain or loss of Attack Power, Armor, and Resistances.
Changes to specific bonuses like "+Crit Chance" or "+Overpower Damage."
Exact numbers instead of vague green or red arrows.
This feature prevents costly mistakes, like swapping to a weapon with higher base DPS but losing crucial synergy bonuses.
How to Use Advanced Tooltips for Build Optimization
Now that you know how to enable and read advanced tooltips, here's how to use them effectively.
1. Identify Your Core Scaling Stats
Advanced tooltips reveal which stats matter most for your main skills. For example:
Sorcerers using Fireball will prioritize Intelligence and Burning multipliers.
Rogues using Penetrating Shot will focus on Dexterity, Critical Chance, and Vulnerable damage.
2. Prioritize Multiplicative Bonuses
Look for modifiers like:
"X% increased damage while Healthy."
"X% more damage against Stunned enemies."
Multiplicative scaling always provides greater long-term benefits than stacking flat increases.
3. Check Gear Against Skills
Instead of equipping an item just because it's rare or legendary, check how its modifiers align with your skill tooltips. A weapon boosting Shadow Damage is wasted on a Frost Sorcerer. You can also buy Diablo 4 materials to craft more gear to get the best.
4. Plan Around Conditions
If your advanced tooltips show major bonuses against Vulnerable enemies, make sure you have reliable ways to apply Vulnerable through skills, glyphs, or Paragon nodes.
5. Refine Paragon Board Choices
When climbing the Paragon system, advanced tooltips ensure you're picking nodes that actually scale your main skills. A generic "+Strength" node is useless for a Sorcerer, while "+Damage to Burning enemies" is perfect for a Fire build.
Common Mistakes Without Advanced Tooltips
Players who ignore advanced tooltips often fall into these traps:
Stacking Wrong Stats: Equipping gear with "+Thorns Damage" on a build that has no Thorns scaling.
Overvaluing Base DPS: Picking a weapon with higher item power but losing critical bonuses like Vulnerable damage.
Ignoring Conditional Synergies: Not realizing that their skill gains huge bonuses against Stunned enemies, but their build never applies Stun.
Mismanaging Cooldowns: Misjudging skill uptime because they didn't see the exact cooldown.
Example: Fire Sorcerer Using Advanced Tooltips
Let's apply this knowledge to a Fire Sorcerer build:
Fireball Tooltip: Shows "Deals 60% weapon damage + 20% damage to Burning enemies."
Gear Check: Advanced tooltips on items reveal bonuses like "+15% Burning Damage" or "+10% Damage Over Time."
Optimization: You prioritize gear that increases Burning and DoT multipliers. You avoid items boosting Cold or Lightning, since those don't benefit your build.
Result: By aligning stats with tooltips, your Fireball deals exponentially more damage, letting you clear higher-tier content.
Final Thoughts
Advanced tooltips in Diablo 4 aren't just a minor quality-of-life feature-they're a window into the game's hidden mechanics. By enabling them, you gain insight into exactly how your skills scale, which stats matter, and how to optimize your gear and Paragon choices.
Mastering advanced tooltips means mastering your character. And in Diablo 4, knowledge is just as deadly a weapon as a legendary sword or a perfectly rolled staff.
