Diablo IV is/was on sale 50% off so I took the plunge since it had just had a major update and hadn’t played the game at all outside of those two beta demo periods. It’s no longer called Diablo IV it’s now called Diablo IV: Loot Reborn.
You thought I was joking.
Anyway I don’t know how the game worked at launch but it kind of reminds me of Diablo III after Reaper of Souls came out in that it is really easy to level a character up quickly to max level and start doing end game stuff if that’s how you roll.
I got the game Sunday and started a lightning sorcerer and spent most of the day just dorking around doing side quests and dungeons and world events and stuff and took her from level 1 to 28. Since then I’ve been focusing on doing the main quest and have slowed down a bit and just hit level 35.
You can make yourself really powerful tempering affixes to your gear. I don’t know how affixes worked originally but now you get affixes from salvaging equipment that have them at a blacksmith, which puts the affix in your codex, and then you can temper new gear (rare or legendary) at the blacksmith using resources you get from salvaging and the affixes are pooled into six different groups. There’s Weapons, Offensive, Defensive, Utility, Mobility, and Resource. Then each of those groups have subgroups, so like Offensive has stuff like Shock Finesse, Pyromancy Finesse, Natural Finesse etc. which each have three or four modifiers to pull from and when you temper you randomly get one of those modifiers.
So I have a couple pieces of gear with Natural Finesse affixes that boost my damage to distant enemies by between 145-190% each. But here’s the kicker, you don’t get to choose which modifier you end up with but you can re roll the tempering up to four times if you don’t like what you got the first time. Fortunately tempering is cheap enough that you can re roll and most of time get what you’re looking for but it is possible to end up with a piece of gear that has something you don’t want so it’s a little bit of a gamble.
But so far I’m just laying waste to shit and having a time blasting through the main quest. I’ll bump it up to world tier 3 as soon as I’m able, I think that becomes an option once you hit level 50.
There are also elixirs you can find or craft, not sure if these are new or not either, but they give you various boosts for 15-30 minutes and all the ones I’ve found so far also give you a small 5-6% increase to experience. I haven’t been using these much but will probably start just to keep the levels coming quickly. I want to get through the main quest so I can back to just exploring the world and doing the random events that spawn and stuff. This is a good game to play while listening to a podcast.
It is really funny to me that the talk about what they were trying to do before the game was out was make it a more slower paced Diablo game where every level gained was meaningful etc. and a year later it is basically Diablo III kind of. Still some top tier dungeon hacking though.
