Paragon Board Selection and Pathing

Paragon Boards selection adds a lot of depth to endgame progression, but that depth also brings a level of complexity that may seem daunting for many players. In this guide, we demystify the process of setting up your Paragon Boards to make it simpler, faster, and more efficient, so you can quickly get back to slaying monsters while still feeling confident in your choices. As with every strategy, there are going to be exceptions, but using this guide as a general rule of thumb should make planning out your boards far easier and lead to better choices.

The first step is to decide which Boards you want to build into. Each class has 8 Boards (plus a Starting Board), but you won't have enough points to invest in them all, so we need a process to determine the best choices for your build.

The best Boards are going to be determined by how well the nodes on them fit your particular build. There are several different types of nodes to consider and they aren't all weighted equally, so understanding what makes a node valuable and then being able to compare it against others is key.

Rare offensive nodes are typically very powerful early game when you lack additive damage but can fall off later when other sources of additive damage come online. Other nodes, like increased health, maintain their relative power since Increased Health is a difficult stat to find and it scales with any additive health you acquire from other sources.

Still, there are exceptions, and just because a stat is good for you doesn't mean there isn't a better alternative. Example: A node with generic 5% damage is good for just about any build, but the damage is additive with other sources. At late game you probably already have a lot of additive damage. If another node offers 5% Attack Speed and your build benefits from it, the relative power increase for your build may be higher with the Attack Speed node because it's harder to find, so you may have a lot less of it.

Hypothetically, If you didn't have any additional attack speed at the time you took this node, you would attack exactly 5% faster than before you took it. Alternatively, if you took the 5% damage node but already had 100% additive damage, you would only deal 2.5% more damage than before you took the node.

This process determines how efficiently you can reach your Glyph Bonuses. However, there are often times when taking more than the required attribute for a Glyph is worthwhile. For example, many Glyphs provide a stat based on how much of a given attribute is within it's range. Example: The Werewolf Glyph states 'For every 5 Willpower purchase within range, you deal x% increased damage while in Werewolf form'. If you were playing a Werewolf build and determined that this stat is important for you, you should consider investing beyond the Glyph's 40 Willpower requirement.

Once you've analyzed all of the potential sockets you can now determine which are best for the Glyphs you want to use. Plan to place them in the sockets that have the best access to the attribute they require without spending additional points on nodes you otherwise wouldn't take. Ultimately you may need to be flexible and make some compromises, but starting from this ideal state will give you a good foundation for deciding which boards work best for your build.

Since you won't be able to invest in every board, you need to choose the best and leave the rest. How you choose those is going to vary somewhat from build to build, but here's some general rules to follow:

Now that you've selected the Boards you want to use, it's time to plan out your path through the connected Boards. This step is all about maximizing efficiency; we want to get the most possible desirable nodes into our board within the allotted points while also prioritizing the very best ones. To accomplish this, we need to employ several strategies. We do this for every board, starting from highest priority to lowest, until we've exhausted all of our points and cannot find a more optimal path that maximizes the amount of desired nodes we can pick up.

The first thing we want to accomplish is finding the shortest route through each of our boards that still picks up all of the major nodes we want. This is usually accomplished by taking the most direct path to each node, starting with the node closest to the entrance to the board first and ending with the node closest to the exit. Nodes in between these two can be trickier, but you can generally move to the next closest until you reach the exit. Due to the way some boards are set up, it may make more sense to branch out to access a valuable node or cluster and then go back to a previous one to continue on the path.

Speaking of the exit, when possible always choose the one that is closest to a node that you can end with. This will save you several points that you can use elsewhere.

If you find yourself lacking in a particular attribute, don't deviate from your chosen path to pick up extra common nodes of that resource. Common nodes are very low value, so picking up more than you need lowers the number of high value nodes you can acquire.

There is almost never any value in branching out from your chosen path to pick up common nodes (Reaching Glyph bonus requirements is a notable exception). Instead, follow the strategy below to improve your attribute distribution while still maximizing your points.

While the above sections will lead you to an optimized setup, there are still some strategies that advanced players can employ to get even more efficiency out of their board.

Due to these factors, building around a socket early likely decreases your power when compared to investing in other nodes. Lower level and rarity sockets also have a smaller radius of Nodes that they affect, making it even harder to benefit from them. Typically, you're better off waiting to invest heavily into sockets until they have been sufficiently leveled up. This could mean avoiding sockets until later and respeccing into them when the Glyphs are ready. Doing so will open up those points to use on more impactful nodes, which in turn will make it easier to handle Nightmare Dungeons to level your Glyphs.

Sometimes a Board will have multiple valuable nodes on it that are very far away from each other, and the stuff in between provides little additional value. In these cases, it may be better to jump into a Board multiple times.

In this scenario, we would enter a Board near a valuable node and then immediately move on to the nearest exit node. We would then set up the rest of our boards in a way that could circle back to the other side of the Board with the far away nodes. This only works if we have enough additional boards to invest in and naturally want the points in them. It can take a lot of planning to pull off, but success can mean saving several points to spend in more valuable areas.

Glyphs aren't the only reason to consider respeccing your Paragon Boards. Certain stats become more powerful over time while others become weaker. We touched on this a bit with additive damage, but the concept applies to many areas of the game. Example: you want to make a Poison build, but to get the most out of Poison you need a Unique or Legendary power. Before acquiring the item your build would be better off with more generic sources of damage. You could invest early in Poison nodes on the Paragon Board, or you could invest in the more generic damage options and respec into poison once you have the item you need.

Clearly, respeccing will be the more efficient option because it will increase your damage early on, which improves your clear speed and increases your drops. This has the knock on effect of increasing the chance that you find the item you need faster, allowing you to respec and take full advantage of the Poison nodes faster. Following this strategy will require some pre planning and a gold investment, but if you're willing to spend the time and money, it's worth the effort.