Having played Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred for about a week (actually less given that I stopped for a few days after getting fast burn out and being heavily frustrated), I finally got to the point where I could write enough of my thoughts down based on my experience. Unfortunately, I still have yet to try out the new Echoing Hatred game mode, the highest tiers, the new pinnacle boss and the Warlock to really round out the review (and maybe even fishing) but I think I have accomplished enough where I have a solid feeling for where the game is without needing to deep dive into areas I’m unfamiliar with. While I have read various reviews and praises for the game, I will say that I was fairly frustrated on launch as well as a few particular areas that I suspected would be problematic. So this will not be an entirely glowing praise type of review.
Campaign Portion
First, let me state that I decided on choosing a Sorcerer once again for my campaign character. Like Vessel of Hatred, Diablo 4 did something right where you could play the campaign with a fresh seasonal character. Since you can optionally start from the very beginning, you have a few avenues to progress through the expansion’s campaign. However, like Vessel of Hatred, the campaign to me felt protracted and I did what I could to skip as much dialog and unnecessary cut scenes as I could stomach or deal with. In general, I honestly have no idea what happens in the story nor do I care because I’ve felt the writing in general had been atrocious, the dialog meandering and hedonistic. In many cases, you could not skip certain areas of dialog which drove me nuts as I had zero desire to experience shitty writing.
The one notable thing that occurs is that Nyrelle pretty much dies immediately and she receives a small moment/burial. In a way, it was like a reverse Optimus Prime where the least liked character went straight to the grave because of the fan backlash from Vessel of Hatred. For myself as with most of the atrocious story in Diablo, I simply did not care. I have zero investment in the back story because I know it’ll be boring and not the thing I want from the game.
In terms of the worst aspects of the campaign, I identified two major problems (beyond the story): 1) the stupid Horadric Cube guardian fight; 2) the Mephisto fight. I wrote a while back that the Diablo 4 team needs to move away from puzzle type of fights. Instead, in these two cases, they doubled down.The Horadric Cube guardian fight sucks because it’s a puzzle fight where I had to die a few times to figure out what to do. And figuring out, I mean I needed to determine what the mob’s name was because there weren’t any videos up describing how to fight this creature and because the fight wasn’t telegraphed enough. There’s a weird hint that someone gives at the beginning and you need to drag some sort of light thing to the right rune. It seems simple enough but if you don’t do enough damage or can figure out which rune matches the thing above the guardian’s head, you’re kinda fucked.
The Mephisto fight is god awful mostly because once again the Diablo 4 team decided to reuse the pull out effect. So you’re running around with your head cut off because it’s impossible to control this little character due to the sudden change in UI. I’ve seen the other versions and I can’t believe they added an unskippable cut scene. This really felt like a typical Mythic WoW raid boss which honestly has no business being in an isometric type of game. I’m utterly convinced just with these two fights that the encounter group and UI/UX groups ought to be thrown onto the streets, begging for alms.
Luckily, those were the biggest impediments to an otherwise uninspired and lengthy campaign (lengthy to me because the dialog was killing me). However, once you’re doing you start dealing with War Plans as you enter into the end game. Now, before I talk about that feature, let me first mention the skill tree and item reworks because those were fairly huge changes. The skill tree was a necessity because the previous passive nodes were more of a hassle that in the scheme of things made no sense. The paragon board still makes no sense but the notables that extend the skills’ core functionality have more overall impact in affecting your play, which makes early leveling seem more intuitive. I believe that part of the limited patch note drop was partly done as an experiment to see how effective this change would be since the old skill twig was still alien to new players who didn’t understand min/maxing nor used build guides.
Updated Skill Tree
My main issue though about the revamped skill tree is that there’s still some leftover odd conditional logic that is too systems dependent like how a skill may affect Overpower. My issue with this is that some of those systems just never made sense especially with Overpower and Vulnerability. I think having these separate damage type categories was a mistake and really didn’t add anything useful beyond to the core game, which is why something like Overpower has been constantly revamped. I think the skill modifiers should have been more straight forward like increasing the rate of attacks, adding elemental damage type modifiers, increasing the area/size of an attack, etc. that could be scaled through additional points. Those things can visually be easy to understand and scale. Some of these side modifiers have that kind of capability but it’s not consistent and you can’t put additional points into them. That said, I think the baseline here is a reasonable restart where they can expand more nodes for skills or allow for additional points to be placed in the side nodes. In a few cases, there ought to be hard limits but I would like to see more choices beyond doing a skill point dump into the core skill.
Itemization Update 3.0
The other major area that got yet another revamp was itemization. Obviously, a lot of this was due to the massive Horadric Cube crafting aspect. But tempering, aspects, uniques, etc. all received a variety of modifications and consolidations. One thing I noticed, for instance, was how some aspects were moved into a key node for a skill like Dust Devils for Whirlwind and Double Swing. That was an excellent move because it was utterly frustrating hunting for a truly build defining Aspect when it was locked behind RNG. Other Aspects might’ve been moved to a Unique like the one for Necromancers that enhances the number of skeleton/mages. I think the main goal here was to make the build’s flavor come online in the skill tree but the actual power being done through Uniques. Then Aspects is how you scale that a category of power along with Paragon nodes and Glyphs.
I still think the system is rough though. The Uniques seem almost like Aspects at this stage since the affixes on Uniques now are random. Also, a few Uniques seem to overlap with Aspects like this one ring for druids that give you an additional companion and more companion damage per companion, which is similar to Shepherds. I’m not a fan of this thought process because it feels redundant. Why not just collapse the two into one? Then there is the idea of a Unique Reroll but I haven’t seen a single build that has taken advantage of this power. Originally, people thought this could be similar to Chaos Armor but with the change in Uniques affixes, I’m wondering if you’re relegated to just rerolling a power on the same type of item it’s derived from if you managed to find a unique with good affixes. If that’s the case, then the whole Unique system just took a massive shit on itself.
On the bright side, you can temper on everything now, including Uniques and Mythics. Uniques received this change I’m guessing because of the shift in moving build enabling affixes away from Uniques. But tempering on Mythics is huge because it makes a tanky item like Tyrael’s Might much more important as a well rounded damage reduction piece in allowing one to grab the all precious Maximum Life affix. Mythic items are the only items with stable affixes but lost their guaranteed GA affix in the change.
Along with the change in itemization comes the update to how drops work. Every rarity can be valuable in the end game especially with the introduction of the Loot Filter. The Loot Filter is something I have yet to use just because I haven’t really felt a need. Once you get into higher difficulty levels though, you will want to employ one. Otherwise, there’s too much clutter that can even endanger you in certain encounters. That said, getting good quality items is much more difficult so the item hunt has been extended, which can be frustrating in the early game especially for a new season. On the bright side, even plain uniques and legendary items down the road won’t be the most important things to find since magic and rare items with multiple GA affixes are going to become the gold standard in the average item hunt. Even white items, especially those marked as ancient, are going to become huge in the end game once you start aiming for build defining unique items.
New Talisman, Charms and Seal System
The other major update was the addition of seals and Charms. Seals are really boring beyond giving you two additional affixes and determining the number of charm slots that open up. You get some early leveling set charms that are similar to the ones in D3 with bonus XP and a few other modifiers but they don’t scale into the end game well. The class set charms are the real key in builds though. I don’t think each set are created equal value where some like the Tal Rasha set just outperforms based on the defense bonus. But I think the design tries to take too much from the D3 sets in giving us a formula of 2 set minor offense/build change; 3 set defense; 5 set major offense update. I don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad thing because in some cases like the Druid Companion set is amazing with the visual addition of a bear companion or Tal Rasha giving you elemental skill triggers. That part is really well done. But it’s clear that they want you to use set charms to get into the end game.
In the case of Seals, you can find ones that give you 6 charm slots. So what goes into the 6th slot? Another major change is the introduction of Unique Charms, which are the unique bonuses along with two affixes that you can add into the charm slots. In truth, it’s simply a less powerful version of Kanai’s Cube in allowing you to choose from a limited selection of Unique Powers that go into this spot. However, you can only slot in a single Unique charm unless you have a special Mythic Seal. There are three variations of the Mythic Seal, one which has six slots but reduces the requirement by 1 and prevents you from using an additional Unique charm. I’m guessing the idea is to pull in a second Charm Set but I have yet to see any build use this option. From all accounts, the Mythic Seals seem overrated and probably should get a re-examination if they’re not pulling their weight.
Next, let’s talk about build diversity. One of the major points of changing so many core systems is to allow for increased build diversity because of how one can supposedly flavor their builds better. For the early part of the game, the changes in skills do allow for more customization but by mid game you’ll want a build guide. The biggest issues I’ve found is that there’s a huge discrepancy in the interrelationship between skills, aspects, uniques, etc. that prevent real build diversity in existing. Generally, you’ll have someone who discovers an overpowered skill (like say lightning) and how it works with other skills in the tree as well as how it is complimented by a few aspects to really make it work. Some people call it a bug; I call it poor system architecture.
My main criticism about the redesign is that there’s still too many conditionals, multipliers and weird system interworkings that I think the developers ended up overthinking how to make a good system. None of this should be this complicated at all. If I want a big fat fireball that I can fire off fast and exploded in an icy manner, that should be possible. I should be able to scale all of that with gear, skills and special points. If I suck at aiming, I should be able to pick something that helps correct my problems for a little less damage. It’s really not that hard when you think about how a system should work.
Crafting
Itemization certainly was influenced in the redesign by the new crafting through the Horadric Cube. I know there’s people orgasming on forums on the new crafting but it’s really simple in terms of what they did. It’s basically like a more focus oriented version of Enchanting except that you can upgrade and downgrade pieces with a few key pieces of currency. The problem with the so-called focus crafting is that you still get a wide range of random results and I don’t think you can receive GAs on those affixes. So you can waste an incredible amount of time going back and forth trying to nail the right affix.
Here’s what I found to be effective in crafting. You want a good base (i.e. minimal 1-2 good affixes preferably one with at least one solid GA). Then you target craft two others where one does not fall into the category of the existing two. For instance, if you need multiple damage multipliers (yeah say that a few times), you only try to get the one you want and don’t add other similar categories until you nail the one you really want. For instance, if you have a GA on maximum life and a resource mod, you don’t want to add another defense. Because if you get the wrong defense, it’s harder to remove that one. Instead, you try to get 3 of the 4 affixes you really want, then use the 4th affix as a reroll spot on the Enchanter (which answers my prior question on what will become of the Enchanter moving forward). So it’s not a terrible system but you still need some patience to deal with bad outcomes.
Since they removed Aspects from dungeons, you can no longer beat dungeons to obtain early level Aspects (the rewards were replaced by a one time cache when you beat it on a character). So how can you get Aspects early on especially when the drop rate is very low? For new characters, getting Aspects is very tough because you’re limited by currency. However, if you have plenty of the currency to upgrade a rare into a legendary, this will be your best bet to farm Aspects for a twink character. Once you hit level 30 or so, you can use the Bartering system but you will need a lot of currency and require your Mercenaries to be leveled. So there are a few different ways to handle this part but it is about as RNG based as before with fresh seasonal characters bearing the brunt of the punishment.
There’s also Transfiguration which I think is a lesser version of Sanctification. I will say that I am pretty disappointed by Transfiguration where the only slot that gets the all important extra affix is the neck piece. However, because Transfiguration is so random, you’re not guaranteed anything and can potentially brick an item still despite all the negative feedback. I still think that all slots should be opened up to the legendary addition for Transfiguration because of the sheer amount of randomization involved here with the chance of bricking an item.
Regardless, it did look like they took my suggestions on what crafting ought to be as well as solving some of the Aspect bloat. I still think that the game needs to bring back the OG Sanctification as Transfiguration to solve the existing Aspect bloat but the idea is there for changing in the future.
Another great usage for the Cube is the 5 merge upgrade. Some people use that for Tributes for Undercity Runs. But another major wonderful thing for this recipe is upgrading your Runes. It’s the best way to farm legendary runes to eventually target farm Mythic crafting. If you combine Undercity rune runs with crafting, you should be able to at least get most of the main runes you need to enable a build.
The one thing I still need to talk about are the new currencies. Again, it’s mostly what I talked about in my previous blogs. But the one thing that utterly drives me nuts is that your pet does not pick these up. I suppose my issue is that I need to change my loot filter but it’s highly annoying to pick up these tiny items that further liter the game. The game already suffers from visual clutter. The less you are forced to interact with it, the better should be the lesson here. Or at least take my other suggestion in making the interaction radius much larger.
Nonetheless, there’s no question that this new Cube provides a great addition to the game. There’s other recipes I did not talk about as well as some secret ones. But I do appreciate the various QoL updates the Cube provides.
Builds/Leveling
On the other hand, I have tried two classes so far with a few skills thrown in. So let’s talk about the 3 builds I worked with and the leveling process.
The leveling process itself for the campaign was a pain. I did go straight into Helltides before starting the Campaign to get a few levels and gear. However, unlike Season 6, the numerous changes to the core of the game made the gear and early levels not really worth much. Maybe the first boss fight you encounter before you enter the new city is helped by having something like a Hydra available but most of your time should be spent getting through the campaign as fast as possible (that is if you’re like me).
The second character I tried with the Druid was much smoother. I think the campaign makes leveling painful and you’re effectively trying to get through a bad story with a few forced boss fights, some of which are stupid. The normal game itself is a lot more fun and I prefer that to their story mode any day of the week. In the case of the Druid, I went through the normal process that I normally do. However, you do need to hit level 70 so eventually you run out of Strongholds. Also, Strongholds no longer give guaranteed Tempering recipes. So they’re fine for early leveling (15+) but the newer Strongholds are pretty bad. Also, I couldn’t bring myself to uncover the rest of the new zones and finish off the side quests. So unless I partake in a Helltide that forces me through that area, I probably will end up leaving those spots covered up.
Fire Hydra/Fireball Sorcerer Leveling/Mid Game
Really bad decision doing this as a season starter two seasons in a row (skipping on s12). The main difference is that this version (mostly the Hydra part) felt even less potent due to the massive changes in Hydra. Fireball is a great enchantment but awful to use as a skill. Even with the staff, Fireball feels like utter trash and you’re better off cutting your fingers off than ever trying that out. I thought I was going to be smart in using Hydra because of how it was a good damaging leveling skill. But this is one instance where the change in passives and even basic Aspects made the skill worthless except in novel situations. I heard the new Charms can make Hydra good but I already changed my build and was too disgusted/disappointed by this build that I don’t want to return.
Static Field Blizzard Sorcerer
Naturally, Mekuna came up with this build and on launch Static Field Blizzard was bugged and doing too much damage (of course). But even with the nerf this ended up being a very strong build to transition into with little gear investment. By the time I nearly gave up on this season/game, I had enough Aspects and the new key unique (Raiment of the Sea) as well as the key set charms to start it up. Almost from the get go, I was able to launch into T8 without much problem. I even found a Starless Sky (and later two Shakos). After the nerf, this no longer was the strongest Sorcerer build (Ball Lightning is) but it’s fairly good on its own. The main issue is squishiness. But I think at least for T9, I have zero issues and it plays smoothly. T10 gave me a lot of problems with infrequent deaths but that was prior to finding a Shako. Also, I had swapped my Unique from an Endurant Faith to Crown of Lucion. So my survivability may have been bad without the Shako. Nevertheless, swapping to this build convinced me that the game can be fun but you need the gear and a flavor of the month to really enjoy things.
Companion/Lightning Storm Druid
Having a previous character dealing with the bulk of the fresh season leveling makes a secondary character much more digestible in terms of experience. I found myself with 13 points from the get go and being able to access War Plans immediately. There are some downsides to this though because you will still be incredibly weak and your skill tree access is limited by your level. What that means in practice is that you start off as a level 1 and are forced to dump all your points into a basic skill which you’ll change almost immediately. I think they should just give you the additional levels if you’re already leveled a character and unlocked those skill points.
Of course, if you’re more entrepreneuring, you can simply provide 8-9 higher tier Whisper Caches to power level your fresh character. I’m not really a fan of this because you just miss out on unlocking various areas naturally like Strongholds, some of which you will want for accessing portals and dungeons. Also, I prefer leveling on my own to experience the journey. But the first 10 levels or so are pretty brutal especially compared to past seasons. So this is an area that the developers need to really work on but probably aren’t on their radar by far.
As for using this oddball hybrid of Lightning Storm and Companions, I found this combo to be pretty effective as a leveling combo. Lightning Storm is excellent for the AoE and you can pretty much dump most of your points into this skill for maximum early damage once you get this unlocked. Also, Companions really aren’t that strong for a while. I did have the Igni-Ceh runes available and used those along with Bac – Petrify. That combo was incredibly powerful and I still use it.
Prior to level 70, I attempted to combine my existing Sorcerer charms into ones for my Druid. So apparently, they won’t let you until you hit level 70. You pretty much will only see the leveling set charms if you use the 3-1 formula. If you intend to use your set charms for twinking out a new character, you should save them for level 70. And save a LOT. Even if you’re missing key uniques and aspects, having a full set of charms can make a monstrous difference. Similarly, keep any ancestral common items and hoard your unique upgrade currency. You probably will have worse luck on these things but it’s worth giving it a shot. Also, you might be able to reroll into a unique power you need. So I might try that on a future new twink.
That said, getting a Companion Druid properly built was a lot of fun. Probably, the sleeper build this season. It’s effectively like Whirlwind Barbarian minus the right key channeling. Instead, you just keep running forward, hitting your abilities on cooldown especially for elite and rare packs. Unlike my sorcerer, the visuals weren’t as impairing. The AoE still isn’t great compared to Static Field Blizzard Sorcerer but I only obtained a few new items to really bring this build online. A few really critical things were the Storm Companion pants and the new Companion unique ring. Having the maximum number of summons made dealing with content much easier. Also, don’t underestimate how proper itemization, masterworking and ancestral items does wonders for a build. I ended up on T8 this morning and pretty sure I can push further. Bossing is really smooth especially as I increase my critical hit chance which helps in bringing down my wolves cooldown.
War Plans
This is another major addition to the game. The content modifiers are quite good and very meaningful. Some of the coolest parts are the ability to summon Grigore in Helltides or having Chaos Waves spawning from worms. I really like how old seasonal content was able to make some comeback here like the Chaos Waves and even Mind Cages. Really War Plans are almost similar to the Alter of Rites in Diablo 3 where you can build power increments in the content.
However, I still maintain that War Plans should have been the way Diablo 4 would scale out their difficulty rather than Torments. Torments don’t really feel meaningful except in rewards and power glut. But the power glut part could still have been retained in War Plans such as how certain nodes increase the power of the content. I did not like the fact that your choices are very limited as well. Like I want Duriel’s bugs along side Chaos Waves in my Helltides. And to unspec these options cost a lot.
One major issue people are complaining about is that the experience for War Plans should be account wide rather than character based. Here’s my take. I think War Plans are a great addition to the game. I feel that the developers have a nice core system that can be scaled indefinitely in adding many more nodes and more activities to these War Plans. If we see more nodes in the future, then the account wide experience complaint is very valid because of how much effort it takes to scale an activity tree. If there are no plans to enhance this tree, then I am fine with the character based part because a starting character would find the leveling process potentially too difficult in using the existing War Plans from another character.
Nonetheless, I do hope that we get to see more returning content from previous seasons and reap the benefit from those rewards too. Like I would love to see Season 3’s Construct return if you choose certain modifiers for Nightmare Dungeons that alter the dungeons into a more trapped based version. And since the Mind Cage does return here, that means we should be able to get a Realm Walker and Seething Opals as a reward in some Whisper Event choice. But it’s clear that War Plans can be expanded in a variety of ways and provides a great way to bring back old seasons (once they’re fixed) as well as the rewards and possibly season powers.
Fishing
I tried it and it’s so rudimentary that I forget it exist. Some people suggested to add it to boss zones to give people something to do while waiting for a boss to spawn and that’s probably the best use case to motivate people into doing something like this. Otherwise, unless there’s a key item here that I absolutely need, I probably will continue to avoid it.
Cow Level
Someone discovered this and I don’t care. It looks like a big hassle for nothing.
Overall Assessment
The current state of the core game is in a better situation in general. However, the ugly areas remain ugly. The one piece of content that has been receiving steady updates but I think will hamper the game in the long run is the Tower. It’s replacing the Pit as the thing to compete for the esports players. But it’s also the thing that will kill a lot of builds. Anyone who is on top probably runs an exploit so Blizzard will continue to chase their tail when the real problem is having timed event gauntlets in this game. I feel this game has too many and it continues to hamper the game design where you will constantly see a state of imbalance. Until Blizzard changes their stance on the idea of balance, the game will be in a constant state of unsatisfying imbalance from a variety of levels.
In terms of bugs, there’s a lot of pretty frustrating ones that don’t seem huge when you think about them but feel like they’ve been glossed over or swept under the carpet on purpose. But the most offensive ones are the visual clutter and frequent lag issues. The lag issue has not been solved and I don’t know at this stage if Blizzard is capable of solving it. It’s not necessarily a crossplay issue (I turn mine off) but can range from something simple like opening up a stash tab to terrain with different elevation that causes a complete degradation of game play.
The visual clutter to me is a monstrous issue that Blizzard needs to address at some stage. In a nutshell, the screen is a mess and I don’t think they know how to solve this in terms of how they can reconcile the effects with the art style. Some seemingly simple issues are poor visibility from things like monsters to objects you must interact with to, of course, on death effects that merge with all the other crap going on. I think at least for the on death effects, Blizzard should concede to removing these because of how they compete against the art style. Visually, I don’t think the developers have the ability to resolve this conflict of interest. But I’d prefer that they retain the art style rather than trying to keep in a feature that no one in the community wants because at least the art style can be appreciated.
The big bosses remain shit. I’m going to really go ham on the encounter designers here, but it’s needed. Whoever are in charge of these encounters are complete morons. I knew when some of the developers during one of these campfires revealed, “You will die; we’re trying to kill you” I knew that we were dealing with imbeciles. Having the intent of killing players as an actual design decision is beyond retard level. It’s really easy to put an exponential damaging number that’s unavoidable and lie by calling it a challenge and a skill issue. But it’s not a real challenge where someone has to use skill and thought.
But the real problem is that these encounters don’t go through a hefty QA phase and user experience person apparently. I think what happened is that the raid encounter people from WoW ended up on this team. But the WoW raid encounter designers don’t understand how an isometric type of game where you have high degrees of visual clutter and a few different viewpoints just can’t coexist. An example is the Lilith fight where you’re forced into a pulled out view, which immediately causes you to be disoriented from how you’re trained in the game to play. Or during one of these fights where you suddenly are forced to go around a room in a panic trying to touch things to re-enable your skill bar. The reason this is not a challenge is because these things occur in phases so if you get one shot you have to start over. It’s the same shitty philosophy that WoW’s raid system has, which, imo does NOT work in a simply ARPG. That’s why I thin they borrowed the WoW raid developer(s) to do those fights. But those people have no clue on what makes a good ARPG fight/encounter.
In truth, I wish they killed these “complex” encounters and had more variety of simpler encounters. It feels that for all the phases these shitty bosses receive, you can add 10 more fresh bosses/encounters and thus more content rather than one piece of content no one wants except for those who enjoy measuring their penises. This is what kills the game for me though and where you get a 5% doing. Yes, it’s aspirational in nature. But it’s also a complete waste of time and a disrespect for the players’ time.
At any rate, the base game is in a better state. The good stuff is better but the bad stuff is worse. My recommendation: fix the really bad stuff, get rid of that shitty raid developer(s), stop caving into the esports mandate and stop being cheap.
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