Hey, look, Diablo 4 is better now

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?