Diablo 4 struggled to maintain community attention after launch. Season 4 could, however, be a major turning point for the game, as it will undergo profound changes. A PTR was set up for the first time to test all of this in preview, in which we participated.
This is the opportunity for us to give you our impressions of this upcoming major overhaul of Diablo 4, if you don’t have the time or the desire to install the PTR on your side. Especially since it is only available until April 9 on PC, and therefore not accessible to all players. Whether it’s the new loot system, the major changes to crafting or even class balancing, here is our opinion before the official deployment of all of this on May 14.
Diablo 4 will try to prioritize quality over quantity (of its loot)
Usually in hack’n slash, a shower of loot is synonymous with a satisfying injection of dopamine. In the case of Diablo 4, 99.9% of the loot collected unfortunately ended up in the trash. The fault is too many poor quality items and useless affixes. Blizzard seems to have heard the community’s grievances, and the trend should greatly reverse from Season 4.
The overall quantity of loot has indeed been massively revised downwards. This allows you to chain several dungeons/demon slaughters without having to return to town and waste your time sorting. In addition, from Torment 3 and 4, we will only see loot of Sacred and Ancestral quality respectively. Finally, we will no longer collect gems, but dust which will go into the components instead of filling our bag unnecessarily. On this point, we very much appreciated the changes seen in the PTR.
Better yet, the file for each object will become pleasantly clearer. Several affixes that are too situational will be discarded, to concentrate on the essential. Thus, each item that you collect will only offer the main statistic of your class (Dexterity for Thieves, for example). Overall, looted items will only present up to three affixes maximum such as an increase in the percentage of damage or the number of health points. What’s more, their stats will increase overall and exponentially as we level up.
Thus, we will be less drowned in loot, but it will be much more interesting overall. Such a change on Diablo 4 is certainly not to displease us, at least when it comes to leveling up. Once we reach the maximum level set at 100, we will necessarily be much more selective. And that’s where the crafting overhaul comes into play.
A major overhaul of crafting (and grinding?)
Our best friend in Diablo 4, the blacksmith, will indeed have new tools to do his work. It will no longer be a question of improving each piece of our equipment up to five times, but of tempering and perfecting them. We explain all this to you.
Quenching equipment will allow additional affixes to be added based on a list specific to each piece. For example, weapons will not have the same as boots, which will not have the same as gloves, and so on. This is where the more situational affixes were transferred, in order to create a tailor-made set for us. To do this, however, we will need to find recipes that we can loot naturally during our expeditions through Sanctuary. Each will give several different affixes. If we temper an item with a given recipe, one of the affixes will be applied randomly. However, it is possible that the blacksmith’s hammer will slip and that Lady Luck will play a bad trick on us by applying several times an affix that we do not want…
Each piece can be soaked a predefined number of times. Once this milestone is reached, we will no longer be able to soak our equipment (and too bad if you never got what you wanted). It will then have to be perfected. We then find the old improvement system from Diablo 4, but with a twist. We will now be able to improve each piece up to 12 times, and this will randomly improve only one of our affixes each time. Every 4 levels of improvement, however, we will be entitled to a higher improvement, drastically increasing the value of a random affix. It may, however, apply to the same affix three times, whether we like it or not.
On paper, this system seems to be interesting for making our stuff (more or less) as we understand it in Diablo 4, if we omit the (too much?) random side. However, both tempering and perfecting require enormous amounts of resources, some of which are only accessible through given activities. If the grind during leveling should be reduced thanks to better quality loot, this will inevitably be carried over into the endgame. We will see in the long term to what extent the thing could prove boring or not.
In addition to the blacksmith, our dear occultist will also experience very qualitative improvements. The Power Codex, our collection of legendary affixes, will now house absolutely every legendary effect in the game, instead of just a few. What’s more, this collection will improve over time. By recycling a legendary item, we will gain a level on the effect it carried. By applying the given affix to another piece of equipment, its statistics will therefore be improved, up to a maximum threshold. Finally, the cost of enchanting an item and trying to get another more interesting affix will be capped, instead of increasing shamefully exponentially. These changes to the Occultist are clearly some of the ones we liked the most in the Diablo 4 PTR.
Barely noticeable Diablo 4 class balancing
The last project that Blizzard intends to focus on in Diablo 4 is the balancing of its classes. However, we have not noticed any radically profound changes to our favorite classes which are Thief, Wizard and Necromancer. The builds we had been using since the beginning of the game were still proving to be just as effective.
However, we have noticed an appreciable overhaul in terms of the clarity of keywords in the skill tree and Paragon tables. These clarifications overlap with the avoidance of overly situational affixes on equipment. The synergies between the different skills of each class should therefore work better in the future, which is not to displease us.
The real balancing, however, will come during the deployment of Season 4. We should indeed be entitled to the traditional wall of text for each class, as well as the addition of unique legendary objects and effects, in order to try to improve them. reinvigorate the gameplay. This is also one of the points that annoys us the most with Diablo 4: even after three seasons and numerous additions, we see that most of the builds imagined at the launch of the game still remain very effective today. A solution to bring more diversity would possibly be to bring back the class sets from old games. In the current state of the game, however, such a thing does not seem to be Blizzard’s priority. Perhaps this will change with the new mechanics specific to Season 4, or the Vessel of Hatred expansion, expected this summer?