Diablo 4: Season 15 Progression for Me

I’ve been hitting #Diablo4 Season 15 reasonably harder than I expected mostly because I felt quite strongly about the content being quite plentiful and well done. Bugs aside, just in terms of sheer content, this might be the best season they Blizzard team has put out yet. The real trick though is ensuring you select a good starter class, which I don’t think I did.

I ended up choosing Warlock since I read that it was going to be fairly strong this season. I ended up going Apocalypse since I played that build previously and had some familiarity with it. I do think it feels slightly different where the explosion is more like a mini nuke. But building up enough stacks to charge your nuke and can be annoying. I did struggle quite a bit with this class and died a few times (mostly to Diablo in Helltides). I think the real problem for me is just struggling with the life drain and general slowness of the class. It’s meant to be this combo type of class or build and it really doesn’t work well because you need to constantly be paying attention to your buffs, stacks, etc. on top of discerning for ground effects that can instagib you.

That said, gearing was a real nightmare and challenge. It took me a while before gaining the correct set charms and quite often the game seemed to want to steer me in a different direction. Instead of just going with the flow, I stupidly kept trying to convert the other charms into the ones for my build without any success. So progression felt really slow. At one point, I just couldn’t get the necklace to drop or craft and I threw up my hands and gave up on this character for now.

Instead, I had been watching Mathil1 just destroy SSF on his Storm Strike Druid which looked kinda fun. Initially, I wanted to give the Tornado build another shot because I hadn’t played it in ages. Instead, I started out as a Lightning Storm build for leveling and quickly gained plenty of key pieces of gear to convert into a Storm Strike Druid. The biggest was the 2 piece Storm Shepherd set that effectively makes Lightning Storm an autocast ability. So for the first initial torments, I was just running around obliterating my surroundings. It was so absurd that I didn’t understand why Storm Strike was used as an ability here.

Things didn’t slow down until around T8. That said, gearing was much better and most of the power boost came from the set charms. In addition, I crafted both a Stealth and Insight early on and recrafted them just to get a boost on their item level. But really great twink seasonal items in addition to the Leoric’s Crown you get early on. I leveled and geared so fast this time around that I barely did any strongholds outside of a few that had key waypoints.

At this stage, I’ve been working on my Druid’s gear. At this stage, I’m one Ancestral away from being adorned with all Ancestrals. Also, I crafted a Mythic on the Ifeh’s Dire Totem. I didn’t have ideal stats as per one of the guides but I said, why not? My Set Charms are near all Ancestral except for one and I’ve got the Furnace as my Unique. I’ll probably run this setup for now until I can find a Mythic Seal, which might be hard. I did read about the Torch Mythic Charm that people are finding off of Uber bosses so I might eventually try to farm one of those.

Now, one thing I did kinda mess up on was my Boots and Amulet in terms of Transfiguration. Because I’m using a build guide, the one thing it didn’t do a good job at was highlighting the fact that the Dirge of Airidah inflicts damage based on Vulnerable enemies (as well as Immobile and Slowed). So I Transfigured my boots and of course it rolled Indestructible. But what I failed to realize is that I needed Overcharged on them to ensure that enemies are Vulnerable (via Lightning Storm) and that you Transfigure Overcharged on the Amulet first before swapping to the Ghostwalker aspect. So I need to redo my boots which sucks since I found a 3 GA one and already rolled off one of the GAs for a better stat. Nonetheless, this would explain why my damage feels a little gimped. Also, I’m not sure I had Overcharged so I’ll need to double check for that. Lastly, I forgot to use the Prism for the Transfiguration so I shot myself multiple times in the foot. Argh.

That said, I’ve been reading about the Werenado build and I came to realize that it has a bugged interaction. I doubt I’ll use that because it partly requires you to have the Mythic Seal that reduces your charm requirements, which I have yet to discover. I’ve been considering playing Werenado again and was in fact the original reason I made a Druid this season. One nice thing is that the gear swap wouldn’t take too much effort so I would need to research what Glyphs I’d need. I may have to relevel a few Glyphs but it might not be that bad all things considered. Outside of the bugged interaction, I don’t know if the base Werenado Druid is stronger than Storm Strike. I think the only thing I would dread is redoing the Paragon board. That would suck supremely.

The other major build I’m looking at soon-ish is another Necromancer Minion build. I did see Kripparian using one during the S13 for the launch of Lord of Hatred but it looked a little weak because of how one of the Uniques I believe had been nerfed since the patch notes “for server stability reasons” (which sounds like BS). That said I did read that Army of the Dead got buffed and the current build makes use of Enigma and Insight (which I do have). I could craft an Enigma because I’ve managed to stumble across double spare Jah’s last night. I haven’t done a Necromancer Minion in a while and there’s enough of a change where I think it might be worth checking out again. As long as I’m not playing that stupid Blood Wave build, I don’t mind.

I have no idea what else I’d like to check out this season though. Sorcerer has Firewall as their top build but I’ve never been a huge fan of Firewall even for leveling. It’s generally clunky and slow. A lot of the Firewall builds use Raiment of the Infinite which to me as a spellcaster seems very clunky and sketchy especially because Ice Armor has a cooldown which makes your defenses turbulent. None of the other builds really appeal to me either for Sorcerer. Evadeborn seems dead at the moment but the rest of the builds that are top notch seem more like “piano builds” for Spiritborn. Zeal got knocked off a cliff apparently but I wasn’t a huge fan of it compared to Auradin which hasn’t recovered since S11.

Now, there is apparently a GoD Demon Hunter-like Rogue build using Heartseeker, Dance of Knives and Nilfur’s Narrow Eye as your set. As someone who has loved the old Diablo 3 GoD set, I actually might give this one a try. I don’t think it’ll be the same though. The biggest red flag I saw on the write up was “weaving Heartseeker while spinning.” So the GoD set kinda had a similar problem in that you need to swap to your primary ability periodically. In my case, I just rapidly would hit shift here and there to fire off my Primary in between Strafe. So that wasn’t too horrific. But Diablo 4 is not Diablo 3 and not nearly as smooth so I need to give this a shot before judging. This might be worth creating a Rogue and giving it a try. If anything, I could just go Dance of Knives and call it a day.

I suppose the big question is how far should I get into this season? I haven’t found a build as strong as my WW Barbarian or Crackling Energy Sorcerer from Season 13 with the Lord of Hatred launch since almost everything got the nerf hammer in between. I’m not really interested in the exploits but I am interested in builds that are strong enough not to make me suffer through most of this content. Like looking at that Rogue build, I noticed that there’s a specific setup for bosses. Le Sigh. Yes, I know about the Armory but I still think it’s a pain that you need to swap pieces just for a stupid boss because there’s a dumb ass crowd control mechanic that doesn’t really work on them.

The one thing I’m not exactly looking forward to doing in this season is farming splinters. I know about the Torch Mythic Unique Charm so I would like that along with a Mythic Seal just to see what else I can squeeze into my build(s). I suppose if I could get a Mythic Seal on my Druid that might motivate me to push for the Torch for certain. On the other hand, I kinda want a different build. Storm Strike was fun to get into the higher tiers but it probably has some limitations.

Also, I’m not certain if I’ll go back to Warlock anytime soon. It just didn’t feel great. I could just drop down the difficulty and refarm all the gear for Screaming Blaze or something like that since my friend is playing. But the Apocalypse build just kinda stunk and wasn’t as encouraging compared to Season 13. Yes, I know that the meta is Warlock but I don’t really care since the base build I’ve been using has been discouraging.

At any rate, I’ll probably report back in a day or two if I manage to fix my Druid and/or decide to swap builds or do a different character.