I wanted to talk about Diablo 4 again after the 15 months since the game released. A launch Diablo 4 was a very disappointing game, and signified that Blizzard was pretty much incapable of doing anything correctly besides art and sound design. The company is now part of Microsoft and I had hoped for positive changes, though the company is a huge ship and it takes time to change course. Not that I have much faith in Microsoft either, but you never know, stranger things have happened.
Over the past 15 months Diablo 4 has gone through 5 seasons of content, which is fairly typical of an ARPG, the gameplay model is based on seasons that add and mix around features each reset. However Diablo 4's seasons have had some of the biggest whiffs at bat that I have ever seen. Season 1 wasn't even an event really, just some half-assed questline with currency that bogged down your already shitty inventory space. But season 2 was much better, adding a vampire power system that added a level of power to the game that made it feel much more fun to play. Season 3 was the biggest piece of dogshit, trying to double down on the vampire power system it gave you a robot companion that could be good if you wanted to grind for 200 hours.
It wasn't until Season 4 that Diablo made changes in the right direction, namely they completely redid the loot system. I mentioned this in the original review for D4 but the loot was a big problem because it was way too bloated with potential stats that were meaningless to people and/or too confusing to figure out. Damage to frozen enemies, near enemies, far enemies, enemies wearing silly hats, blue damage, red damage, damage to demons going to the bathroom. Far too much and not enough stats designed to make your character actually good. Season 4 got rid of all of it, making the state much more straightforward and easier to understand as well as making it much easier to get a baseline character online. Additionally they added systems to further improve your gear through "crafting", though it's little more than improving your gear by 5% each click of a button. Nevertheless the gear changes made the game fun again, on top of adding new ways to get the Uber items.
They've added super bosses which now have a set chance to drop those Uber unique items that literally ZERO players found for months after launch. Now these super bosses will drop those items at about a 1% rate, which is still low, but because they are farmable it made a huge difference in people actually getting to use and play with the best items in the game.
And that brings me to Vessel of Hatred and Season 6. The expansion to Diablo 4 comes with a brand new class that nobody wanted (people really want Paladin) called Spiritborn which is basically a Monk with Druid powers, punching people and calling forth beast spirits to aid in battle. Being the new class it's obviously the most powerful class in the game because Blizzard doesn't know how to balance anything ever, but despite that it's a fun enough class.
In addition to the new class there are new end game activities, well....actually there is one new endgame activity called the Citadel which is a co-op style dungeon that requires several players to do some mechanics during boss fights to win. The rest of the endgame stuff is the same except shuffled around a bit.
Nightmare Dungeons are used to farm currency and Pit keys. The Pit is just the greater rift system from Diablo 3 except it holds the keys to unlocking the higher difficulties (which like D3 are also call Torrment 1,2,3,and4), The Pit also levels your glyphs which used to be in the Nightmare Dungeons but they moved that system entirely. Now glyphs that go into your paragon board can level up to 100 instead of just 21, but they also grant much bigger effect to your character. The trade off for those extra levels is that the levels are easier to get, at the end of a Pit level you get 5 upgrades to a glyph, and if the Pit level you did is higher than the level of your glyph, you'll level it pretty easily. There is a bit more to it but that's the basic idea.
Speaking of glyphs in the paragon board, that whole system is a a little different to adjust for the change in levels. New expansion means a new level cap....kind of. Originally you leveled from 1 to 100, however at level 50 you stopped getting basic skill points and starting getting a paragon point every 1/4th of a level. They completely scraped that system. Now you level from 1 to 60, getting skill points the whole way up. At 60 exp becomes paragon exp that goes from level 1-300 and these paragon levels are account wide. Meaning if you want to level a new character, that character would level 1-60, but at 60 would immediately unlock all paragon levels you have from a previous character that season. Making alt's more friendly, while also adding a bit more grind to the leveling process. I like this system better because I tend to wanna try different builds on different characters and only having to grind the levels once is a good change.
Outside of that it's mostly just a more streamlined and easier to play experience than Diablo 4 was originally.
The new campaign is very short and also very stupid. It's a story about the power of friendship and you don't even fight the villain at the end so....I don't even wanna talk about it. It's bad, but people don't play these games for that shit anyway.
Over the past 15 months Diablo 4 has gone through 5 seasons of content, which is fairly typical of an ARPG, the gameplay model is based on seasons that add and mix around features each reset. However Diablo 4's seasons have had some of the biggest whiffs at bat that I have ever seen. Season 1 wasn't even an event really, just some half-assed questline with currency that bogged down your already shitty inventory space. But season 2 was much better, adding a vampire power system that added a level of power to the game that made it feel much more fun to play. Season 3 was the biggest piece of dogshit, trying to double down on the vampire power system it gave you a robot companion that could be good if you wanted to grind for 200 hours.
It wasn't until Season 4 that Diablo made changes in the right direction, namely they completely redid the loot system. I mentioned this in the original review for D4 but the loot was a big problem because it was way too bloated with potential stats that were meaningless to people and/or too confusing to figure out. Damage to frozen enemies, near enemies, far enemies, enemies wearing silly hats, blue damage, red damage, damage to demons going to the bathroom. Far too much and not enough stats designed to make your character actually good. Season 4 got rid of all of it, making the state much more straightforward and easier to understand as well as making it much easier to get a baseline character online. Additionally they added systems to further improve your gear through "crafting", though it's little more than improving your gear by 5% each click of a button. Nevertheless the gear changes made the game fun again, on top of adding new ways to get the Uber items.
They've added super bosses which now have a set chance to drop those Uber unique items that literally ZERO players found for months after launch. Now these super bosses will drop those items at about a 1% rate, which is still low, but because they are farmable it made a huge difference in people actually getting to use and play with the best items in the game.
And that brings me to Vessel of Hatred and Season 6. The expansion to Diablo 4 comes with a brand new class that nobody wanted (people really want Paladin) called Spiritborn which is basically a Monk with Druid powers, punching people and calling forth beast spirits to aid in battle. Being the new class it's obviously the most powerful class in the game because Blizzard doesn't know how to balance anything ever, but despite that it's a fun enough class.
In addition to the new class there are new end game activities, well....actually there is one new endgame activity called the Citadel which is a co-op style dungeon that requires several players to do some mechanics during boss fights to win. The rest of the endgame stuff is the same except shuffled around a bit.
Nightmare Dungeons are used to farm currency and Pit keys. The Pit is just the greater rift system from Diablo 3 except it holds the keys to unlocking the higher difficulties (which like D3 are also call Torrment 1,2,3,and4), The Pit also levels your glyphs which used to be in the Nightmare Dungeons but they moved that system entirely. Now glyphs that go into your paragon board can level up to 100 instead of just 21, but they also grant much bigger effect to your character. The trade off for those extra levels is that the levels are easier to get, at the end of a Pit level you get 5 upgrades to a glyph, and if the Pit level you did is higher than the level of your glyph, you'll level it pretty easily. There is a bit more to it but that's the basic idea.
Speaking of glyphs in the paragon board, that whole system is a a little different to adjust for the change in levels. New expansion means a new level cap....kind of. Originally you leveled from 1 to 100, however at level 50 you stopped getting basic skill points and starting getting a paragon point every 1/4th of a level. They completely scraped that system. Now you level from 1 to 60, getting skill points the whole way up. At 60 exp becomes paragon exp that goes from level 1-300 and these paragon levels are account wide. Meaning if you want to level a new character, that character would level 1-60, but at 60 would immediately unlock all paragon levels you have from a previous character that season. Making alt's more friendly, while also adding a bit more grind to the leveling process. I like this system better because I tend to wanna try different builds on different characters and only having to grind the levels once is a good change.
Outside of that it's mostly just a more streamlined and easier to play experience than Diablo 4 was originally.
The new campaign is very short and also very stupid. It's a story about the power of friendship and you don't even fight the villain at the end so....I don't even wanna talk about it. It's bad, but people don't play these games for that shit anyway.
