• Guide

How to hire and level up Mercenaries in Diablo 4

Mercenaries add a new flavor to solo exploration in Diablo 4 and can be very helpful in a fight.

Aidan O'Brien

October 7, 2024 1:30 PM

Blizzard Entertainment

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Mercenaries have finally made their way to Diablo 4, giving you a way to bulk out your squad and compliment your build without the need to sink your own skill points into things. 

How to get access to Mercenaries in Diablo 4

First, you will need to play through the new campaign, Vessel of Hatred, until you get to the Thrust into the Dark quest. At the end of this, your new friend Raheir will lead you to a secret hideout called The Den. This is where he used to run a group of mercenaries called The Pale Hand, and it’s time to get the band back together. 

Inspect some items in the Den that will be marked by purple waypoints, and this will bring up three different quests to find three more Mercenaries, as Raheir will count as your first new recruit. 

These are, for the most part, pretty simple quests. Just head to the waypoints in question and help your would-be Mercenaries out of whatever pickle they have gotten themselves into. 

• Aldkin - a demon child caster - A Nameless Mystery
• Subo - a surly archer - A Feather on the Scale
• Varyana - a brutal fighter - Slayer’s Retribution

Finish up each quest, and the Mercenary will return to the Den, happy to go out on adventures with you if you ask them nicely. You can then hire them by talking to them and setting them as your hired mercenary or your reinforcement.

How to use and pick a Mercenary

There are two ways to use a Mercenary. First, you can set them as being Hired or Reinforcement. You can have one Hired Mercenary and one Reinforcement, and there is an important difference between the two. A hired mercenary fights beside you like any other NPC, and a reinforcement mercenary will act as an occasional aid that will perform one ability when a certain trigger occurs. 

Interact with any mercenary in the Den to have the option to Hire or enlist them as your reinforcement. One more important note here is that a hired mercenary will not accompany you if you are at a party with another player, but you can still take advantage of the reinforcement ability of the other mercenary.

Be sure to assign Raheir the moment you finish up your first trip to the Den, and when you enlist a mercenary as reinforcement, make sure you set both their skill and their trigger in the menu. Personally, I just like having them set to fire off their skill on my own basic attacks, so they are constantly spamming it on cooldown.

How to level up and assign skills for your Mercenaries

You level up your Mercenaries by having them accompany you on quests and in combat. Just hire or enlist them to start ranking them up. You can see their abilities and spells in the Mercenary tab in the Character panel in the top right corner.

Skilling them up works identically to how you level your own character. As they hit an experience benchmark, they get a point that you can spend on interconnected abilities. It’s best to make a build that compliments a weakness in your character. Raheir can help you tank some damage, while Varyana can make you faster. They all have a variety of benefits that can help you out.

Once you have the full skill tree unlocked for the mercenaries, don't stop using them as you can continue to level up your Rapport level with them, earning free goodies and resources.

And that's it for Mercenaries and how to use them. Make sure you experiment with different builds to see which ones really suit your style. For more helpful guides, be sure to check our Diablo 4 page.

Aidan O'Brien

Contributing Guides Editor

Hailing from Ireland, Aidan has been conditioned by local weather conditions to survive hours at his PC grinding through whatever game is offering the lowest possible drop rates for loot. He thinks the easiest way to figure out what fans of games want to read is to just be a fan of games. You can normally find him logged into Warframe, Destiny, or a gacha game. You can reach out to him on X @scannerbarkly.