Bounties
Last Updated:September 14, 2023|Change Log
Introduction
While playing in Adventure Mode, you’ll be able to hunt for bounties. Bounties are special missions to kill a specific enemy, clear an area, or complete an event. To see the available bounties in each Act, press the “M” key (PC) to bring up the world map. Waypoints with nearby bounty objectives will be marked with a yellow “!”, and clicking on one of them will teleport you there. Completing a bounty will reward all players in the same Act with small amount of Gold and XP. Completing all 5 bounties in an Act and talking to Tyrael in the town will reward all players in game with a Large Horadric Chest. The chest will be automatically deposited in your inventory; be careful: if you don't have any space, it will drop on the ground under your feet.
Large Horadric Chest
Large Horadric Chests contain an assortment of loot, which depends on the game difficulty and on the Act in which the bounties were completed. Apart from normal items and materials, you can find unique bounty-only Legendaries, that can not be obtained in any other way. You also receive a number of Bounty Materials which are necessary to craft Legendary and Set items, and use some of the Kanai's Cube recipes.
On Torment 16, a Large Horadric Chests contains:
- 1,640,000 Gold
- 135 Blood Shards
- 90 Reusable Parts
- 92 Arcane Dust
- 35 Veiled Crystals
- 6 Death's Breaths
- 22 Bounty Materials
- 1-4 Marquise Gems
- 1-2 random items of Rare and above quality
- 2 bounty-only Legendary items
Bounty Item Rewards
Act 1
Act 1 Bounty Material is Khanduran Rune. Act 1 items are themed around Leoric, the Skeleton King.
Item | Usage |
Mad Monarch's Scepter | Useless |
Ring of Royal Grandeur | Core item in many builds. Due to its poor guaranteed rolls, it's almost never equipped, so you only need one to extract its legendary power. |
Pauldrons of the Skeleton King | Sometimes finds home in Legacy of Dreams builds, when there's nothing better available. |
Golden Gorget of Leoric | Useless |
Sanguinary Vambraces | Useless |
Act 2
Act 2 Bounty Material is Caldeum Nightshade. Act 2 items are fancy looking items with green and purple color scheme.
Item | Usage |
Coven's Criterion | Can be useful as a defensive item in high Block Chance builds, but typically outclassed by other options. |
Gloves of Worship | Sometimes used in T16 builds and also in support builds that utilize Ahavarion, Spear of Lycander. |
Cloak of Deception | Useless |
Illusory Boots | Used in a number of builds, most often support or Legacy of Dreams builds. |
Act 3
Act 3 Bounty Material is Arreat War Tapestry. Act 3 items are "desert-camo" type items with snake ornaments, named after seven deadly sins.
Item | Usage |
Burst of Wrath | Useless |
Boots of Disregard | Useless |
Pride's Fall | Used in some T16 and Bounty builds, as well as some DPS builds that rely on shields. |
Envious Blade | Has potential to be used in one-shot type T16 builds. Currently useless. |
Avarice Band | Must have item for any T16 build. |
Insatiable Belt | Useless |
Overwhelming Desire | Can be used in support builds or on the Follower, but legendary effect is limited to 1 target at a time and doesn't affect Rift Guardians. |
Act 4
Act 4 Bounty Material is Corrupted Angel Flesh. Act 4 doesn't have any specific items and instead it can gives you random items from any other Acts.
Act 5
Act 5 Bounty Material is Westmarch Holy Water. Act 5 items are spooky Malthael-themed items with skulls on them.
Item | Usage |
Death's Bargain | Useless |
Soulsmasher | Useless |
Helltrapper | Has potential as one of the strongest on-hit effects in the game. Currently useless. |
Salvation | Useless |
Pandemonium Loop | Sometimes used for 15% Chance to Fear on Hit in builds with Rechel's Ring of Larceny. |
Types of Bounties
All existing bounties can be broadly separated into three types: Kill, Clear and Event. Each of these types can be identified before starting the bounty, just by looking at it's name. Kill and Clear bounties always start with exactly that word and Event bounties cover everything else.
Kill Bounties
In this type of bounty you need to kill a fixed number of monsters within a zone plus Unique monster. In some cases you first have to go to a different zone, which can be either a dungeon or a nearby area without its own waypoint.
Boss Bounty is a subtype of kill bounty, here you don't have to kill any mobs and instead of a Unique you need to kill one of the Act bosses. Each Act, except Act 4, is guaranteed to have exactly 1 Boss Bounty. The Unique monster, door the the dungeon, or door to the boss room is marked by a ping on your map and a yellow arrow pointing towards it on your minimap.
Clear Bounties
Here your objective is to go to a dungeon (or a last level in a multi-leveled dungeon) and kill all enemies within it. This includes enemies that spawn after you enter the dungeon, such as summons or quest mobs. When there's 15 or less enemies left you will see the exact number of them in your list of objective and all the remaining enemies will be marked by skull icons on the minimap. The entrance to the dungeon (and to its second floor if needed) is marked by a ping and yellow arrow.
Event Bounties
Event Bounties is a broad term for all other quests, in general you have to run to the objective (marked by a ping and yellow arrow) and then complete a quest there, which can be anything: a random event from campaign, a cursed chest or even a portal to Bounty Grounds.
Click Bounty is a subtype of event bounty, where you have multiple (3 to 6) objectives in the same zone, and you need to visit each one and click on it. Each of the objectives is marked by usual ping and arrow, but only when you get close to them. Clicking on an objective will start a 4 second channel, that is interrupted by damage, unless you are immune to Crowd Control. There are special mobs guarding each objective; on some quests they only spawn when the player approaches.
Bounty Builds
In general, when doing a bounty you first need to run a considerable distance to reach your objective, then kill some enemies, and finally teleport to the next zone. For that reason, there's several requirements to a good bounty build:
- able to run very fast, without relying on killing mobs (e.g. effects such as In-Geom, Messerschmidt's Reaver and Grave Injustice)
- able to kill everything on the screen (or on the map) really fast
- have easy access to CC-immunity to channel teleport and click bounty objectives
- have enough toughness to ignore mobs while channeling (about 400 million)
- have enough single target DPS to kill Queen Araneae in one phase
The condition in first requirement, makes bounty builds different from T16 builds, designed to farm Nephalem Rifts. In bounty runs you have much lower uptime on In-Geom and you also can't rely on Goldwrap to solve all your toughness problems.
Since running and killing are separate activities in most bounties, some of the bounty build employ item swapping. You carry a few extra items in your inventory and switch between "running mode" and "DPS mode". This can be annoying but you don't have to do it too often and it can make your bounty runs a lot faster.
Build | Speed while running | Speed while killing | AoE clear | Single target DPS | Toughness | Requirements | Overall Speed |
UE DH | 10 | 8 | 10 | 9 | 10 | 10k mainstat, swapping | 9 |
GoD DH | 10 | 10 | 7 | 10 | 8 | 10k mainstat | 8 |
Hydra Wiz | 10 | 8 | 7 | 10 | 10 | 10k mainstat, good gear | 8 |
LoD Monk | 20+ | 9 | 10 | 9 | 7 | 26k mainstat, good gear, swapping | 10 |
Inna Monk | 20+ | 12 | 9 | 9 | 6 | 20k mainstat, good gear | 10 |
PoJ Monk | 7 | 10 | 7 | 10 | 8 | 12k mainstat | 7 |
FotH Sader | 8 | 7 | 9 | 10 | 6 | 10k mainstat, good gear | 7 |
WW Barb | 8 | 8 | 6 | 10 | 10 | 10k mainstat | 7 |
SB WD | 8 | 9 | 6 | 10 | 4 | 12k mainstat, good gear | 7 |
Mage Necro | 6 | 6 | 9 | 10 | 6 | 12k mainstat, good gear | 6 |
In this overview we compare the best bounty builds in the game and the best bounty builds for each class. Three builds deserve a separate mention.
LoD WoL Bounty Monk is by far the fastest, when it comes to getting from point A to point B, and it also has excellent AoE coverage. Unfortunately damage is not quite there. In order to comfortably oneshot everything in a 4-player T16 game you need quite some Paragon and very good gear (which also needs to be Ancient and with max CDR and RCR rolls everywhere). Another problem that can be fixed with Paragon is that this build requires gear swapping. The insane movement speed is achieved by Dashing Strike spam, which is only possible with Raiment of a Thousand Storms (4) Bonus. Raiment is a very weak set so it's impossible to actually kill stuff, while wearing 3 pieces of it. But if you have the Paragons and if you are willing to do the swap, you get the bounty build that blows all competition out of the water.
UE Multishot DH is second fastest bounty build, and it has one big advantage over LoD Monk: it's incredibly easy to build. Just throwing together the full set of items with any rolls at paragon 600 will be enough to crush T16. By optimizing your gear you can make the build a little bit faster and eventually get rid of swapping. If you are playing any other class and are planning to do a lot of bounties (15+ hours) over the course of the season, then you should seriously consider making an UE DH specifically for that purpose. It will only cost you about 2,000 Death's Breaths, some crafting mats, and 30 minutes of your time.
GoD DH is just a hair slower than UE, but it doesn't require any swapping and is overall more chill to play. It also has quite low gear requirements, so you can build that instead of UE if you don't want to swap and/or farm DH gear.
Hydra Wizard was buffed in Season 23 with reduced Teleport animation speed, which matters a lot in Bounties. This buff makes it about as good as the two Demon Hunter builds, so you can play that if you like Wizard. The only area where this build is lacking is CC-immunity but it's not that big of a deal because Hydras can protect you while you channel.
General Bounty Strategy
Since two out of four strongest bounty builds involve item swapping, the next 2 sections will contain remarks specific to swapping, marked by italics.
First and the most important trick to doing bounties is to do them in a group. 4 players going to different waypoints and doing different quests will earn Large Horadric Chests almost 4 times faster than a single player. Even going to a public bounty game, where one of your teammates is terribly undergeared and another is straight up AFK, will be a lot more efficient than doing bounties solo. Never do solo bounties, unless you are playing Solo Self Found for extra challenge.
Kill Bounties
swap to DPS mode at the start
These bounties are extremely straightforward: you go through the map towards the quest marker, while killing everything in your sight. On some maps, where there's way more enemies than required by bounty, it's faster to do it the opposite way: first run to the Unique, kill it, and then go through map killing everything.
Kill bounties can be done faster with more players, so if there's no more bounties left and someone in your team is doing a kill bounty, don't hesitate to help them.
Boss Bounties
swap to travel mode at the start
This bounty type is even more straightforward: you run to the boss, you kill the boss. The tricky part comes when you consider the group play. Only one bossfight can be active at a time, meaning that when you reach the boss door and one of your teammates is currently fighting another boss, you will be unable to enter. There's two ways to avoid this.
- Designate a dedicated boss killer. Have 1 player do all 4 (or 5) boss bounties, while other 3 players ignore those quests completely. This is very easy to organize, but if your game has Belial, Diablo and Malthael at the same time, your boss killer won't be able to kill all bosses before all other bounties are done.
- Follow a boss order. The player running Act 2 is always starting the game with his boss bounty. Another player goes second, and they are doing first some other quest and then the boss. Finally, the 3rd player is doing their boss as their 3rd quest. This way is superior, but it's way harder to explain and people need to pay attention for this to work.
Clear Bounties
swap to travel mode at the start
Nothing special here: run to the dungeon kill all the mobs. Some of these bounties can be very long and they can not be done faster with more players, so try not to leave them for the last.
Event Bounties
swap to travel mode at the start
Here you need to run to the event and then do it. Depending on what this even is, you may need to do different things, but mostly they include talking to NPCs, killing enemies and interacting with objects. Your best friend for these bounties is "Close all Windows" button (Space by default). With its help you can skip most of the NPC dialog, even when it doesn't have a visible window. When waiting for even to progress, spam this button, it never hurts.
Some of the event have a fixed timer and they can not be completed faster, no matter what you do. Most of these bounties are "Kill 100 enemies" Cursed Chests, but there's some others such as Jar of Souls, Blaze of Glory and Forged in Battle. Here instead of waiting the entire timer you can do the following:
- Run to the event and initiate it
- Use Town Portal (T) to go to town
- Go do a different bounty
- Use the map (M) to go to town
- Enter your portal made in step 2 and complete the timed bounty
This way you are effectively doing two bounties at the same time. This technique doesn't work when there's no more bounties left, so try no to leave these events for last.
Click Bounties
swap to travel mode at the start
Click bounties are unique in that you are not required to kill any mobs. All you have to do is reach the objectives and perform a 4 second long channel. If you are CC-immune and have enough toughness to tank all enemies for these 4 seconds, you can just run up, channel the thing and run to the next one.
Like with kill bounties, here you can help your teammates to complete the quest faster, if there's no more bounties left.
Tips and Tricks for Individual Bounties
Act 1
Act 2
Act 3
Act 4
Act 5
Bounties are the only type of activity in Diablo III where joining even the worst possible group is better than going solo. For that reason it's incredibly important that average person playing Public games knows what they're doing, because it makes Bounty farming faster and more enjoyable for everyone. I hope this guide helped you improve your bounty gameplay!
Credits
Written by Northwar
Reviewed by Raxxanterax