Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was the launch of Diablo IV Season 4, and I had more or less decided that this was going to be the last chance I gave the game. It took almost a year of reworking almost every system in the game, but I am pleased to announce that the game is actually enjoyable now. It still is extremely shallow as compared to a Path of Exile or even a Last Epoch, but the mechanical loop of the game feels pretty solid. Leveling in Diablo IV feels akin to what it is like to level in Diablo III, where you zip up through the levels so fast that nothing can really get stale or sluggish as a result. I only managed to make it to level 46 last season before giving up on the game, and after one night I am already level 44 and would have been considerably higher had I not also played quite a bit of Guild Wars 2 to knock out my dailies.
So you might be asking yourself… what changed? What makes it now suddenly a good experience? If I had to boil it down to a single change it would be the Helltide improvements. At the launch of the game Helltide was an event that did not spawn until you had reached World Tier 3 and had an hour on/hour off schedule so there were huge gaps where you could not participate in the event. It was also really static and largely became about killing the fairly sparse monsters, collecting embers, and then turning them in at various chests around the zone. It did not really feel like a dynamic event and did not reward you for sticking around or really interacting with other players.
In Season 2 there was an event that collectively became referred to as the “Blood Tide” where this green area was marked on your map and it moved locations every hour. Essentially it was a Helltide that was always up and in addition to having really high mob density, there were objectives for the Tree of Whispers that could be completed each time the area moved. Additionally, there was an aggro system that the more vampires you killed the more desperately they tried to kill you, until they eventually spawned a boss. More than that there was an area where players could work together to chain summon a boss encounter that became exceptionally efficient to farm. Better than all of these things… you could do it at level one and during Season 2 I spent 90% of my time farming the blood tide.
So now we zoom forward to Season 4, and they have effectively taken the good bits of the Helltide and merged them with the far superior gameplay of the Bloodtide to create an event that is better than both. Helltide is now available as soon as you complete the campaign on your first character, or choose to skip the campaign on secondary characters. This means for seasonal characters you can pop straight into Helltide and effectively never leave it until you reach level 100. Gone is the meta of farming the start of a single dungeon over and over and resetting it just to get the highest mob density, and born is the meta of hanging out and playing with other players in an open-world zone. This feels so much better and really suits the strong points of Diablo IV considerably more than the “dopamine tunnels” ever did.
I feel like the Helltide changes on their own would not have been enough to repair the game’s reputation. In addition, there are a slew of quality-of-life improvements where the Diablo IV devs seem to have actually paid attention to feedback. For example, one of the things that I railed on the hardest in beta was how far apart all of the resources that you need to interact with regularly were on the map. This was improved slightly for Season 3, but has been completely fixed with Season 4. For example I have drawn a green circle showing the area just southeast of the teleport into Kyovashad. In this tight ring you have a Stash chest, Vendor, Gemcrafter, Blacksmith, Enchanter, and the Obol vendor which has been greatly improved. Sure there are reasons to leave this tight ring like going down to the stables or messing around with your wardrobe, but the majority of things you are going to interact with constantly while actively playing the game are in an efficient cluster allowing you to get back into the action faster.
More important than this is that the Codex of Power is actually a really important system in the game now. Previously it only gave you access to weak versions of legendary aspects that you unlocked through running dungeons, requiring you to still keep a bajillion random legendary items for later extracting and upgrading. Now when you salvage a legendary item you collect the aspect that was on it, at its current power level. This means that over time as you keep finding better legendaries you will keep upgrading the base level you can imprint on items. Almost more important than that you can look in your codex and find which aspects you are missing and where you can acquire them, even pinning the location of the dungeon on your map.
On top of this there is a new tempering system that replaces the previous upgrade system allowing you to place interesting affixes on your items. For example there in the above image I just placed one that increased the Upheaval Size by 28%. There is one that I specifically want on all of my gear that turns my default Bash ability that I use as my builder into a cleave. The tempering patterns drop in the world expanding the things that you can tweak on these items. They all seem to be a 1 in 4 chance of getting the specific affix that you want, which is something that I don’t necessarily love. I would have rather had them be similar to the bench crafting in Path of Exile. That cleave temper for example is something I am going to need on one of my weapons at all times. I get three attempts to reroll the temper but I have actually ended up failing to get the one that I needed.
It was extremely liberating hopping on my standard character and salvaging every single legendary that I had stockpiled in my bank in order to fill out my permanent codex of power. This combined with the changes that they made last go round to turn gems into a crafting material, means that honestly… there is very little that you really need to hold onto other than maybe some perfectly rolled gear for alts or things that you want to try and sell to other players. I am encountering a bit of friction in earning enough gold to pay for everything, so I feel like there will be a time when I am having to decide between selling items to vendors or salvaging them for materials. That is an improvement that they can tweak later on down the line because I feel like they don’t have the gold values dialed in quite yet.
Do I think Diablo IV is perfect now? Hell no. Do I think the game has evolved in the right direction with Season 4? Absolutely. I have no clue if there is going to be enough endgame there to keep me engaged, but I am looking forward to checking out the new Greater Rift Adjascent system. I figure I will hit level 100 for the first time in this season if things keep going as they are. I also plan on trying out a Necromancer as they have apparently improved greatly with this season. I’ve only run a few Nightmare Dungeons but they also seem to have improved significantly. I am actually looking forward to playing more, and I am sure as the season goes I will share more of my thoughts.
