Diablo 4
I have been on a bit of a rollercoaster ride with Diablo 4 season 4 since it launched just under a week ago. But as I sit staring at my level 99 character, which has already blown past how far I got in all of season 3, I’m thinking yeah, this has gone pretty well.
I was impressed by the changes to itemization and Helltides that you can see right away in the game, even if re-leveling those early levels was still irritating. But then I hit a power swing so wild I was blasting through everything I could find for 48 hours or so, which made it seem like the difficulty curve had gone a bit too off the rails.
Now, deeper into the endgame, I have run into those later challenge walls as I crawl my Barbarian past 75 Nightmare dungeons and 35 Pits. I’m no pro, but already this is deeper than I almost ever get into the endgame, and in my spare time I’ve been soloing Duriel and Andariel.
But the way I can sum up why this season works so well is…my 64% move speed boots. These:
Diablo 4
This is a prime example of why the gear chase is so much fun now. What exactly happened here? A few things:
- Legendary gear now has the ability to drop with one (or sometimes more) stats boosted to 150% of their normal values. That’s what happened with the baseline move speed number here on top, which gives it almost 30% right off the bat.
- Then, with the ability to “temper” items by adding additional perks from a few buckets, I had a 1 in 4 chance to apply even more move speed (with some rerolls) for an additional 13%.
- The blue number there is what happens when you masterwork an item four times, as each time you do that, a random stat will jump by 25%. In this case, that was dodge chance, but it could have also been move speed which would have made this even crazier ~36% base speed item. Take it all the way up to max (which is super expensive) and you keep getting those boosts applied.
- Then, an old system, I imprinted it for the my Ghostwalker aspect that gives me another 21% move speed (which could have been 25%) when unstoppable, which is very often. So, this is around 64% move speed altogether, and it could have been even more. I actually took off a 12% movespeed amulet because it was so much overkill.
This is just movespeed, but you understand what I mean. You can do this for any item, almost anything you’re looking for to take it to absurd levels. The combination of randomly boosted perks with grinded-out masteries and roll-based tempering is a great endgame pursuit when literally neither of those things existed before. It’s a really transformed loot system and worth checking out even if it took a while to get here.
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