Better combat, crafting with legendary items and a Paragon system reminiscent of Path of Exile: Diablo 4 finally shows off its improved endgame.
It’s time again for a new quarterly update on Diablo 4: After the last developer blog was all about the sound design, the (December post) again features news on gameplay and game mechanics.
The four most important news about Diablo 4
1. the Paragon system returns
Those who have played Diablo 3 before will be familiar with the Paragon system: after you reach the highest level, you can continue to earn experience points to level up in Paragon. This offers helpful values in Diablo 3 such as critical hit chance, running speed or resistances, but is pretty straightforward.
In Diablo 4, the system becomes much more complex: As soon as you reach level 50, you get access to the Paragon board. This represents a new skill tree of its own, in which dozens of nodes are waiting to be unlocked.
These nodes are divided into four different rarity levels:
- Grey/Common: These only give small bonuses to stats such as strength or intelligence.
- Blue/Magical: These squares give a little more variety in stats, such as resistances.
- Yellow/Rare: Yellow squares are supposed to represent significant buffs. Especially if you have already committed to a playstyle or build, there are bonuses here that can complement it perfectly.
- Orange/Legendary: After the first board, each following has a legendary tile that, when unlocked, grants a powerful talent or enhancement to a specific skill.
Leveling without end: At the sides of the currently active board there are transitions that lead you to other boards. These in turn have their own layout and offer new fields that you can unlock. So that you can really plan your build, you always have a list of new fields to choose from. These can also be rotated before you attach them to the exit of your choice.
Glyphs: In addition to the fields already mentioned, there are also unlockable slots in which you can socket the so-called glyphs. You can find these as loot and they work similarly to the jewels in Path of Exile.
The glyphs have a radius and grant bonuses depending on which fields have been unlocked in the vicinity. For example, glyphs can strengthen all affected squares or grant a bonus of their own that becomes stronger when you have unlocked certain squares in the radius.
2. Legendary Items and Crafting
Even a year ago, the developers stated that legendary and unique items will play a big role in how a character will play:
Occultist: In the current blog entry they have now introduced a new NPC – the Occultist. This trader can disenchant legendary equipment for you and thus put the legendary property of an item into an essence sphere.
If you combine this orb with another item of your choice – such as a yellow/rare item that has the perfect stats for you – it will receive the legendary trait on top of it.
Targeted looting: While the distribution of loot in Diablo 3 was still completely random and you could find almost all uniques and set items in the rifts – with the exception of individual cases such as the Ring of Royal Splendour – in Diablo 4 you will be able to go on a more targeted loot hunt.
Certain enemy types have a higher chance of dropping certain item types. Blizzard mentions bandits as an example: They drop more clubs, crossbows and boots.
3. new animations and effects
Blizzard has also presented some visual adjustments. The biggest feature is that each class and each ability has unique killing animations to offer.
While the sorceress will burn her enemies to ashes with fire spells, the barbarian will be able to bisect or crush the same monsters – all depending on the skill chosen. You can see what this looks like in action in the following new gameplay video:
4. more realistic fights
To make combat feel a little more realistic, your punches and spells will now only hit where the associated animation suggests they should.
One example, which you can also see in the video embedded above, is the barbarian’s iconic whirlwind: In the previous series installments, this was simply a cylindrical area where damage was dealt around your character.
In Diablo 4, you will only hit your enemies when your weapon is actually whirling past an enemy. This should also help to make the death animations mentioned above even more impressive and immersive, for example by having the ragdolls of the killed enemies fly in the direction of the hit.
However, the release of Diablo 4 is still a long time coming. As announced in November, the release date is 2023 at the earliest. Next year, however, Diablo Immortal is to be released as a fully-fledged, new Diablo for mobile devices – which will also be playable on the PC.
