Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred: Season 13 Zeal Paladin Build Review and Game Thoughts

For the last build of Season 13 for me, I have decided to give the Paladin a shot. In particular, I wanted to check out the Zeal Paladin build as it was something I saw another streamer do. At first, it looked like a channeling type of build but in fact it’s more of a close range/melee spam build. For Path of Exile players, this build reminds me of Sweep attack where you can do a frontal semi-circular attack. Once you get a few key upgrades and the sword though, the attack becomes more of a full circle. At any rate, I managed to secure the basic gear based on another guide and wanted to discuss my thoughts here.

First, why do Zeal? It’s a decent leveling build (which you can find here) where you can transition from a starter to end game. Most of the basic skills are the same which means there’s not much else to learn once you hit level 70. If you’ve played Diablo 3, the build will remind you of the Roland’s Sweep build where you quickly blast everything around you. Like the Roland’s set build, this build also increases your attack (cast) speed when you employ the new Cathan’s Dauntless Faith Charm set where the two set bonus causes your Zealot (Zeal) skills to give you a Do or Die effect. This effect stacks and boost your Critical Strike Damage and Attack Speed up to 25 times.

Along with the Do or Die effect, the 3 set bonus triggers your Rally skill at maximum stacks once every 6 seconds. Because of this autocast effect, you don’t need to put Rally on your action bar but will want to place points into it because it helps with your movement speed, gives you Unhindered and triggers other Justice skills, which we will talk about in a moment. Then the 5 piece bonus increases your Zealot damage as well as stores an Afterimage effect for every 5 stacks of Do or Die that gets spawned when you move. So it’s a like a Shadow Clone that you leave behind after attacking.

The other major component to the Zeal build is a unique 2-handed sword called Red Sermon. Besides increasing your Zeal damage (which is the main reason to get this item), you also gain the Death or Glory variant for free, which means you’ll have two variants for Zeal. Death or Glory causes Zeal to do a full circle attack, uses 10% of your Maximum Life instead of Faith as a cost in exchange for increasing your Critical Hit Chance and Zeal’s damage. Besides Death of Glory, the build uses Zealot’s Legacy which attacks randomly and striking 4 additional times. Also, you pick up Additional Strikes, which gives you 2 more attacks and Weaken, which makes Zeal a fast attack.

To mitigate some of the life sacrifice from Death or Glory, you take Endurant Faith to spread the damage out, Defiance Aura to get passive healing and stand in Consecration for a little more active healing. In general, I’ve found that as long as you’re not just spam casting Zeal endlessly, the amount of life removed is negligible and can be topped off quickly. The build guide I use doesn’t do anything extra like add Life on Hit or Life on Kill but I imagine that you can effectively become quite a powerhouse in splitting some defense by using either type of mitigation.

Most of the defense here comes from Resolve stacking. The guide has you take Resolve on the amulet, helmet, chest and leg pieces and applying the Glynn’s Anvil aspect on one of the three armor pieces. Then you start building Resolve stacks early on by using Fortress. Since you can masterwork Resolve and get GA’s on it, you try to go for +12 on those pieces to get 48 points in Resolve on gear. I will have comments later on regarding Resolve stacking but it pretty much is the primary way to build defenses here.

Now, one of the cool things that happens with the way Rally works along with the 3 piece bonus from Cathan’s Dauntless Faith Charm is that it gets periodically autocast. When that happens and you choose the Words of Inspiration variant, Rally expends all available charges (which is up to 3) that causes your Justice skill cooldowns to be reduced by 3 seconds per Charge. Since we don’t have Rally on the action bar, you’re effectively able to lay down Consecration once every 2-3 seconds or so.

For mobility, you use Falling Star and employ the Igni + Ceh Runeword for using Spirit Wolves to apply Vulnerability to reduce the cooldown. The rest of your mobility comes from raw movement speed placed on your boots. But with Rally being up most of the time, you shouldn’t have many issues getting around. Also, while the guide suggest Cir + Vex for your other Runeword choice, I think it’s a bit of an overkill. Instead, I prefer Bac + Que for keeping up a Barrier for the extra defense. Movement really isn’t an issue on this build and you can get more skill points from your Charms. But having another layer of defense in sketchy moments I think is worth it for melee builds.

The biggest issue I’ve found in terms of the play style was the tiny pause when you cast Zeal. Because this ability is in melee range, certain mob on death effects like Executioner make the scenario dubious. I generally keep an Evade charge handy just to dodge quickly. Falling Star helps out with this too. That’s also why I prefer Bac + Que because I don’t want to rely on Resolve stacking or Fortress.

Another issue I had with this build (guide) was the emphasis on Critical Strike Damage, Vulnerability, Attack Speed and Physical Damage affixes/multipliers. I think because you get your Critical Hit chance from Helm of Perdition, Fanaticism Aura and Death or Glory via Red Sermon, you avoid having Critical Hit chance on your gear (except as a Temper on your weapon). But it does make these ideal stats very hard to obtain, which is really annoying and has me question the end game crafting and gearing system.

Before I dive into some overarching concerns I have with the end game systems, let me finalize a few thoughts on the Zeal Paladin build. First, it’s a decent build that does pretty good boss damage, which generally is my concern as I take a character into the end game. AoE-wise, it’s not great because of the range factor. The Afterimage effect seems cool in concept but most of the time you’re leaping/moving to the next pack of mobs so if the intent was to leave behind a clone to attack, it doesn’t feel effective. Maybe this style of play works better at higher difficulties but it doesn’t solve the problem of how you’re forced to move forward most of the time.

I did like the ideas of the combining synergies between the charm bonus, Rally, Consecration, Red Sermon and healing. The general concept is pretty cool. The Afterimage clone effect would be cool if they follow you around for a few seconds rather than be left behind. Like in the case of Whirlwind Barbarian with Tornadoes, the Tornadoes shoot outward, so stragglers can be damaged. I might have to play around with the Zeal build at higher torments to get a better feeling. Right now, my character is only at Torment 6.

That does beg the question: why am I only at Torment 6 on this character? So part of the reason I’m writing this post is to talk partly on the journey of this character not just writing on how to create a build (because someone has already done that for me). Because I have played numerous other characters in Season 13, I managed to accumulate plenty of spare gear, materials and set charms. Usually at a certain point in a season, if I’m enjoying myself, I tend to play alts especially if there’s new builds I want to try. Naturally, in Season 13, because let’s face facts and call the Lord of Hatred launch nothing more than a public PTR, the number of choices has been wide open. With the Paladin being the other newest class, I wanted to check out other builds as I only used an Auradin back in Season 11 (and leveled with a Hammerdin). Zeal was one of the top builds around and I got to see it in action which piqued my interest.

One of the advantages of having all those preexisting characters and spare gear is that it’s easy to get rolling fast. For instance, I grabbed Bac + Que and Igni + Ceh up immediately and crafted sockets on my starting gear. The difficulty mostly was in getting new Aspects to align with the build guides. Since I was pretty impatient, I used the upgrade mechanic in the cube to convert blues to rares to legendaries as well as Bartering with the Mercenaries (although I frequently run out of currency). Even with these methods, you still may not find all the key Aspects to really get the build online. So my leveling experience was more of a hybrid situation.

Also, attempting to match up the affixes on gear to the main build was a very frustrating experience (still is). Because the build guide emphasizes on almost all offensive stats, you need to get supremely lucky. Even crafting these stats in the cube isn’t a guarantee. At a certain point after burning tons of materials up, I would simply give up and find any 2-3 combos “just” enough because it was getting too expensive and painful to try and perfect the build. Even the midpoint guide used here mostly emphasized the “all damage multiplier” types, which I think is a red herring in a way. Because of having to deal with crafting, managing another Paragon board, etc., I effectively quit because I started to feel burnt out.

After giving myself a few days off, I came back and played around with this character again. One of the things you can do is that reaching Torment 1, you can convert your other set charms into your current class’ sets. Since I was aiming for Cathan’s Dauntless Faith Charm, I naturally crafted the one for the Wing Strike build and only crafted a single piece for the Zeal build. That only infuriated me into taking a few more days off to clear my head (not to mention I was upset at the upcoming Season 14/patch notes).

So finally, I decided the other day just to play normally and treat this character as an “advanced” fresh start character. Meaning, she would have some twink gear but I already had found the Red Sermon and had enough Aspects and basically gear to hit Torment 1. And to be frank, I enjoyed this part. If it weren’t for the fact that I have a kick ass Whirlwind Barbarian, I would probably enjoy playing other characters a lot more. But having a near fresh start character does give you a type of new way of progressing and it honestly doesn’t take long before you’re in at least Torment 3. The thing is that I didn’t want to push her too fast in the way some people might try going from zero to hero when you already have unlocked all the higher Pit tiers on a more powerful character. That way, I could still experience a small sense of progression on her. On top of that, getting the other set bonuses was not difficult at all.

But part of the journey was just using the existing War Plans to get through these lower torments. I could have just grinded in the Pits to push her Glyphs, etc. But you simply do not gain enough War Plan experience so you’re effectively wasting a lot of time doing any non-War Plan activity (which will be part of my upcoming criticisms to the War Plan mechanism). On a fresh character, you will want to only do War Plans so you can level them up. This does prevent you from focusing on a single activity like the Pit and you’re at the mercy of RNG for what it gives you. As a result, I would do the Pit anytime I had a chance but I still needed to do all the side activities which takes time, which left me at around Torment 6. I could easily do a higher Pit level but I like gradual progression especially because of how I didn’t obtain all the necessary glyphs.

That said, I really had wanted to play the Wing Strike build rather than Zeal. I think leveling with Zeal was a little painful and slow. At the moment, Wing Strike is considered a C grade build as per Maxroll. Also, I’ve read numerous other people describing Wing Strike being weak, awkward and not great at bosses. However, Wing Strike does offer one thing that other builds (except pure Auradin) do not: a walking simulator build.

Given this experience, the whole ordeal gave me the epiphany of how poorly structured Diablo 4 is at the moment. First, crafting is definitely in a better state if not the best state as far as any previous version of Diablo has been. But the cost and sheer RNG aspect make the situation truly a nightmare along with the horrible UI. While I do think the crafting materials are a massive step up from what they had before, the interaction with this whole system is nearly insufferable from the fact that you cannot easily pick up the materials off the ground, the tiny amounts provided, the very manual mechanisms to craft anything desirable and the depressing feeling of being letdown when you cannot get what you want. Some mentally disturbed individuals actually enjoy this system but I think those people are masochist and want carpal tunnel because that is what you will receive as your true “reward” from enduring this torturous experience.

But I think the frustrating wasn’t just this terrible flow for me. I think where the game just dies and leads to burn out is when I find myself doing this highly manual, one-by-one, type of workflow where I get nowhere. When you combine how build guides are made with the “idealistic” gear in mind and try to pair it with someone who does not want to spend their entire life inside a single game, it’s a really bad combination. I want to play the actual game and find some meaningful progression towards a goal. The RNG factor absolutely kills 90% of my desire to play this game any longer than a month when there’s a reasonable season at hand. I’m not talking about just grinding to find items, but grinding, finding the items/currency, then starting from scratch because the game has a shitty “The Price is Right” failure honk going off on you because there’s a built in gambling mechanism. It’s just not fun and more than frustrating.

Where the idealistic build guides portion start to damage the game for me is when the game allows for an insane level of multipliers and damage types on gear. For instance, in the Zeal Paladin’s case, you grab on Gloves, Rings and Amulets Critical Strike Damage, Vulnerable Damage, Physical Damage and Attack Speed. While it is good that you can obtain all these forms of damage modifiers, getting the quad-fecta version is close to impossible without spending hours maybe even days on a project. You’re effectively doing Focused Rerolls or Adding/Removing carefully, one by one. The workflow of the Cube itself is just so horrendous that you’re better off blowing your brains out with a bazooka than suffering this mind numbing, fecal waste of time. Hence, why I just started giving up once I hit 2-3 key modifiers. We’re not even talking about Greater Affixes either nor adding the perfect Temper and Masterworking, which still are all RNG based to a degree. THIS IS NOT FUN.

For me and I think a lot of ARPG players, the real fun is when you see meaningful progress and that you’re gradually getting improvements while the game opens up as well as seeing the updates which alter how you play the game. The way Diablo 4 is currently designed, you have so many impediments where the start of a new season is fine but once you get into the end game or when you start playing alts, this feeling of sameness of self-awareness of being on in a trapped hamster wheel creeps up quickly. This same feeling is the same reason I quit World of Warcraft a while back because I knew that game was horribly poisonous to my mental state. With RNG being the gatekeeper in Diablo 4, I feel like all the joy of the game gets quickly sucked out, which is why the game only last for most people a few days after the start of a season.

Another thing that I realized in playing the Zeal Paladin build is that the game is terrible for anything except walking simulators. At this point, the game requires every build to be fast, do area damage, have great single target, need high defense and a get out of jail card (outside of Evade). It’s absolutely ridiculous to have these types of requirements because it imposes a very strict type of style in place. The end result of these requirements is that the only builds worth doing are those that can either clear the entire screen at once or doing enough damage in a radius quickly while not stopping. All the builds that I’ve played that were enjoyable were speedy, did not pause for casting, had some sort of gimmicked defense and possessed a reasonable area clear. This is an absolutely stupid design.

There are two major problems in the current design of the game, which funnels players towards these types of builds. First, bosses have massive, unforgiving AoE zones and generally poor mechanics that become annoying once they phase. So you need to effectively kill the boss before they can phase. If damage reduction were actually meaningful in this game, the damage wouldn’t be so bad. You should be able to take multiple hits even at higher difficulties if you have enough Toughness. So Toughness is virtually a nonsensical, meaningless stat. The second major problem at this stage is the recent addition of on death effects. I would argue that on death effects would not be an issue IF YOU COULD SEE THEM. The game’s art design effectively make these on death effects almost unfair because they aren’t highlighted well, they conflict with the player’s abilities and the damage becomes so high that there’s almost nothing you can do. It’s one thing if the Executioner’s falling sword pushes you into a swirling poison pool that takes a portion of your health away. It’s another when you can’t even see either and just die out of nowhere.

The other massive problem is the speed in which the game has moved towards. People describe Diablo 4 as more of an arcade style game (they even have those anymore outside of Japan????). So the expectation is that everything just moves fast. When they talked about increasing the AI for monsters in higher torments a while back, we never really saw that aspect in play. I think most people were expecting better reactions from monsters, which only seem meaningful in lower level content where a player is undergeared. In higher difficulties, the only real visual thing is seeing monsters assault players must faster and shoot out a ton of damaging effects. None of these elements cause me to believe that the monsters’ AI has improved; instead, it’s just AI slop in a very literal sense. But the result of this is to force players to have increased speed in a variety of ways. It’s basically kill or be killed.

But the core overarching issue is the internal edict that the developers are here to kill the players. This was actually a highlight in a previous developer campfire. “You will die” they mentioned during Season 9, I believe when all the monsters received a massive revamp. Now, this situation would be fine IF there was compensation for the way the various systems have evolved. If Toughness was actually meaningful/useful as a clear stat to indicate how much damage you can mitigate at once, then the current systems would actually work. You wouldn’t have to use some sort of janky, gimmick like Resolve stacking or Immortal Barbarian with Selig’s to deal with a lot of the one shot stupidity.

Along with this internal edict as I’m labeling it, the various multipliers that players are allowed and almost expected to use are out of control in conjunction with the Torment and monster damage scaling problems. Many people have stated that multipliers are what is making the game ridiculous. The problem is that they aren’t really meaningful stats at the end of the day. You can’t deduce how much you ought to be doing because of the wishfully complex math involved. It would be different if say +1 skills simply meant +1 to damage or something on a reasonable level. I think part of the problem is that multipliers are the mentally ill fated mechanism that got World of Warcraft into a bad state to begin with in creating higher tier gear and making lower levels invalid when an expansion began. So this issue ended up somehow getting inherited to the Diablo franchise.

I don’t think the game as-is can easily change the multiplier situation without yet another round of monstrous refactorings from the ground up. But it is a major issue that I think has made these various builds problematic because of how it’s impossible to reliably calculate damage and defense. And to be clear, I think the only real multiplier should be on Critical Hit and nothing else and I would reserve that type of damage to a few select scenarios.

Given these situations and the upcoming Season 14, I’m not certain if I want to play at this point. I’m a bit disappointed in the state of things. I think the changes to Mythics coming up and the various balance changes don’t solve the core problems of the game. The actual builds themselves won’t change much, which leaves just the season mechanic as the only reason to play. But I might just be burnt out by the game at this stage. I think if the grind was more progressive than regressive from its RNG dependency, I would be more compelled to try more things out. But the game is still a far cry from what I would consider a true A tier level title.