Hey, look, Diablo 4 is better now - Diablo IV - Giant Bomb (2024)

I enjoyed my time with Diablo 4 last year and placed it at #5 on my GOTY list, but even so, the game had issues and there was clear room for improvement. E.g., leveling was too grindy, stash space was a problem, and there was really very little to do at endgame after capping your character level at 100. It was definitely a better game than Diablo 3 had been at its own launch (remember the auction house, the impossibly difficult torment setting, and abysmal loot?), but it still needed some time to simmer.

I played season 1 and season 2 (I'd never played seasonal Diablo), using Druid both times and playing just long enough to complete the battle pass. It was... fine, I guess. The first season made only very mild improvements. The second season did add a cool new mechanic that involved up to three different players spending a seasonal resource to spawn tough monsters that dropped metric crap-tons of loot, which really helped get those loot drop endorphins ramped up and felt like something of an improvement on Helltides.

I then skipped season 3, because I was feeling pretty Diablo'ed out and had other things I wanted to be doing. After the fact I heard it was a step back from season 2 anyway.

But then, a week ago, not knowing anything about what was up with the game, I randomly did a Google search to find out if Diablo 4 was better now. Turns out that yes, it is indeed better now. Having just completed the season 4 journey, again with a Druid (though a completely different endgame build), allow me to tell you exactly why it's better. The TL;DR is mostly that Blizzard has done a lot of streamlining and smoothing out of pain points in the game's gameplay loop.

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Leveling is waaay faster. I complained at launch about how ridiculously long it took to max a character. Maybe they'd designed it that way because, as already noted, there wasn't really much to do after hitting the level cap anyway (doing high-tier Nightmare Dungeons for the LOLs was basically it). But I had gone in thinking I'd like to max all five classes, only to realize that it would take 100+ hours per character to do that, which just... no. I wasn't going to do that. I did max my Druid, but it took me something like a month.

But this season 4 character? It basically only took the long Memorial Day weekend to hit the level cap. Maybe it went into a fourth day, I don't remember for sure. I was playing hard, but the time to max a character has probably been cut by something like 75-80%.

The game is easier at the lower levels. At release, the game offered two difficulties for starting characters: "World Tier 1" and "World Tier 2", the latter of which offered more gold/xp and better item drops in exchange for more enemy health and damage. The prevailing wisdom at the time, however, was that WT2 was not worth playing, since it slowed the game so much that you could actually make progress faster by playing on the easier setting.

For my season 4 play, I decided to start on WT2 to see how it felt... and found it even easier than WT1 had been at release. Which is more than fine with me. I very much play Diablo as a second-screen, half-paying-attention-to-it-while-I-watch-YouTube sort of game, so I really don't need or even want the early game to be difficult. I want to just click the monsters and have shiny loot fall out, and that's what it did for me.

They've adopted season 2's mechanic for Helltides. Helltides are more fun and more rewarding now. Greater mob density, demon ambushes when you've killed enough to a fill a meter (which I guess is supposed to represent the demons' anger at your cheekiness), and most crucially, a mechanic to spawn a tough boss in the middle of the field who drops metric tons of loot. It does take three of a resource to spawn this boss, but the game isn't stingy about giving it to you, and usually you'll only need to supply one of said resource, with other players on the field supplying the others. That's because you're incentivized to contribute: those players who have contributed the resource to start the fight get bonus loot (a nice improvement over how it worked in season 2, which didn't do this), though anyone on the field can still pop in and contribute and get some decent drops of their own.

Legendary aspects are no longer a pain in the ass. In the launch version of the game, the "legendary aspect" system let you "extract" a legendary affix from one piece of gear and move it to another. While this was a neat idea, a major problem was that extracted aspects took up inventory space, and would tend to quickly fill up your stash (especially if you were playing multiple characters), competing with the gear that you were also stowing. Now they've changed it so that legendary aspects are no longer discrete items at all. Instead, breaking down an item with an aspect will add that aspect to your "Codex of Power," and can then be applied to another piece of gear an unlimited number of times. Breaking down an aspect that is a better "roll" of it will update your Codex with the improved version. This is a huge QoL improvement, freeing up a ton of stash space and doing away with a lot of finicky micromanagement.

Lots of other streamlined gameplay elements. I'll just bullet list some others:

• There are no longer separate plant materials to gather; they're still named different things in the field, but clicking on any of them will always drop "bundled herbs." Now you can easily craft the elixirs you want all the time without worrying about finding specific crafting mats (also, fewer elixir types now anyway).
• Obols to gamble now cap at 2,500 rather than 1,000.
• You are no longer constantly getting nightmare dungeon sigils (i.e., the items to start them). Instead you're mostly just getting a lot more of the crafting materials to make them, so they're no longer constantly filling up your inventory.
• There are now rare items that will allow you to respec your ability and Paragon points, rather than having to undo them all individually and at a fairly steep fee.
• A lot of this was done in prior patches, but in-game vendors/services in towns are generally much more consolidated than before, so you can do your business more efficiently and get back to combat that much more quickly.

"Loot Reborn" has made loot easier to sort and "read", and has added a more meaningful endgame. I already talked about the very welcome changes to "aspects", which is certainly a big part of how the new loot grind functions, but there are other key changes and improvements.

For one, rares (yellows) are now essentially worthless except at lower levels since they only come with two affixes, while legendaries have three. So you no longer have to eyeball the affixes of rares at all, you just sell them or break them down (or don't pick them up at all). Already there is less to sort through.

For another, you now have much more control of the affixes on your gear. Previously, equipment came with four affixes, and one could be re-rolled, meaning you had direct control over 25% of the affixes. Now you only have three to start, and you can still reroll one, but you can then add two more affixes of your own (for a total of five) through a new system of "tempering." This means, in effect, that you have direct control over 60% (3/5) of your gear's affixes. Another way of looking at it is that you're hunting for two good affixes per item instead of three.

Finally, the last big thing that makes loot easier to sort and "read" is that equipment can now have "starred" affixes. This can happen for one affix on the item, or even all three if you're really lucky. These starred affixes are just higher than the max range to start, and you can't get them on re-rolls. E.g., crit chance on gloves might normally be a range of 6.0-8.0%, but be 12.5% as a starred property. What this essentially means is that, although of course in the early game you'll be looking at all items more closely for "starter equipment", when you reach endgame, you're basically able to ignore anything that doesn't have at least one star. It all means that there's less time scrutinizing every piece of loot before getting rid of it. The flow is much improved that way.

There's more to do in endgame. A lot of the endgame now centers around "masterworking", which essentially is a more elaborate system of "upgrading" gear (the old upgrading system is gone). You can improve items up to 12 times each, with most of these increasing all affixes by 5%, but with every fourth upgrade enhancing one random affix by a massive 25%. Though the chosen affix is random, you can reset masterworking and try again until you get the one you want. It's even possible to get the same affix to improve by 25% all three times, though the odds of this are very low (when you consider it's a 1/5 chance for most equipment (all except uniques), your odds of getting the same property twice are only 4%, and less than 1% for all three times). This is the part that will really take a while depending on how obsessive you want to get about perfectly optimizing things. It's not really super necessary, but it's nonetheless an endgame thing to chase.

You get the mats for masterworking by doing runs in "The Pit", which basically functions exactly like Greater Rifts in D3: it's timed runs where monsters drop no loot, the boss appears after killing a certain number of enemies, and you have to finish in time to get the rewards, with a time penalty for deaths. The Pit scales up even higher than Nightmare Dungeons do, making it the hardest content in the game. Higher tiers will reward you with more mats for masterworking, although you can still get by doing more runs on lower tiers, it'll just take you longer.

There are also new higher-tier versions of bosses that have better chances to drop the ultra-rare "uber uniques". Plus, there's now even a way to craft uber uniques, by collecting four "resplendent sparks" that can be earned seasonally through various methods.

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Anyway, I've been having a good time with the game for the past week. Up through level 100 I just played the same Werebear Pulverize Druid I'd been playing before, which was perfectly fine just for leveling up. But upon reaching the true endgame content I realized that this build was fine defensively but couldn't kill higher-level bosses worth a damn, it was like I was hitting them with a pillow. I switched to a Werewolf Tornado Druid, generally considered the most powerful of the Druid builds right now, and after doing some masterworking of my equipment etc., I managed to beat Tormented Duriel, the easiest of the level 200 uber-bosses, without too much trouble, which wrapped up my season journey.

And now I'm thinking that I may actually start a second seasonal character. The Necromancer is apparently the hotness right now, since Blizzard finally made the minions survivable and powerful enough in general that a pet build is not just viable, but actually the preferred way to play, rather than sacrificing all minions and becoming a glorified Sorcerer. I'd always wanted to play a full minion build with Necro before, but couldn't because it used to be so awful. At this point, leveling is so fast that I could probably hit the level of my 50-ish Eternal Realm Necro in a long Saturday of playing, and could earn another resplendent spark to boot (you can earn one per seasonal character by simply playing Helltides enough).

What can I say, Diablo seems like it may be back as my "podcast game" of choice. Anyone else tried this thing lately?

Well I hadn't been but this post convinced me to give it another whirl. I liked the base game and story but didn't really enjoy the post game or seasonal content but it seems like they've made that significantly better. Also I really want to try a pet necro build now that it's viable.

I will say that this is yet another example of early adopters getting screwed in gaming. Not only did they have to play the game when the loot system was worse but all their stuff is pretty worthless now because it doesn't have star rolls.

I have no idea how they screwed the loot up SO BADLY on launch. It's ironic because they got a lot of stuff really right and made a game that I did enjoy quite a bit, with some amazing atmosphere and cut scenes as well as decent mechanical wrinkles but they managed to completely whiff on the thing that makes Diablo Diablo.

Good that they're correcting course and that you don't need to pay extra for the fixed version (though there is an expansion coming too, I think this year.)

It's actually even a bit worse than that. Since old gear had four affixes instead of the new three, all that old equipment is marked as "legacy" and can't be tempered or masterworked at all, hence its potential is just that much lower than the new stuff. I imagine that it would probably still work fine while you hunted for updated gear, but I was playing seasonal so I started from scratch anyway.

I wasn't as down on it as you were, and it was certainly better than D3 was at launch, where uniques not only had abysmally low drop rates, but were often bad items even when they did drop (I remember using well-rolled rares almost exclusively for a long time). But there's no doubt that "Loot Reborn", as they're calling it, is a massive improvement. It took them about a year to sort their loot out (amongst other things), but IIRC that's about how long it took for D3's "Loot 2.0", which I believe coincided with the Reaper of Souls release.

TBH I had completely forgotten that they announced an expansion. I'll be interested to see what exactly is in it and whether it's actually worth buying. E.g., I played D3 for a long time and did buy Reaper of Souls but not the later Necro, I didn't care enough.

@atheistpreacher: "It works fine while you get the new stuff" is the MMO expansion power creep issue. It's very rare for it to happen without an expansion being introduced. It's not a huge deal I guess, but playing so many hours with the old, bad, systems is. Like we all had to go through the slow leveling and deal with pretty boring loot.

I think in general everyone thought the loot system was boring and had a lot of issues. I don't think they'd be trumpeting "Loot Reborn" if it wasn't a widely derided issue. And being better than Diablo 3 at launch is a very low bar. It was also launched 11 years earlier than 4 and they should have been able to roll the lessons from 3 into 4, which it seems like they are starting to after a year. But Diablo 3 had a terrible launch in a lot of ways and probably only survived and thrived eventually due to the strength of the name (and some admittedly very good underlying gameplay and graphical "bones.")

I ended up getting Rise of the Necromancer as part of a bundle with Diablo II remastered at a lowish price but I didn't really get much out of it.

Reaper of Souls on the other hand...

I mean I have to imagine you did get Reaper of Souls, arguably one of the best expansions ever but even if you don't feel that definitely worth it if you play a lot of Diablo.

@bigsocrates: Yeah I did buy Reaper of Souls, I actually was just editing my response to reflect that. I just didn't buy the Necro, as that was a later thing.

Most loot games these days do generally tend to have fairly regular "loot resets" where you have to go out and find all new stuff. More engagement, says some executive. Often it's just increasing a level cap so you have to go and find the higher level gear. But this is a bit of a weird one as a more total revamp rather than a simple level increase. At least it doesn't matter at all in the context of seasons, which is where Blizzard tends to focus, but it does kind of suck for Eternal Realm characters.

Agreed that launch D3 was a very low bar to clear and they should have learned more lessons from it. Those who refuse to learn from history, etc.

@atheistpreacher: Most live service loot games these days do have some form of power creep (there are loot games that are just static) but they sometimes include upgrade paths for old stuff etc... It's rare to just leave it all behind unless it's a paid expansion of some kind.

Honestly it's not really so much the old loot not being good anymore that irritates me as the feeling like I paid the most for the game (as a launch player) and got the worst experience, I know that's pretty common these days but it has never stopped annoying me.

In the olden days developers used to finish a game and put it out and it was what it was. Maybe there was a revamped version on newer hardware at some point or with a PC game you might get some bug patches and expansions but the game was designed and released.

Now we're all beta testers. And that's what I feel like when I see these kinds of revamps, not just to loot but to leveling. A beta tester who paid for the privilege.

I enjoyed the game so I'm not super bitter about it or anything, just the general way things work now rubs me the wrong way.

Now they need to do a skill revamp because I still think the Diablo IV skill system is kind of mediocre. Like the loot the skills are too much about fine tuning and not enough about doing cool new things and changing the game. That's my main complaint about both old loot AND the skills. Too incremental. For me it's fun to watch the number go up, but to watch them go up slowly and in a way that doesn't feel impactful just makes it feel too grindy.

It's more balanced, and the big impactful stuff can be a nightmare from that perspective, but I think the percentage of Diablo players who care about balance is much lower than the percent who care about the "cool" factor, they just get catered to more because they're more hardcore.

I miss when games cared more about being fun and exciting than being balanced.

Overall, I'm positive on the changes. I spent a LOT of time with Diablo 3 over the years, and one thing I was hoping for for the sequel was that they would slow things down, make leveling and gearing up more of a process, and make legendaries more rare and special. Well, that seemed to be their initial philosophy, but they messed up so bad that they had to hard pivot back to D3's constant candy explosions. This season pushes you to Helltide from the start, and the new Helltide boss can be summoned using 3 hearts which drop pretty frequently, so a lot of my opening moments were spent around the boss area with a handful of other players, each with 10+ hearts, constantly summoning and killing the boss who drops like 5-10 legendaries each time. By level 30, I was fully decked out with legendaries, including two uniques. Absolutely absurd. It makes sense with the way the new codex works, but part of me can't help feeling a little bummed about the new direction. That said, I can't deny it's better than it was before.

Also, the days of picking up a cool item and equipping it are gone. Now it's about taking it to town to rework it. In the late game where upgrades are few and far between, these additions are great, but early on, I found myself scrapping potential upgrades because it was too much of a hassle to go through that whole process.

So I'm fairly torn on the early game, but late game! Oh, late game. Now you have my two favorite additions: greater affixes and masterworking. While standard legendaries are now a complete non-event, greater affixes bring back that level of rarity and excitement when something drops. A legendary with a star at the end? Fairly uncommon. Two stars? Pretty rare. Three? Haven't seen one yet, but knowing they're out there gives me that itch to keep looting. I guess uniques can even drop with four, but I'll never see one of those.

Masterworking also provides some sense of progression you lose once you hit max level, which... hey. Did we have to make it this easy to reach the level cap? I think being level 100 kinda sucks. When I've been playing for hours and my drops have sucked, I want at least something to show for that time. I know the infinite leveling of D3 was divisive (I loved it), but I dunno, I want that XP to go somewhere. Masterworking gives you a great reason to keep playing, but it unlocks so late in the leveling process that you then very quickly hit a great reason to stop. Even still, I want to keep playing, so hey, they've done something right.

Diablo 4 at launch was stuck between worlds, no doubt in part to the revolving door of designers involved. Parts of the game suggested a slower, more measured pace (a far cry from the frantic lootsplosion rift sprints that came define Diablo 3's final form), but other parts seemed tuned with an entirely different speed in mind. This is how you get the sluggish experience curve, but I think nothing demonstrates the problem quite like Nightmare Dungeons. They were clearly something you were meant to do a whole bunch of times back to back (essentially D3's rifts), but you had to manually ride your (much slower then) horse to it each time -- two gears that wanted to move at different speeds but got stuck. Friction is fine in a game, if we get something back in return, but the process of riding out to each dungeon was a great case of worthless friction -- if you were doing nightmare dungeons, there was nothing worth stopping for out in the overworld.

So they had to pick a lane -- build a game that maintains friction but makes it rewarding; or burn all friction to the ground. The latter is much easier to do in hurry, so I'm not surprised by the decision. It's resulted in a Diablo 3-style game that is less frustrating, more cohesive, and dare I say better than it was at launch, but I also find it completely uninteresting. I liked Reaper of Souls but I've already played it, and given that Diablo 4's narrative was about the folly of just doing the same thing over and over again, it's disappointing to see the game now following its predecessor down the path of absolutely zero resistance.

@bigsocrates said:

I get the frustration, but on the other hand I don't there was any malicious intent on the part of the devs. If they could have released a better game from the start they gladly would have, and I don't think simply delaying it another year until now would have led them to all the improvements that a year of player feedback suggested to them. And in the past, before the era of live service games, we likely would have simply been stuck with a worse game for longer. In that sense I don't get too worked up about it.

It does strike me with Hades 2 entering early access recently that Supergiant is literally making its early adopters "beta testers who pay for the privilege," but being very upfront about it, which I don't think anyone minds. I suppose Blizzard could have done the same thing for Diablo 4, but it's just not something that AAA companies do, they seem to consider if beneath their dignity or something. But we also all knew that D4 was going to improve, that's just how these games work. Theoretically I could have waited a year until the game was better to start, but I didn't really want to!

Yeah, I think the issue is that making the skill trees themselves that much more impactful leads to them multiplying off of the legendary affixes in multiplicative ways that become nigh impossible to balance. In a sense you have to pick one or the other or try to balance the scales between skills and gear. Last Epoch went the other direction and made their skill trees really involved and impactful, but the loot itself was exceeding uninteresting and unimportant (at least when last I tried it). And D4 does at least have the paragon boards, which do have some game-changing powers on them, and which I think are kind of neat generally. I do wish that the basic 1-50 skill tree was a little more straightforward, I don't like the weird meandering path design of it that makes it hard to see at a glance.

Overall, though, I do tend to agree that too much worry about balance just cuts into the fun, which is reminding of the thread I started a couple if years ago about how much I enjoy "breaking" games.

I have seen three stars... four times. For funsies, here they are:

The two one-handed weapons are sadly worthless to me ATM because the build I'm using requires a two-handed weapon. That Hammer is good, not quite the right weapon type, but still very usable, though I'd roll off the lucky hit effect for straight resource cost reduction. The amulet is OK, but max resource is kinda unexciting and total armor % is wasted for my current build.

Which actually brings me to another recent change regarding armor, for those deep into the game who care about such things (took me a while to realize this, maybe it will also be news to someone else). There is now a hard cap on armor at 9,230 for the full 85% damage reduction against level 100 enemies, and you now get that full 85% damage reduction against all higher-level enemies (whereas before, you'd need yet more armor for every level of an enemy above your own, e.g. for the ones that show up in nightmare dungeons at level 150 etc... meaning there is now a more reasonable limit on your squishiness against the highest-tier content). Worth noting in this connection is that there is an all-classes aspect called "Juggernaut" that has the negative effect of increasing your evade cooldown by 100%, but in return gives you up to 10,000 armor... enough to hit the armor cap all by itself (I'm using this on my current Druid build). I expect that this will probably get nerfed at some point, but suffice it to say that there seem to be ways to hit the armor cap even with the ranged builds without too much difficulty. But I hadn't understood this about the new armor cap before doing some research, I'd just assumed that it was working like previously.

FWIW my two best pieces of equipment are probably these double-star ones:

Not bad at all! And that the fire resistance on the pants is non-starred doesn't even really matter since the 5% increases per masterworking level will put me at the resistance cap by level 12 anyway, so it's as close to perfect a roll as I'm likely to get. The ring doesn't have starred attack speed, and the resource cost temper roll is a minimum one, but still quite a good item.

Agree to disagree on the leveling. As I mentioned in the blog, I'd intended going in to level all classes to 100 before I found out just how many hours it was going to take, and promptly lost interest. I'd rather get to the endgame faster, it makes me way more likely to actually explore other classes rather than just stick with one.

Hey, fair enough, I get it. I've certainly been known to like games with lots of friction. The recent Dragon's Dogma 2 was all about that, I really enjoyed it and wrote my last blog about it (incidentally, a Double Fine dev did their own blog about DD2 that is a great read, more interesting than mine IMO). But I suppose it simply comes down to what you're looking to get out of a game. To me Diablo is the epitome of a casual "forever" podcast game and is best with little to no friction. I'm a simple man, I just want them loot explosions and increasing numbers until I decide to play something else. To each their own!

Yeah, I've been playing the new season, and it does seem to be the best one yet. The new feature that lets you add bonus stats through recipes is fun, and I just started on the 3rd Nightmare tier and getting a lot of good loot and decent fights. Hopefully, this brings people back to the game, so we can get more content, and possible new story DLC.

It's definitely a better season and I'm enjoying playing it but every time I start it up I get a few hours in and I just miss the... character of D3. Everyone and everything in this world is so goddamn dull nobody has ever popped off But Once no matter how many hordes of demons you mow through.

Well, with the state of the lategame at launch, I don't blame you. I don't think what we consider the endgame has to start at or around the level cap, I think that's actually pretty unusual for the genre. I know it takes a hundred billion years to hit the level cap in D2 and PoE, but it doesn't take nearly that long for people to start doing their Mephisto runs or whatever. Unlock masterworking and start dropping 925-power items at level 50, I say.

As for trying out new classes, isn't that what seasons are for?

That probably is what seasons are for, I just hadn't ever personally played that way myself. I never touched the D3 seasons and just wanted to max all classes so I could play around with endgame builds with all of them. I was always wanting to get to the point where I could start actually keeping the gear I picked up, rather than knowing I'd be discarding it for something higher-level later (I don't think that particular aspect is all that unusual, actually). Having 925-power items drop earlier would indeed help with that, it would make the leveling grind itself less urgent, which could then be lengthened a bit again. But IDK, I think it's balanced pretty decently right now. Can't please everyone.

@atheistpreacher: Admittedly, I have a bit of a sickness. If they just let me keep increasing the number in the corner with no power increase to my character, I'd probably be happy. I just like seeing that blue meter fill up.

I agree with you. Diablo III had more charm and personality, not just in the overall world, but each character class had their own personality and backstory. All that was stripped in this game. A pity.

I've said this before and so won't repeat it at length, but I always thought the D3 art controversy was dumb and that it looked fine. Someone here pointed out that it looked very WoW in style, which is maybe why more people were wanting something darker and just different from WoW, but speaking only for myself, I've never played a second of WoW, so it just didn't bother me. It did have more personality, both in the art style and the dialogue etc.

In comparison D4 does indeed seem a little grimdark and dull, and worse, less readable (another thing I'd complained about previously). But this reminds me of another change I forgot to mention that I really appreciate. Upon firing up the game for the first time since I'd finished season 2, I was greeted with this screen:

Wait, you mean I can actually see enemies again, they don't just blend into the background? Sign me the f*ck up!

The controller targeting in this game is still one of the great mysteries of the universe.

Pointing camera at target, looking at target in the middle of the view, skill decides it really wants to f*ck up the vase to my right.

Pointing camera at the Elite directly in front of me, press Shadow Dash zip past it and past everything currently in view to hit something off screen.

@efesell: Yeah, you know, I'm generally a console guy and will buy games on my PS5 over PC when I can, and when I do buy on PC, I still usually prefer a gamepad. Just... not for Diablo or other isometric RPGs like it. Mouse and keyboard all the way. The rare exception for me.

@atheistpreacher: I mean I would generally have given them a pass and just accept that I'm playing a game that is mismatched for controller and move on....

But it worked great in Diablo 3, a game that wasn't even designed for console initially. So they went into Diablo 4 knowing that it was going to be on everything from the jump and they still designed so many classes to have skills that require pinpoint placement or targeting to use optimally.