At a certain point in my Diablo 4 playthrough, I realized there were a handful of quests in Kyovashad that I'd passed over. Lost in the fog of the loot grind, I'd ignored a bunch of white quest markers. Wanting to get them off my screen, I quickly jumped from marker to marker, paying no attention to whatever the NPCs had to tell me, slightly annoyed that the XP reward for completing these quests was pretty meager by this point in the game.
These quests are designed to teach you about upgrading your gear, but while I'm still going through the story I'm also still churning through loot so fast that I don't want to invest in those upgrades. As a result, I've stayed pretty clear of towns unless I'm hawking an inventory of dud weapons to a vendor, and have basically ignored anyone that won't buy my loot off me, or any upgrade that doesn't come with some higher numbers for my Diablo 4 Necromancer build.
Still, something had been bothering me. Next to the little health potion icon in the bottom left corner of the screen was a brightly-colored upwards arrow. I've been playing long enough to know an upgrade marker when I see it, but the arrow gave me no information on its own, so I assumed the mark denoted the extra potions I'd unlocked through the renown system. I had five potions now, not four, so that was all the upgrade I needed.
An embarrassing number of hours later, my mouse happened to drift back into that corner, just for a moment. In the flicker of UI that appeared, I saw the words 'Tiny Healing Potion'. "Tiny?" 'Tiny' denotes size, and that suggests an entire array of sizes – have I been strutting around with a pathetic potion this entire time? My mind raced, circling through the number of times I'd taken a whack from a boss and survived on just a sliver of health. How much easier would the grind have been if I'd had the appropriate potion?
Upgrades people, upgrades!
Diablo 4 review: "A magnificent and absurd loot theme park"
Returning to the apothecary, I discovered that I'd missed not one, but two upgrades, and was well on my way to a third. I'd passively acquired the ingredients for the Minor and Light potions, and once I've gone up another couple of levels I'll have the Moderate potion too. That potion heals 378 HP instantly. The one I've been using until now heals just 48. Had I not discovered the reason for that little arrow, I'd have soon been hamstringing my healing capacity by nearly 90%.
I acknowledge that all of this is my own fault. My apparent lack of reading comprehension was almost entirely the cause of those missing upgrades, and I'll put the rest of the blame on my Necromancer build, which currently offers a small army of skeletal NPCs to absorb the brunt of whatever Sanctuary has to throw at me. I've also not really needed the upgrade - even on a harder difficulty, I've only died a handful of times, and that's mostly been down to my own hubris.
If I'd been dying all the time, I might have wondered why I could only heal for a tiny amount. As it is, I think I've been doing pretty well for myself. That probably would have changed once I hit endgame, but I've stumbled through most of the campaign largely unscathed. Thankfully, now I've given myself a nice healing boost, I'll never know just how nightmarish I would have found those Nightmare Dungeons, but I might pay a little more attention to the next few tutorials I play through.
In case you still need a hand, here's how to upgrade your healing potion in Diablo 4.
