Warlocks and Paladins are finding an unexpected obstacle in Diablo 4's Cow Level quest
Soul Shards and Oaths can prevent them from meeting the Crooked Staff's unusual requirements.
Diablo 4's Secret Cow Level quest has an awkward problem for two specific classes. You may be unable to obtain one of its required items on your main character.
The issue comes from the 
Crooked Staff, a relic that requires you to defeat a specific elite using only your default Basic Attack. And by Basic Attack, we do not mean your first Basic skill, we mean the Basic Attack that you have when you start the game. The little stabby-stabby knife or pew-pew spell... Yes. This means removing literally everything from your character until that attack reappears on your skill bar.
Unfortunately, Warlocks and Paladins who have unlocked Soul Shards and Oaths may find that they cannot remove all the abilities that interfere with this requirement.
Why the Crooked Staff Is a Problem for Warlocks
The requirement sounds simple enough.
Refund all your skill points
Refund your Paragon points
Remove equipment that grants additional skill ranks
Dismiss your Mercenary
Defeat Blood Lightning Elite "untrained", so using only your character's default Attack
That default attack only reappears on your skill bar if no other skill has a single point in it. And any passive damage, like mercenaries or auras, etc., will not count for that quest.
The problem is that the game checks how you kill the elite. Other sources of damage, including passive effects and automatic attacks, can prevent the Crooked Staff from dropping. You also need to remove anything that gives you access to additional skills.
For Warlocks and Paladins, Soul Shards and Oaths complicate the process. Once unlocked, this class mechanic can leave the character with abilities that cannot be removed through the usual skill-reset process. And these are not like Rogue or Sorcerer Specialties, where you can decide to walk around with any speciality at all. Once unlocked, you can only swap Soul Shards and Oaths, but not remove them completely.
That means these two cannot return to the completely untrained state required for the encounter.
Community reports and guides have documented this issue for months, so it is not an entirely new problem. However, you might not know about it and wonder why that staff still has not dropped on your character.
Warlocks have the biggest problem. If you are a Paladin, it might still work. We saw people claim their Oaths prevent them from completing the step, but others say they managed to obtain the staff after a few tries. Oaths do not grant additional skills in the same way as Warlock Soul Shards, but it can still block you for some reason. So if you tried a few times and it did not drop, you will have to use another class.
The Workaround Is to Create Another Character
No, you do not have to abandon your main character or repeat the entire Cow Level quest. As long as you are not on Hardcore of SSF, the simplest workaround is to create a new character from a class that can access its default Attack normally.
Barbarian, Rogue, or Sorcerer all work perfectly fine, for example.
You can take the character to Blood Lightning at a very low level
Switch the difficulty to Normal
Defeat the elite with the default Attack
Collect the
Crooked StaffStash the item in the shared stash
Log back to your main Paladin or Warlock and pick the item up from the stash
You do not even need to level that new character. Since anyway you cannot slot any items. We did it with a level 5 Rogue on normal, and it was just fine.
A good tip is to also make sure you kill the little mobs around the Elite's area first. If you get surrounded, you will die, so clear them out little by little and then take on the Elite alone.
It really takes a maximum of 15 minutes to do, and you can always delete that low-level character afterwards if you do not need him.
It is an annoying, unnecessary extra step for a quest that already asks you to follow a ton of obscure instructions, but well, you do not really have a choice here.
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