Diablo IV

What is an ARPG Season?

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Diablo IV Character Select Screen

Hey Friends! Right now there is a bit of strife happening in the fledgling Diablo IV community over the concept of what is going to happen with the upcoming start of Season 1, and the Battle Pass associated with it. This morning I thought I would take a moment because I honestly had no clue that the concept of a season in ARPG terms… or even that ARPG was a specific genre… was foreign to some gamers. This is me showing my ignorance as being a long-term member of this sub-genre community. Over the years you will have noticed that I play a lot of ARPGs and play an awful lot of seasons, so I thought I would take a bit this morning and talk through some of the terminology.

ARPG as a Genre

Diablo II Resurrected

First, let’s start off with defining “ARPG” as it is referred to by the “in group” that plays them as a hobby unto itself. It is admittedly a bad genre title, but it is one that was pinned onto Diablo as being one of the first real-time Action RolePlaying Games, and the name just sort of stuck. Over the years Action RPG has been pinned to a lot of games from Dark Souls to Devil May Cry… to even the Fallout Series… and to be honest, they are not wrong to do so. When I say ARPG however I more specifically mean the lineage of Diablo and the subgroup of largely isometric viewpoint hack-and-slash loot chase games that involve some degree of randomly generated content and a bunch of repetition in chase of building the perfect character. I guess it might be easier if I just rattle off some of the games in this genre to help define it.

  • Chronicon
  • Diablo Series
  • Dungeon Seige Series
  • Fate Series
  • Grim Dawn
  • Last Epoch
  • The now-defunct Marvel Heroes game
  • Path of Exile
  • Titan Quest
  • Torchlight Series
  • Undecember
  • Victor Vran
  • Wolcen
Victor Vran

This is by no means a complete list but represents a broad swath of the type of games included in the ARPG genre. I view “Looter Shooter” as a divergent genre that started with Borderlands and continued on into Destiny, Anthem, Division, and Outriders. When this genre broke apart from the pack of Isometric games, it picked up its own traditions and design ideas that carry forward from that point. Now I have questioned before whether or not Diablo IV should even be considered an ARPG by the definition of this genre or not. I personally think it aligns more closely with an MMORPG which is a definition for another day.

What is a Season?

Path of Exile Character Creation Screen Showing of various Leagues

In a core ARPG, especially one with multiplayer play… there is this concept of a periodic reset of progress. Generally speaking, there is some sort of transition of characters from the previous period moving to the more standard or as D4 calls it… “Eternal” realm, and then a new realm spinning up that is only for brand new characters. This construct goes by many names depending on the game you are playing.

  • Diablo 2 – Ladders
  • Diablo 3 – Seasons
  • Diablo Immortal – Seasons
  • Diablo 4 – Seasons
  • Grim Dawn – Seasons but they are community-led only
  • Last Epoch – Cycles but won’t be in-game until the 1.0 release
  • Path of Exile – Leagues or Challenge Leagues if you look at old posts
  • Torchlight Infinite – Seasons
  • Undecember – Seasons
Diablo 3 Season Journey Tracker Website

The idea is to have a fresh start that puts everyone on even footing. There are often race events surrounding these “seasons” and specific content that can only be obtained by starting from scratch. How this actually works varies wildly by game. In Diablo 3 you had a series of challenges that you completed in order to get rewards. The first four gave you a full set of gear, and the last six unlocked a cosmetic of some sort and another stash tab (up to a certain point). In Path of Exile, there are extremely detailed mechanics that only take place during a season some of which may or may not actually make it into the “standard” game as they refer to it. Right now in the “Crucible League,” the mechanic involves putting talent trees on your weapons which unlocks the ability to create some truly bizarre builds.

The information we have currently surrounding seasons and Diablo IV is a bit hazy. We know there will be some sort of seasonal journey similar to that of Diablo III, where you have micro objectives that add up to rewards with bigger rewards from completing a bunch of meta achievements. We also know there will be a battle pass system, that unlocks rewards as you gain experience by completing these objectives and probably from just grinding the world as well. There is some sort of season-exclusive story arc that will only be available during that given season. We now also know that none of this will be available on the “Eternal” realm, aka the realm that everyone has been playing on since the launch. Like other ARPG seasons, you will need to create a brand new character to experience any of this and only seasonal characters will progress your season’s journey.

Seasons have a Fixed Duration

Another important concept that you should understand is that seasons… or whatever a game calls it have an expiration date associated with them. Generally speaking, these tend to last three to four months, with the best having four seasons during a year. This gives you just enough time to build up a character… get bored of that character… have some time off from the game, and then get excited again when the next season happens. Path of Exile does this probably better than anyone else currently and they really hype up the launch of a new league with trailers, dedicated cosmetics, and an official race that is often commentated like an e-sports event. While I have never really been one to watch e-sports in the past… I have to admit that I do find myself drawn to the league races. I even participated a little bit in one of the ExileCon qualifier races just to get the achievement for getting to level 10 during a race.

Why Play a Season?

Loot explosion from Diablo 3

I am honestly not entirely certain if I am the best person to explain this, given that I am so bought into this concept that I never spend any time playing my non-seasonal characters, and effectively when the season is over they either rot or are deleted. I guess I could talk a bit about why I personally enjoy seasons. One of the funniest times for me is the launch of a new game, the hype cycle leading up to it… and the hardcore focus of grinding up a new character. There is a reason why I have played almost every MMORPG that came down the pipe over the years… and then petered out slowly as the rush of excitement around the game died down. I love the excitement surrounding something that is shiny and new, and how it brings all sorts of folks out of the woodwork. Honestly, the best part of the Diablo IV launch for me… is seeing folks showing up in my Battle.net friends list that I had not talked to for years.

An ARPG season is this entire process in a microcosm. For Diablo III, seasons would always begin around 7 pm on a Friday night. So on that Friday night I would get together with Ace and often times Byx as we leveled brand new characters. There was always a crush of excitement around getting back together after being apart for three or more months. Diablo III seasons were almost the perfect example because generally speaking we got good enough at the game to be largely finished by Monday. So we had this really focused gaming weekend, and then plenty of time to chill and do other things… and then be excited about the start of the next season. Path of Exile leagues are a considerably less social experience, but still, I have had a lot of fun talking through build ideas with Ash, Thalen, or Ace throughout the season and slowly ticking off achievements as I completed maps or knocked out challenges for cosmetics.

I also love the almost manic levels of content in the community and the excitement that surrounds the launch of a new season. I am using the season as a generic term, but Path of Exile leagues are specifically so focused on the experience of playing through the league, digging down and finding out critical information about the new mechanics, and coming up with the most efficient methods of play. In Diablo III, it was admittedly a much smaller community but there was still a lot of excitement centered around the completion of the season’s journey and figuring out the best new builds taking into account all of the changes that were made.

Probably the best aspect of the reset is that it puts everyone on the same footing. No matter how much you played the previous season… it is all washed away and everyone starts back at level 1. So that allows someone to sit out a few seasons and then return at the launch of a brand new season without feeling like they have to play “catch up”. This is the problem I have with Destiny seasons, in that they keep moving the bar forward in gear level making it seem like to return… I would need to dedicate a large amount of time to catch up to the same gear level as everyone else starting the season. In an ARPG you can just show up and know you are going to be on equal footing with all of your friends.

The Drama Surrounding Resets

Right now we find ourselves in a gulf between those who are dedicated ARPG players and understand the constructs of that genre, and those who are playing Diablo IV without ever being part of that community in the past. We’ve had this same disconnect among the AggroChat folks because once upon a time I said that Tam wasn’t really an “ARPG Player” when he absolutely felt he was. He had played through every Diablo when it came out to completion… which sure is a thing, but is also different from being engaged with the particular community and customs surrounding the seasons. Right now there are a lot of folks who have experienced seasons as a construct in other genres and are freaking out slightly that they will have to throw away the hard-fought progress that they have made on their current crop of Eternal characters in order to experience anything associated with the first Diablo IV Season.

I can’t say that they are wrong honestly. One of my core complaints about Diablo IV is the fact that it is way too grindy to be reasonably played in a seasonal model. Normally speaking in a seasonal ARPG, it takes around a week to reach the end game… and then you are spending the rest of the season completing achievements. In Diablo IV I am roughly 100 hours into the game and still have not reached the “true” endgame. That seems like one heck of a long commitment for folks to make every three months. Maybe Diablo IV given that it is more MMORPG than ARPG… needs to be the one that breaks this mold and introduces seasonal content that is available to non-seasonal characters. I have a feeling that the way the game is currently… season one might kill whatever momentum Diablo IV has. I am deeply uncertain if I will participate in the season because I am honestly not sure if I enjoyed the game enough to go all in for it. There is also supposed to be the start of a new Path of Exile league around the same time, and I am way more into that game.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again. I think Diablo IV is a great game for the type of player that wants to get in… and play through the story and then move on to another game. I feel like this game is not designed for the way that ARPG core players tend to play these games. The core gameplay loop is just not as interesting as some of the other options. With the upcoming release of Path of Exile II… which is really just a new client for the game and a whole new campaign… I think that will end up capturing all of the Core ARPG players for the long term. I think Diablo IV will probably be better for Path of Exile… than POE was for D4. There were a lot of players waiting around for the next coming of the Diablo franchise, and are now already filling the internet with grumpy think pieces about how it just doesn’t quite live up to their expectations. I would be one of those players as well.

I personally think a lot of things are going to have to change in the way that Diablo IV works in order for it to succeed in the traditional ARPG seasonal model. Firstly they need to greatly speed up the process of leveling, and speed up the renown gain process if they are in fact going to require that to be done each season. Additionally, they need to add new mechanics into each season in order to flesh out the end game, because right now… nightmare dungeons as the primary end game activity are not amazing. They also need to spend some time improving the feel of the various classes because everyone effectively is funneled into playing exactly the same spec. There are only one or two viable options for the end game in a given class. Diablo IV as a whole has way less build diversity than literally any other ARPG with a seasonal model. I just can’t see the game in its current state… existing in the normal seasonal model.

So maybe that means that seasons will need to change for Diablo IV. Maybe there will be enough pushback from gamers that are used to different seasonal models to make this happen. I foresee that the first few seasons will be a bit on the rocky side. I do not think that the team that is working on Diablo IV necessarily grasps all of these nuances. They built a game that is not necessarily how ARPG players actually play ARPGs. I get that they were attempting to expand the base… but I am not sure if the way in which they did so will be successful in the long run. Right now I am looking forward to ExileCon and more information about Path of Exile II, and way less about the first Diablo IV season.

However, since there seems to be a disconnect between those in the know and those who have never engaged in a Seasonal ARPG… I thought I would take some time this morning and talk about that divide and hopefully fill in some information.

Path of Exile II Hype Intensifies

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Path of Exile II Logo

Friends… I am starting to get so overwhelmingly pumped about Path of Exile II. With Not-E3 going on right now, we’ve got two new teaser trailers kicking around after a few years of relative silence. I talked about the first one last week(Ngamakanui), and then we got another one during the PC gaming show (Aggorat). I’m expecting ExileCon on the 28th of July to be a massive deal and essentially outline not only the full feature set of this mega-expansion as well as a general release schedule. It would be truly wild if they just shadow-dropped the game at the show… but I sort of doubt that will be the case. We do know that the Crucible league that is wrapping up was a bit smaller than normal because we are expected to get a really massive league launching with ExileCon, and I wonder if it will be directly tied to Path of Exile II.

Screenshot from ExileCon 2019 Presentation Showing the text One Game, Two Campaigns

One of the things that have been a bit hard to wrap our heads around has been the fact that we keep referring to it as a new game… but in reality, it is just a continuance of the original game. The idea is that everything about Path of Exile 1 continues trucking along, and all of the expansion league content applies to both games going forward. This solves one of the problems that I had when Destiny 2 was released because it felt like we gave up too much of the good stuff that was in Year 3 of Destiny 1… to end up getting a crude shell of a game that wasn’t fully fleshed out and lacked a lot of the quality of life features we had gotten used to. So I will not only get a brand new campaign, and a whole slew of new abilities to play with… but also get to keep access to the leagues that I love like Delve and Heist.

Screenshot from the Path of Exile II Teaser Trailer Aggorat showing a large creature raising up out of a pool of filth and a Monk like characters standing to fight it

One of the things that I find interesting is that in the two latest trailers that we have seen so far… I feel like we are seeing brand-new classes on display. For example in the Ngamakanui trailer, I just assumed I was seeing the Witch on display because it was a female caster… but Aggorat pictured above has made me reassess those assumptions. The “Monk” class that we see on display in that trailer does not really match the visual signature of any of the starter characters that we currently have in the game. This makes me think one of two things is happening. The first idea is that we are getting several new starter classes and both of these trailers have showcased a different one.

Screenshot showing the Diablo IV Character Creation Interface

The other more intriguing idea is that maybe we are getting a detailed character creation system similar to the one that we just go with Diablo IV. I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but it would be so freaking amazing to be able to craft my starter character to look however I want it to look. Not that I mind playing a feeble old man, a girl in rags, or a beefcake in a diaper… but the entire ARPG experience is so much richer if you get to pick your own appearance. This would also solve the problem of not being able to play the gender you would prefer to play. That doesn’t necessarily impact me directly given that I pretty regularly flip back and forth between gendered options just to mix things up when a game gives me that ability. However, I know this is a big deal to a lot of players and it would be amazing to see these character models trickle out into the rest of the game.

Screenshot from recent Path of Exile II Teaser trailers showing the text Find Out More July 28 www.pathofexile2.com

Suffice it to say I am pumped for July 28th… but am trying really hard to reign in my expectations. I have considered taking the day off from work just so I can watch the presentation uninterrupted. A lot of the reason why I have been so engaged with Diablo IV right now… is that I am in somewhat of a holding pattern until the next Path of Exile league. The only negative I can see about the “two campaigns one game” thing, is that for players who were maybe hoping POE2 would be a fresh start and wildly different. I expect a lot of new toys to play with, and a lot of changes to the game engine to make it feel a bit more responsive and have much better visuals, but I also sort of expect POE2 will feel a lot like the original release in the way that the end-game works. It took me over a thousand hours in this game to really come to a place of loving it wholeheartedly, but that is sort of a big ask for most players.

I do think the relatively shallow nature of Diablo IV, is ultimately going to make a lot of players feed into Path of Exile. There were a lot of folks holding out hope that D4 would be the next best ARPG and I am not sure that is the case. It has a lot of great moments, and yesterday I released a video talking about some of my favorite things. However even in a video where I tried my best to stay positive… a number of complaints still made it into the recording. I am almost vibrating with hype for what I am seeing for Path of Exile II though, so the future still seems exceptionally bright. I’m also extremely pumped about the release of Last Epoch 1.0 later this year. We are truly living in the golden age of the ARPG, and the loot will flow!

Beating the Ghost of a Dead Horse

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Friends… I find myself in an awkward place right now. I keep poking at Diablo IV even though I am admittedly not really enjoying myself. I end up in these patterns sometimes with games where I feel like I should be enjoying them, but for whatever reason don’t. I probably spent 200 hours poking at Guild Wars 2 over the years trying to figure out what I was missing that others really enjoyed about that game. Eventually, I reached a place of happiness with that experience, but often times I never really do. I do not enjoy Warframe for example, even though on paper everything about that game should be something I am heavily into. I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on what was wrong with the experience, but something is… and something is also wrong with Diablo IV. I feel like I am poking the dead corpse of Diablo IV with a stick, trying to figure out why I don’t love it after waiting over a decade for it to arrive.

Most recently I have poured all of my efforts into catching up with the story quests that I missed along the way, and more importantly, grinding out my renown levels. At this point, I have completed everything but Kehjistan, and I have to say… this is a miserable process. Nothing about this is enjoyable in the least but it also feels like they have hung just enough carrot… in the form of 4 bonus Paragon Points at the end of this stick that I cannot avoid it. I also found the hunt for 160 Altars of Lilth was complete misery as well… but again all of the permanent stat boosts were too beneficial to ignore them. Both of these are examples of thoroughly uninteresting gameplay, but also something that feels like you can’t really skip it because they attached something to it that you can’t really get otherwise. I certainly hope that these are a one-time thing and do not reset each season, because I cannot ever fathom doing this again.

Then there are my frustrations with the Paragon Board system. Namely the force mechanic around unlocking the bonus for each Glyph. None of these are really worth the effort unless you unlock the bonus, but in order to do it… it causes you to make some deeply uninteresting choices with your points. My frustration right now is that I need to acquire 40 strength from nodes on the board, but there is only 35 strength worth of nodes in the radius of this glyph. That means I need to level this glyph to level fifteen in order to expand the radius. The system of leveling glyphs is in theory supposed to replace the process of leveling Legendary Gems from Diablo III. Same mechanic but implemented in a maddening slow manner. When you leveled a Legendary Gem you got 3 level raises each time you ran a Greater Rift, with Glyphs… you get part of a level each time you run a Nightmare Dungeon.

Most of the glyphs that I have access to are Tier 1, and those gave me half a glyph level at 1, and a quarter of a glyph level at 2. Meaning that in order to level these up you just have to chain-run Nightmare Dungeons. These are not fun. They are just normal dungeons with some added nonsense that you have to watch out for but are as mind-numbing as the normal dungeons. Greater Rifts in Diablo III were also admittedly repetitive but there was a lot of randomization in each run and you could rip through them quickly as they did not require you to do any backtracking. Dungeons in Diablo IV however require you to complete a series of boring mechanics which often require you to backtrack in the dungeon and are effectively the same experience every time you run them. I ran six of these back to back last night before ultimately deciding I had my fill and moved on to other things.

What is genuinely enjoyable are the World Boss fights. I grouped up with my friend Cyl and took down The Wandering Death, which is an encounter I had not seen before. Sure the mechanics were relatively easy, but it was still a fun five minutes of gameplay that felt extremely rewarding for the time spent. The problem here however is that these world boss events… are so few and far between that I’ve literally played likely over a hundred hours at this point and this was the first one that I happened to be on at the right time to catch. Instead of taking a page from the very excellent Guild Wars 2 event spawning book, Blizzard seems to have these vague three-hour windows when a boss MIGHT spawn… and when this happens you are not exactly given a clear indication unless you happen to be looking at the map. Personally, I feel like World Bosses should ALWAYS be spawning and you should never be more than 20 minutes away from the next one. The same is true with Helltides and I feel like there should never be a moment when you log in and there is not one available.

Then let’s talk about one of my key complaints… how generally fucked the stash tab situation is. Not only is the UI for your Stash completely useless and without any sort of search functionality… you are painfully limited in what you can store. This image that I have cobbled together from screenshots represents all of the storage space that you have. 200 slots of storage space are allocated for all of the characters on your account, and right now it is largely filled with crap for my barbarian. Then you have the 88 slots of storage space that you are carrying on your character which is divided up into 33 inventory slots for drops, 33 slots that are for consumables but this is shared between Potions and Nightmare Dungeon Sigils, and finally, 22 slots that you can use to store aspects that you have extracted. Most of my actual stash tab storage is consumed by legendary items that I am holding on to in order to extract legendary aspects from later because the aspect storage is so painfully limited.

Let’s contrast this with three other games in the genre. Path of Exile has a virtually unlimited amount of storage space so long as you are willing to buy more stash tabs with real-world money. Last Epoch also seems to have a virtually unlimited amount of storage space available pending if you are willing to keep farming in-game gold to purchase them. Even Diablo III, which I considered fairly limited… gives you 910 stash tab slots… though some of those I earned through seasonal play and others I got from the Reaper of Souls expansion and the Necromancer pack. However, even if you only have the base game… you still have 350 stash slots. I think part of what makes the D4 situation feel so bad is all the damned gems… and admittedly they ate up a ton of space in my bank in D3 as well. However, there is no real reason why they don’t just live in your ingredients tab.

I find myself in this rough spot with Diablo IV, and the longer I play it the more frustrated with the current state of the game I get. I should just stop playing it and do something else, but I am not sure exactly what else I want to dive into at the moment. I should go back and finish out the league in Path of Exile and get the last achievement I want to get. I should work on progressing through the monolith further in Last Epoch. However, my brain seems to be caught up in this pattern of logging into Diablo IV and then getting frustrated. I keep thinking if I push through this…. the game will get better. However, the further I push… the shallower the game seems to get. I still stand by my original assessment of this game. It is a pretty great game for playing through the story and then moving on to another game. I question how good of a game it is for playing like most ARPG players play those games. I feel like as soon as the new Path of Exile league lands with ExileCon in July, Diablo IV is going to be a ghost town.

Diablo IV Advice

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Good Morning Friends! I did not get nearly as much time as I would have liked last night to play some Diablo 4, but I did manage to push through to level 60 and then get another quarter of a level into that for an additional paragon point. I’ve largely been focused on finishing out my renown in the last few zones of the game and finished up Dry Steppes and have now moved on to my final zone of Kehjistan. One of the things that I have been mulling over in my brain is how I would have approached this game differently. For those of you who might not know, I’m one of the admins on the Mastodon/Fediverse server called Gamepad.Club which serves as a gaming-focused social media hub.

While I slept one of my good friends and fellow gamepadders posted a plea for suggestions. I figured I would answer this plea in the form of my morning blog post. Side note… this is the first time I have seen the term Gamepadders in reference to the denizens of Gamepad.club and I think I like it… and am just going to roll with it. Victor got plenty of responses from the larger mastodon community, but I figured I would still outline how I would approach the game knowing what I know now. Of note… I was in MANY phases of Diablo IV testing including several closed phases and a number of public phases. The game changed drastically each time I attempted to sit down and play it. So the truth is I went into the game expecting to play one ability that had been good in the early phases of testing… that was apparently nerfed into the ground.

Follow the Meta

I feel like you first have to ask yourself a simple question. Is the core of my enjoyment of the ARPG experience based on making my own builds? If the answer is yes, then skip this entirely. I am pretty sure you can half-ass your way through the campaign with any build you choose. I made it through the campaign on my heavily nerfed Upheaval build, though I struggled when it came to defeating the first capstone dungeon. Essentially Diablo IV is very poorly balanced right now and not every build is viable when it comes to harder content. If you want the easiest possible experience I would suggest going over to Maxroll.gg and looking at their build guides. They have both leveling builds and end-game builds, and I would choose one of the “in the meta” builds currently that has one of each. That way as you level you get used to the abilities that you will ultimately end up with at the end-game. Icy Veins also has a good build section but I personally like the layout of Maxroll a bit better.

Start on World Tier 1

There are no tangible benefits to playing the game on “Veteran” difficulty. While the placard says that you will get more experience and more loot… you will also take so much more time killing mobs that this benefit becomes entirely negated. Your goal is ultimately to get to World Tier 3 as fast as possible, and as a result, the early game is just an obstacle in your way. There is no point in trying to be a billy badass and insist on World Tier 2. You are only setting yourself up for frustration in the end. If difficult content is your kink, then, by all means, ignore this advice.

Focus on the Main Story Content

Since content scales with you… the later in the game you attempt something the harder it is going to be. As such it is my suggestion that on your first playthrough of the game, you just focus on the main story content. This will be marked in Yellow in your quest log, and you can progress through the game without touching any other content. While you are doing this I suggest you take the time to go ahead and unlock any waypoints you find as you will need these later. Upon completing the main quest you unlock the Tree of Whispers which will give you some additional benefits as you complete the rest of the content in the game. Ultimately you are going to want to do every single side quest available at some point. My personal preference is to unlock the end-game and then roam around doing side content then. If you want a longer journey that will also increase in difficulty as you go, then you can, of course, do side content as you are doing the main content.

Extract Near Perfect Aspects

After finishing the prologue of the game, you will unlock the occultist which allows you to imprint aspects on rare items to turn them into legendaries, and to extract aspects from any legendary drops you might get but no longer need. First things first we are going to need to enable some of the advanced options so go into settings and toggle on the following:

  • Options > Gameplay
    • Advanced Tooltip Compare
    • Advanced Tooltip Information

This is going to tell you how good of a roll a given item is. For example, if you look at the aspect I am highlighting above the ability has a range of 20-30% and the item that I found has a near-perfect roll of 29%. This is very worth holding onto and saving for when you need it on your end-game gear. My suggestion is to go ahead and extract any Legendary item that is at least a roll that is 50% of the maximum and most definitely anything that is perfect or near perfect. Everything else should be salvaged as you are going to need those materials later.

Salvage Everything

There are a lot of guides that I have seen that suggest salvaging gear up until you hit level 50. It is my personal suggestion that you never stop salvaging gear. You are going to reach a point where you have more gold coming in than you need, and are going to still be desperate for materials. I switched to selling everything when I finished the campaign and given how often you need to change gear… found myself completely out of several basic materials. Gold will come over time especially as you find Greed Shrines… but you will never stop needing raw materials at least until you have finished out a set of maxed-out ancestral gear.

Buy Whispering Keys

Obols are the currency for doing events in Diablo IV, and much like Blood Shards from Diablo III, you are limited in how many you can carry at a time. Spending them at the Purveyor of Curiosities is a way to gamble on getting legendary items… but the occurrence of legendary drops seems to be skewed by your level. As such spending Obols on gear early on is a bad use of resources. What I would instead do is buy Whispering Keys which are used to unlock the Silent Chests that you find out in the world. You can hold onto these en masse and then use them later on to get a gear boost when needed as you will likely be finding a lot of these Silent Chests in your journey. So it is my suggestion that any time you have a stack of Obols gathered, you spend it down buying these keys and then holding onto them for later.

Unlock World Tier III

Upon finishing the campaign your next core goal is going to be to unlock World Tier III. This means you need to defeat the Cathedral of Light Capstone Dungeon. Unlike the rest of the world, this dungeon is capped at level 50 but can be completed earlier than that if your build is strong. This is ultimately why you want to be following the meta builds as most of them can complete this dungeon somewhere around level 40-45 without much issue. Even if you do not want to start playing on World Tier III, this is gating your access to the last two tiers of renown which is effectively what you are wanting to unlock as quickly as possible. World Tier III also unlocks Helltide Zones and makes it so that Nightmare Dungeon Sigils drop more often as well as granting you access to the Sacred tier of gear. Sacred gear is a massive damage and survival boost and essentially makes all gear before that point obsolete unless you simply have to have a given legendary aspect. Now this goal might take you a bit to accomplish but I am placing it here to outline its importance.

Tree of Whispers

Defeating the Campaign is going to unlock access to the Tree of Whispers. Now this is not an activity that I think you should ever really focus on, but just something to be aware of as you are doing other activities in the world. If you have the opportunity to collect Grim Favors by doing something that aligns with an activity you are already doing, it is just a bonus. Every so often you will fill the bar and get a free box of loot from the tree. Again this should not be your core focus, but just something to be aware of as you do the next few things.

Collect Altars of Lilith

Scattered throughout the world are the Altars of Lilith which are statues that glow slightly red until you have collected them. The campaign make sure you find a few of these along the way, but after you beat the campaign one of your first goals should be making sure you collect all of them. Once they have been collected on a single character, all of your characters from that point forward get the benefit of them. Since they have to be done on a single character though, you might as well devote the time to collecting all 160 of them early on while you are still working on leveling. Yes, this is tedious busywork, but the stat boost that you gain for them will be extremely important when you are trying to unlock abilities that have stat requirements on the paragon boards. I personally found the maps that Polygon created the easiest to follow as they have them numbered and also have zoomed-in images of each location.

You can of course do these while you are completing the campaign if you really keep your eye out for any areas of the map that snake off into a little alcove. There is definitely a pattern to the placement of these statues that you might pick up on along the way.

Max Out Zone Renown

This is the step that I am actively working on if you were curious. As you are completing the campaign you will be capped at a maximum of rank three renown with each region. It is important that you work up your renown because getting every zone to rank three will net your character an extra 10 skill points and getting them all to rank five will give you an extra 20 paragon points. Both of these are significant and like the Lilith Statues, you need to do this on one character before it applies to all of your characters. This will essentially require you to complete all of those blue quests and unlock most of the dungeons in order to hit rank five. I’ve personally completed four of the five regions and am now working on Kehjistan, the area that I spent the least amount of time in so far.

Play The Game Finally

Congratz! You’ve graduated from the busywork phase of Diablo IV. Now you can just do whatever suits your fancy. You could do a bunch of normal dungeons in order to level most efficiently… or you could hit up the Helltide zone every time it is available for fun mob density and loot boxes. You could also bip around the map doing tasks for the Tree of Whispers or dive into progressing your Nightmare Dungeons and with that leveling your glyphs. Personally, I kind of do a mix of all of the above because that seems to be the most enjoyable. I’ve neglected Nightmare Dungeons a bit so far but I need to focus on them soon. I also need to give an attempt or two at trying to unlock World Tier IV now that I have hit level 60. The last capstone dungeon is hard-scaled at level 70, but I am curious if I can finish it early.

There are some aspects of Diablo IV that I really enjoy, more specifically I like the way the world feels and fits together. There are other aspects of Diablo IV that drive me insane and half convince me to stop playing entirely. I talked about a lot of this in a video yesterday, but most of them can be summed up under the banner of being grossly inefficient and wasteful of my time. So much of the ARPG experience to me is about optimization and the last thing I care about is immersion. Immersion only really holds weight until you have finished the campaign, then you want efficient grinds and in this game nothing is efficient. However since my friend wanted advice, this morning is my attempt at outlining how I would approach the game knowing what I know now. You can of course ignore ALL of this and just fumble your way through the game. Diablo IV is maybe an experience best fumbled through the first time because it will allow you to appreciate the world crafting a bit more. When you attempt to play it efficiently… that is when the wheels fall off.

So maybe… just ignore everything that I just said and approach this game however seems best to you at the time. The shortcomings will make themselves very evident eventually… and when that happens feel free to pop back over here for some advice.