Diablo 4 launched to rave critic reviews, but its patchy endgame and overload of samey looking loot with marginal stat improvements quickly got players talking about the need for improvements. Blizzard tried to course correct a few times, and outside of the first major patch, which was universally despised, as it nerfed pretty much every single fun build, they’ve mostly succeeded at turning the ship around.
Why do I say mostly? Well, last month’s Vessel of Hatred expansion, which introduced an all new class and a complete rework of the gear we acquire (hot on the heels of a different loot rework that shipped in the appropriately named Season of Loot Reborn) has introduced its own issues to the mix, muddying the waters a bit. Now, don’t get me wrong, the Spiritborn is a really fun class, and the campaign, while somewhat underwhelming near the end, is a very strong Diablo campaign that does a great job of introducing the new playable areas and the return of the Mercenaries. Sadly, the second loot rework, while clearly well intentioned, has missed the mark in my opinion, class balance is out of the window, with the “legacy” Diablo 4 classes being completely power crept by the new one, and the return to Diablo 3-like Torment difficulty tiers wasn’t handled the best way it could have been.
That’s a lot to unpack, so I’ll give a brief overview of where I think things have gone wrong on each front, starting with the loot rework. The original issue loot had in Diablo 4 was that players had to look at every single yellow and up piece they got, and determine whether very small stat increases were worth the investment or not. This meant that looting was often a really boring and time-wasting experience, which is the opposite of what you want in a Diablo game. The first solution the developers implemented made yellows unimportant past a certain point and focused more on Legendaries and Uniques, while also introducing Greater Affixes which would massively boost some stats on the gear, but were relatively rare (and were very easy to identify).
This change worked fairly well, but there was still slightly too much loot to sift through, and in order to streamline everything, Blizzard decided to completely rework everything again, making Ancestral-tier items (the highest rarity) always drop with Greater Affixes, but also have a way lower drop rate. In theory, this fixes the issue, since now players will get to a point where the only viable upgrades for their builds are Ancestral pieces, and those are very easy to identify, and rare enough to not clutter the world (and our bags). So far so good, right? Well, the issue is that while Ancestrals are rare, they can still drop with completely useless affixes, which means we might go dozens of hours without seeing a single upgrade if we are unlucky enough with the RNG. I’ve done hundreds of Duriel and Andariel rotations where I walked off with perhaps two drops that I considered an upgrade (or vaulted with the intent to maybe use them in another build or trade). I feel things have veered way too much to the other side of the road, and Blizzard should probably look into increasing Ancestral drop rates (and especially base Ancestral Legendary drop rates). The same thing goes for Legendary Aspects, which are now added to our codex for the duration of the season and upgraded every time we find a higher roll of any aspect (as opposed to the system we had at launch, where they were consumables stored in a specific inventory slot). In theory this system is great, but in practice the drop rates are once again too low, and you can go more than fifty hours without seeing an upgrade for an aspect you need for your build, which is clearly a bit too much for a game where characters are reset every three months.
The second big issue Vessel of Hatred has introduced is that the all new Spiritborn class is clearly head and shoulders above the rest, to a point where it’s an utter waste of time to create a Barbarian, for example, if you intend to push for higher tier Pit of the Artificer runs. This is partly due to bugs that will eventually be fixed, but also because of the stat squish that shipped with Vessel as Blizzard‘s attempt at avoiding Diablo 3‘s crazy post-Reaper of Souls numbers where players had billions of HP and hit for trillions on the regular. The new class was clearly designed with the post stat squish numbers in mind, but the “legacy” classes were not, and they need a bunch of buffs if they are intended to be competitive in Torment 4.
And here’s where we come to the difficulty part of the discussion. None of the Diablo games are the type of title where mechanical skill decides the outcome of a fight, even after the introduction of an active evade mechanic in Diablo 4 (I’ll grant that Uber Lilith does require a certain degree of active dodging, but that’s about it). The new Torment tiers seem designed so players get to Torment 4 as quickly as possible and farm there, because the previous three Torment tiers don’t offer nearly as much loot, and you need said gear if you want to push into late game content. Legendary runes for instance, are pretty much unheard of in Torment 1-3, but once you get to Torment 4 they start to drop fairly reliably from Infernal Hordes , Pit or World Bosses. Paragon Glyphs level up much quicker on Torment 4, since the success chance for hitting a level up goes up exponentially, Ancestral Gear has a higher drop rate, and I could go on and on. But unless you are playing as a Spiritborn, you’ll have a fairly terrible time the moment you first step into T4, and in order to get good gear to actually stand a chance you’d have to spend an inordinate amount of hours in T3, which doesn’t feel fun at all.
It feels to me that Blizzard is trying to create “aspirational content” with the highest Torment tier and later Pit levels, but that kind of thing doesn’t really work very well in a game where everything is decided by the gear you have and not your mechanical skill. You can have aspirational content on Destiny 2 for instance because a player’s ability to deal with the threats at hand will be the most important part, with their gear coming second, but that’s not how Diablo 4 works. I’m not saying Blizzard should completely gut Torment 4, but perhaps they should start thinking about increasing the drop rates for loot that will enable better builds for non-Spiritborn classes on Torment 1-3.
What do you think, dear reader? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
