Diablo 4 just got a lot less grindy
Diablo 4 has largely gone down well with players – better than Diablo 3 at least did during the rough launch period – but a consensus has emerged that the late game and end game just aren’t well balanced. After about level 70-75, experience doesn’t come fast enough, and neither does loot.
The fixes for this – new high-level loot tables and a possible fifth World Tier difficulty – won’t be coming anytime soon. But the latest patch for the game, update 1.0.3, helps smooth things out a bit and ease the late-game grind.
Among the many bug fixes, the patch notes detail some resulting adjustments to experience rewards. Nightmare Dungeons, which are the core of your character’s development later in the game, award “significantly increased” XP for both completion and monster kills. (Some players report gaining up to three times the experience from a Nightmare Dungeon run.) Also fixed an issue where XP was not awarded for completing the “hold-out style event” that occurs at the end of the game. a dungeon can take place. . There’s also a time-saver for those running the Nightmare Dungeon hamster wheel: these dungeons can now be teleported directly through the map.
These aren’t the only ways the late game has been made more generous: Roaming Helltide bosses drop higher quality loot, and Helltide chests now reward more bonus experience. There’s also the promise of more to come: “We’re currently working to increase the monster and elite density of endgame content and plan to make this change early in Season 1,” Blizzard said. (Season 1 is due out mid-to-late July.) But the meager progress Nightmare Dungeons offered was definitely the community’s biggest scare, and players already seem happy with the changes.
Continuing the popular theme, each class has been buffed with more damage and fewer cooldowns. and other skill improvements, some of which are quite significant – such as the Barbarian’s Iron Maelstrom ability cooldown being reduced from 60 to 45 seconds, while critical attack bonuses have more than doubled. With no grain on the blade at all, these tweaks seem less focused on balance than on a general perception that the classes feel underpowered, and Diablo 4 generally feels a bit on the slow side.
Diablo 4 now heads into its first season with the endgame in better shape. But it won’t be until that first season comes to an end – and the community agrees on the requirement for a new character to enjoy the season’s content – that we’ll get a real sense of the game. Diablo 4 will be in the long run.