Diablo 4’s next season has me hopeful that Blizzard understands its greatest weakness as an action RPG—and how to fix it.
Every experienced player has had to learn one reality of Diablo 4: Not every skill is created equal. And by that I mean, the skill tree is full of cool abilities that don’t necessarily do anything even with phenomenal gear.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest obstacle has always been how loot works in Diablo 4. Your gear makes up the majority of your character’s power through legendary aspects and unique items that change how skills work and give them hefty damage buffs.
Say you really enjoy playing a sorceress with spinning lightning orbs around her. Without the unique item that specifically makes them orbit around you and multiplies their damage, your lightning orbs will shoot in a straight line and tickle monsters as they pass by. You either have the item for Ball Lightning or you don’t use Ball Lightning.
This is counter-intuitive for anyone who is used to skill trees that do that kind of stuff instead, like in Path of Exile. Most skills in PoE get stronger from things you can find in its notoriously massive skill tree. It’s so big because it’s full of ways to empower just about every skill in the game, preventing anyone from having to accept that their favorite one is a dud.
Diablo 4’s skill tree can’t do that. No matter how many points you dump into a skill, it won’t match the power of someone using the items designed for it. This is a problem that even Blizzard is aware of, and the developers have hinted at a major skill tree rework coming in the near future (an expansion, perhaps?).
I’m convinced season 10 is essentially a teaser for how Blizzard is going to fix Diablo 4’s loot problem.
When I look at what season 10 is doing to items and builds in Diablo 4, I see what looks like a game on the verge of changing pretty dramatically over the next year.
A group of guide writers recently visited Blizzard in Irvine to test upcoming changes and maybe even a new paladin class. Whatever they saw was a big enough deal that Blizzard wanted feedback from the players who have a deep understanding of what makes a build in Diablo 4. And with how seasons almost always introduce things that set up what’s coming down the line, I’m convinced season 10 is essentially a teaser for how Blizzard is going to fix Diablo 4’s loot problem.
Absolute chaos
Season 10 is the season of uniques, the extremely powerful tier of items that are the beating heart of almost every popular build in the game. Technically, they’re not changing at all. What’s changing is how you use them with a new variant exclusive to the season.
Whenever a unique drops next season, there’s a chance it’ll drop as a chaos unique. Chaos uniques carry over all the same stats and powers (with a small boost) as normal uniques except they can be worn in a different slot on your character.
A sorceress who wants the unique amulet that supersizes her fire-breathing hydras now gets to put that on somewhere else, freeing up that amulet spot for a different item—maybe even another unique. Necromancers can equip an item that is normally a shield as their boots and it still provides all the same bonuses. It’s a little goofy to wear something called Beastfall Boots as your gloves, but the impact this change has when it comes to buildcrafting is huge.
I’ve been trying out all sorts of combinations of uniques on the season 10 PTR this week. I’ve never had so much fun experimenting with gear before. Uniques I never use because the slot they took up was too valuable to give up are now worth considering when they can go anywhere I want. On my sorceress, I was using two pairs of boots (one as unique gloves and the other as a normal legendary) for the cooldown reduction on my teleport evade to zoom through dungeons like never before.
Chaos uniques pry open the iron bars on Diablo 4’s gear and finally let you throw stuff together to discover interactions that weren’t possible otherwise. They also ignore the ways you’re usually forced into having defensive items make up half of your loadout. Now all that power comes with a severe cost that you have to fix. Solving gear-related problems is one of the most satisfying parts of an action RPG, and it’s an experience Diablo 4 lost as Blizzard sped the pace of the game up and simplified loot.
For the first time in a long time, I’ve had to consider what items should go where and if they’re worth more than what I’m giving up. Usually, you just pull the loot of the shelves like a shopping list and everything eventually works itself out. Chaos uniques compete for every slot on your character sheet, and that means having to make decisions based on where your character is at now and not just where you want them to be eventually.
Loot reborn, again
It also opens the door for building around skills that have never had the items to support them. Some uniques offer massive damage increases that you’d never use because they would lock you out of another item needed to change how the skill behaves.
This, to me, is why Blizzard was willing to unshackle the most powerful items from their designated slots. For Diablo 4 to become an action RPG where any skill can be viable, your gear has to be far more customizable than it is now. While I don’t think uniques are going away, I think the concept of a skill-specific power being tied to a specific item and slot is going to go away.
Part of what’s fun in other games is finding your way to a version of a build that doesn’t necessarily look like someone else’s. That’s possible in Diablo 4 right now, but it comes with a massive cost in power to the point of being so ineffective you might as well follow a build guide.
It would be too tragic for Blizzard to give us something this good and not have plans to bring the spirit of it back.
Chaos uniques bring a level of flexibility to the game that minimizes the disparity between using the most optimal gear and using the gear that fits how you want to use the skill. Maybe you want those lightning orbs to explode on impact instead of orbiting your character. A permanent system where you can mix and match powers like chaos uniques would finally allow that to be possible.
I don’t know if it’ll happen via a skill tree rework or a new crafting system or both. I just know it would be too tragic for Blizzard to give us something this good and not have plans to bring the spirit of it back.
Diablo 4 doesn’t need to have the overwhelming complexity of PoE, but it desperately needs to let you build your character around your favorite skills and items without having to worry about hitting a brick wall when you don’t follow the one way to make everything work together.
Season 10 is a taste of what Diablo 4 could be if it celebrated all of its creative and powerful loot by letting you cook something up in your own way, and I’m crossing my fingers that it’s just the first step to something much more robust down the line.
Diablo 4 season 10 starts on September 23.