Cooldown Reduction in Diablo 4

Cooldown Reduction (CDR) is a powerful stat for many builds. It is used to lower your skill cooldowns which makes the gameplay loop feel smoother as you can use your buttons more often, and for some builds it even enables very powerful skill interactions once you have enough CDR. This article aims to explain the basics of Cooldown Reduction and how to acquire it, as well as go through the basic calculations of how multiple CDR sources are used by different skills.

Cooldown Reduction can be found on gear, through skill passives, via the paragon board or by finding a Channeling Shrine. It is generally found in 3 forms:

• Generic CDR - Applies to all skills at all times. This is the only CDR form that is shown in the statsheet.
• Skill-specific CDR - Applies to a single skill (like Leap in the image below). Not shown in the statsheet but is still applied to its specific skill.
• Tag-specific CDR - Applies to a specific set of skills (like Brawling skills or Conjuration skills in the image below). Not shown in the statsheet but is still applied to its specfic set of skills.

Cooldown Reduction from these forms combine to a total amount depending on the skill that is used, up to a cap of 75% CDR. For example Leap is a Brawling skill, so it will be affected by generic CDR, skill-specific CDR for Leap, and tag-specific CDR for Brawling skills. In this example other Brawling skills like Charge would only be affected by the generic and Brawling skill CDR.

The Channeling Shrine provides a source of 60% generic CDR for a short time that counts towards the 75% CDR cap, while at the same time also lowering the resource cost of your skills to 0. Finding one while you're playing through the world can give you an idea of how your character might be played if you had a lot of CDR passively through gear/passives/paragon once you reach the endgame, where you will have access to more powerful gear and rewards.

The following table shows generic CDR affixes and tempers that are available to all classes, as well as all CDR tempers for each individual class (you can read more about tempering in our Tempering Guide). Apart from generic CDR as an affix and CDR through tempering, several unique items also have various forms of Cooldown Reduction, the most notorious of these being the mythic unique helm Harlequin Crest that not only has a big chunk of CDR, but also provides extra points to all skills which in some cases provides extra CDR for those skills (we'll look at that in the "Cooldown Reduction from skill points" section further down).

Generic

Barbarian

Druid

Necromancer

Rogue

Sorcerer

Spiritborn

Gear slot	CDR type	CDR% base range
Helm/Focus/Totem/Amulet	Generic CDR affix	8.1-8.8%
Boots/Amulet	Mobility skill CDR temper Evade CDR temper	6-8% 13-17.5%

Gear slot	CDR temper	CDR% base range
Helm/Chest/Pants/Amulet	Barbarian Strategy Challenging Shout Ground Stomp Iron Skin	6-8% 8-10% 15.5-20%
Boots/Amulet	Barbarian Motion Charge Leap	8-10% 8-10%
Ring/Amulet	Brawling Efficiency Brawling skills Kick War Cry Ultimate Efficiency Call of the Ancients Iron Maelstrom Wrath of the Berserker Weapon Mastery Efficiency Death Blow Rupture Steel Grasp Weapon Mastery skills	6-8% 10.5-15% 8-12.5% 16-22.5% 16-22.5% 10.5-15% 10.5-15% 10.5-15% 15.5-20% 8-12.5%

Gear slot	CDR temper	CDR% base range
Helm/Chest/Pants/Amulet	Nature Magic Wall Cyclone Armor Earthen Bulwark Shapeshifting Endurance Blood Howl Debilitating Roar	15.5-20% 8-10% 8-10% 6-8%
Boots/Amulet	Druid Motion Trample	8-10%
Ring/Amulet	Companion Efficiency Companion skills Poison Creeper Ravens Wolves Ultimate Efficiency Cataclysm Grizzly Rage Lacerate Petrify Wrath Efficiency Boulder Hurricane Rabies	8-12.5% 10.5-15% 15.5-20% 23.5-32.5% 8-12.5% 8-12.5% 8-12.5% 8-12.5% 10.5-15% 10.5-15% 10.5-15%

Gear slot	CDR temper	CDR% base range
Helm/Chest/Pants/Shield/Amulet	Blood Endurance Blood Mist	6-8%
Ring/Amulet	Necromancer Efficiency Bone Spirit Golem Ultimate Skills	10.5-15% 16-25% 8-10%

Gear slot	CDR temper	CDR% base range
Helm/Chest/Pants/Amulet	Rogue Cloaking Concealment	8-10%
Helm/Chest/Gloves/Legs/Boots/Amulet	Daze Control Smoke Grenade	15.5-20%
Ring/Amulet	Agility Efficiency Caltrops Dash Shadow Step Subterfuge Efficiency Dark Shroud Poison Trap Trap skills Ultimate Efficiency Death Trap Rain of Arrows Shadow Clone	16-25% 8-10% 8-10% 15.5-20% 10.5-15% 8-12.5% 16-22.5% 16-22.5% 16-22.5%

Gear slot	CDR temper	CDR% base range
Helm/Chest/Pants/Amulet	Frost Cage Frost Nova	15.5-20%
Boots/Amulet	Sorcerer Motion Teleport	8-10%
Ring/Amulet	Conjuration Efficiency Ice Blades Lightning Spear Ultimate Efficiency Deep Freeze Inferno Unstable Currents	8-12.5% 8-12.5% 8-12.5% 16-22.5% 10.5-15%

Gear slot	CDR temper	CDR% base range
Boots/Amulet	Spiritborn Motion Soar	8-10%
Ring/Amulet	Centipede Efficiency Potency skills The Devourer Eagle Efficiency Focus skills Gorilla Efficiency Defensive skills The Protector Jaguar Efficiency Incarnate skills The Hunter	6-8% 15.5-20% 6-8% 6-8% 15.5-20% 6-8% 15.5-20%

When you have multiple sources of CDR they are combined in a special way that makes each source worth less and less the more sources you have, a sort of diminishing returns is applied to each subsequent source. The Cooldown Reduction stat in your statsheet uses the following formula:

1 - (1-CDR1%)*(1-CDR2%)*… = total CDR

As an example, lets say we have 2 sources of CDR, one with 20% and one with 10%. That means we have a total of:

1 - (1-20%)*(1-10%) = 1 - 0.8*0.9 = 28% CDR

We can think of this as if the first source of 20% CDR brings our cooldowns to 80% of what they were originally. When we then get the next source of 10% CDR we bring our cooldowns to 90% of the 80% from the first source, and so on as we add more CDR sources. An important property of this method of multiplication is that fewer bigger values of CDR is better than lots of smaller values of CDR. For example lets say we have the three cases of:

1 source of 50% CDR

2 sources of 25% CDR

5 sources of 10% CDR

If we were to just add the CDR values in these cases together we'd get a total of 50% CDR, but when we plug them into the formula above we get:

1 - (1-50%) = 50% CDR

1 - (1-25%)^2 = 43.8% CDR

1 - (1-10%)^5 = 40.1% CDR

And we see that having just the 1 source of 50% CDR is better than the other two cases. This is one of the reasons why the mythic unique head Harlequin Crest is such an attractive item for many builds, it has a very large amount of CDR in just 1 affix which can go to 54% if it's a Greater Affix and you masterwork the CDR affix 3 times. Sometimes it's the only source of CDR that is needed for a build that relies on CDR to come online.

One reason for this implementation is that CDR can be a very powerful stat and thus should be difficult to get to a high value even if you have a lot of sources. If it were easy to get all your high value skills to be on very low cooldowns, then much of the game would quickly degenerate into hitting all your buttons all the time in quick succession without much thought of interactions between skills or what the skills actually do for your gameplay. Getting the important skills of a build to have low cooldowns and then using them effectively should feel like a reward after understanding the goal of a build and successfully gearing towards that goal.

Some skills with a cooldown also gain extra CDR from putting more skill points into them, up to 40% CDR at skill rank 20. This extra CDR is a separate source and can make skill go beyond the normal 75% CDR cap, meaning with 75% CDR from gear/passives/paragon and 20 points in a skill we can get up to:

1 - (1-75%)*(1-40%) = 85% CDR

on skills that are affected by skill point CDR. It should be noted that all skills with a cooldown are affected by normal CDR from gear/passives/paragon up to the 75% cap, even if extra skill points do not lower the cooldown of said skill.

Skills that gain CDR from extra skill ranks

Not all skills will gain extra CDR as you put more skills in them. There is not a set rule as to which skills gain CDR and which don't, but usually utility skills like Barbarian Shouts or Sorcerer Elemental Shields will not gain extra CDR with skill ranks. Below we've listed all the skills for each class that do benefit from skill rank CDR.

CDR gained from skill ranks

The skills mentioned above all gain a certain amount of extra CDR per extra skill rank. The amount gained is larger at the start and then becomes smaller and smaller as more points are allocated to a skill, up to a cap at rank 20 with 40% extra CDR. The table below details how much CDR a skill gains as you add more points to them, where each rank adds more CDR to a big additive CDR pool, for example at rank 8 a skill will gain an extra CDR source of:

rank 8 CDR% = 5%+5%+4%+4%+3%+3%+2% = 26%

Summary

• Cooldown Reduction makes your skills that have a cooldown be available faster again after using them.
• Multiple sources of Cooldown Reduction are combined as: 1 - (1-CDR1%)*(1-CDR2%)*… = total CDR for a skill.
• Cooldown Reduction from gear, passives and paragon is capped at 75%.
• Some skills with a cooldown can have their cooldown reduced beyond the 75% cap by up to 40% extra by adding more points in them (max at rank 20), for a potential of 1 - (1-75%)*(1-40%) = 85% total CDR.

Credits

Written by Icytroll
Reviewed by Wudijo