We are swiftly coming up on the one-year anniversary of Diablo IV - a year that has seen a solid game release and three seasons of content for players to wade through. In just a few weeks, May 14th to be exact, we’ll see the fourth season unleashed, and it brings massive changes to how loot works in Diablo IV. I had the opportunity to interview Associate Game Director Joe Piepiora, Lead Live Game Designer Colin Finer, and Lead Live Class Designer Adam Jackson to preview all the changes we have to look forward to
Diablo IV Design Philosophy
First, although these loot changes are coming with Season 4: Loot Reborn, they are game-wide and will affect the Eternal Realm in addition to the Seasonal Realm. As such, the loot changes will stay after the season ends and represent the most significant change we’ve seen to Diablo IV since its release last year.
With these sweeping changes going into effect, I was curious to learn more about what specific loot-related issues they were trying to solve. Finer jumped right in to explain, “We wanted to take a step back and think about how do we make the loot experience have more customization, how do we clean up the experience, and streamline things so that players are slaying demons more and parsing their loot less.” He also mentioned this is an area they have received a lot of feedback from players on, and one I definitely agree with. I love getting the exact items I’m looking for, but I really dislike having to go through a ton of items, the majority of which, if not all, aren’t useful.
Jackson expanded on this idea as well, adding, “One of the big things that we got feedback from players is that they were having a lot of pain points when it came how often they had to parse their loot, looking through a bunch of items, and then how complicated the items were when they did it. So a larger percentage of our game than we liked was people spending time in town looking at their loot after they would finish a dungeon, like a nightmare dungeon, for example. It would take a long time, and it wasn’t a very fun task because they were parsing things that weren’t very enjoyable, like stats with a lot of conditions, a lot of lines of text, and things like that.
“One of our big things, and this isn’t just even with like loot but class design and other places, we’re trying to make things easier to understand, keeping the depth there, but kind of spreading it out over time rather than it all being something you are doing all of the time. So now you’ll notice one of the big changes in itemization 2.0 is we made all the base stats very, very simple. The stuff that just drops as loot is very easy to understand. +Str, +Crit Chance, things like that are very easy for a player to see this is what I want, or this isn’t what I want. Then more complex or interesting build-centric stats are all in the tempering system. So you still get that complexity on the backend, but you are not looking at every single item and hitting all that complexity 30 times; you’re only hitting the one time on the item that you want to craft with and have chosen that is a good one for you.”
This was a great explanation of their goals here. I know when I hear “simplifying” or “streamlining” regarding nearly any aspect of a video game, I immediately tend to worry if that means everything will be too simple or boring. It sounds like they have tried to create a system where players can choose to engage with the complexities of gearing when they want to rather than having to wade through it constantly. As someone who has periodically chosen to log off at times rather than deal with my inventory, this does sound positive to me.
How is Loot Changing?
One of the major changes to loot has to do with the number of items that drop. I’ve certainly, and quite often, had the experience of receiving a bunch of legendary gear and then feeling let down because none of it is useable. Regarding this problem, Finer explained that one of their goals was to “increase the quality of loot while reducing the quantity.” It’s easy to hear that and panic about how it means we’ll see fewer items drop overall, but that won’t be an issue if I’m getting useful items more often. He continued:
“We know Diablo is all about getting tons of awesome loot. We’ve actually packed quite a bit of power into those legendary item affixes. So we’ve reduced base affixes substantially. Before, it used to be a legendary item would have four affixes from a pool of 50 different affixes. We’ve really cut down the amount of stats that can show up on these items, so we drop less of them but they are going to be dropping more pertinent stats to your character.
"We are also no longer allowing things like +flay and +lunging strike and +bash, for example, on items. We are going to allow only one skill-ranked roll, so really, it’s all about getting players items they care more about and making sure the stats all have viable use cases, so you aren’t trying to sift through sand or trying to find a needle in a haystack. We want you to find an item you care about quickly, and then we’ve added a ton of crafting modifications to allow you to customize that item. The idea that we’ve rallied around is that the item journey no longer stops when you get an item you are excited about; you can take that item on its own journey to make it an item you really care about.”
One of the ways players will be able to customize their items is through the new tempering system, which can be accessed at a blacksmith. Finer added, “Tempering is going to allow you to add up to two affixes on ancestral items that are completely customized. You are able to essentially temper this item, pull a stat off of a recipe, do really cool things like double the projectile chance or a chance to double the projectiles, increase, for example, rend’s range, which was one of my particular favorites because it means you can attack monsters from farther away which is a lot of fun. So the tempering system unlocks a lot of build creativity and customization on that item.”
Masterworking comes into play once a player has obtained an item that has affixes on it, and Finer had some extra details to share, “Every time you masterwork an item, all of the affixes and stats on the item are going to increase roughly 5%. Every fourth rank of that upgrade, up to 12, is going to crit one of those stats and specifically really empower that affix. So you might really care about on your helm CDR, or cooldown reduction, and you’re really going for crit’ing that CDR to take it to crazy new heights.” One thing here is it sounded like which affix gets crit might be random, so there could be some potential frustration if the one you want to crit doesn’t.
These new systems for improving gear over time and customizing everything to how I want to play sound amazing, and I am looking forward to jumping in and seeing how all of this feels in practice. However, the one change I am looking forward to the most is the update regarding how the Codex of Power will work. Piepiora explained it this way: “When a legendary item drops, you can take that legendary back to the blacksmith and salvage it, which doesn’t have a fee or anything, and then that legendary power at the roll that it appeared on that item is put into your codex of power permanently. So you’ll have that for the remainder of the season, or if you play on the Eternal Realm, you’ll have it forever. You’ll only ever lose it because you have replaced it with a more potent version of that power.” I’m so excited that I won’t have to carry around aspect crystals, which were almost pointless for me since I was super hesitant to use them.
Other Seasonal Content
With all the focus on the many loot changes happening in Season 4, it might be easy to think this season is only game system updates. Thankfully Piepiora was quick to clarify that this season isn’t just all about the loot updates, “The players will be working with the Iron Wolves, the famous mercenary band the players have been tracking with since Diablo II. They’ll be working with this new mercenary they’ll get introduced to and push back against the increasing encroachment of these helltides across Sanctuary. We’re very excited about this. Players are going to get the opportunity to learn more about the Iron Wolves and help them in their efforts here, and also earn basically fame and reputation with them as they assist these Iron Wolves. The rewards for going through these quests and helping the Iron Wolves are really dramatic; they are very very significant. We’ve thought a lot about how we introduced rewards, the season journey, and reputation systems in previous seasons; we really wanted to make when you do get rewards from the Iron Wolves, they are mercenaries, they’re sellswords, they are there for a job, and they get paid, so you’re going to get paid.”
So far, the Season of Blood was my favorite season out of the three we’ve already had. That said, this quick hit on what we have to look forward to in this season sounds like an absolute ball. Along with the adventures with the Iron Wolves, Helltides are also receiving a major update. There will be more cultists than before during a Helltide, and if you last long enough, the Hellborn, who are past heroes of Sanctuary who have aligned with the demons, will appear and cause even more trouble. After dealing with the Hellborn, you will have collected materials that will allow players to engage with Accursed Rituals. These are botched rituals that allow players to draw in demons and monsters for an all-out battle. Surviving all of this will result in a brand-new mini-boss, the Blood Maiden appearing. It all sounds fun, but it’ll be interesting to see how these go, especially early in the season.
Since the Blood Maiden is a new mini-boss at the end of the Accursed Rituals, we were curious about what type of rewards we could expect from it. Piepora explained it this way, “If you do manage to kill the Blood Maiden as part of this brand new fight in the overworld, you are going to get legendary items, a chance at unique items, materials you could be using to summon some of the most powerful bosses in the game as well as part of this, so there is a lot of really patent rewards to grab from going after this boss whenever she’s available.” After hearing all of this, I want to start a counter when this season goes live to see how long it takes for a Blood Maiden kill to happen. It really seemed like Piepiroa didn’t think that would happen quickly.
Another interesting update in this Loot Reborn season is that some of the blockers are being removed to keep new players from jumping in. Currently, a player needs to finish the main campaign before they can really dive into everything Diablo IV has available. However, with this new season that bar is being removed, and a player could create a character, and at level 1, they could jump straight into Helltides and have fun with those. I still think everyone should play through the story at least once since it is quite good, but for players who aren’t interested in that, this is a great option.
Diablo IV seems to be on a great trajectory leading into its first expansion with everything happening in season four. Piepiora summed it up like this, “If you are thinking about coming back to play Diablo IV, this really is the season to do it. This is the best version of Diablo IV we’ve had to date, and it will only get better from here.”
