168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Diablo 4 has undergone a transformation of sorts this past year. Blizzard has leveraged the game’s live-service model to overhaul the game piece by piece. Itemization has been upended from a pure RNG loot chase to one more focused on player crafting. End﷽game pursuits have expanded ⛎to include pinnacle bosses, a dungeon ladder, and even a horde mode. Even older content wasn’t spared from such seismic changes.
Beforꦍe going into Vessel of Hatred, my biggest gripe was how bloated the endgame was becoming. Seasonal content would eclipse reward incentives from activities reworked not even three months ago, and the vast number of progression systems made endgame pursuits needlessly confusing for the average player. Vessel of Hatred aims to streamline a year’s worth🌼 of content updates into a more cohesive and varied endgame experience.
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Time Played |
42 Hours |
|---|---|
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Chosen Difficulty |
Torment III |
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Highest Level Reached |
Paragon 264* |
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Classes Played |
Sorcerer, Spiritborn |
*This is due to an XP bug in the review build. I realistically hit Paragon 170.
Welcome Back, Torment
The first major change to the endgame is the difficulty system. World Tiers have been removed entirely and replaced 🌞with Torment difficulties, a returning feature from past Diablo titles𒈔. Once you complete the campaign and clear a T20 Pit dungeon, you’ll gain access to the first Torment tier. This substantially increases the difficulty across the entire game but gives you a small chance of finding Ancestral items, the strongest gear in the game. It’s also a requirement to play some of Diablo 4’s more recent endgame additions, like Infernal Hordes or The Dark Citadel.
Torment is used to gauge how powerful your build is, similar to the Pit in previous seasons. A build only needs to play the first Torment difficulty to start farming for the best gear, but if your build is strong enough to ramp up the Torment diffic💦ulty, you’ll fi🃏nd Ancestral gear in greater abundance. Higher difficulties are no longer a requirement to get the best gear.
Mythic Drop Rates
Mythic Uniques are more liܫkely to drop on ꧟higher Torment tiers, although their drop rates seem nerfed. I have over 50 pinnacle boss kills on Torment III and never saw one drop.
I wasn’t a fan of this change on paper, but structuring Torment as an elective difficulty system places less emphasis on following the meta. A common critique last season was how Infernal Hordes were so difficult that players were forced to play 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:meta builds like Frozen Orb Sorcerer or its Lightning Spear variant. Now that higher difficulties don’t gatekeep the best items, casual players can🐭 stick with lower Torment difficulties to experiment with off-meta builds. More hardcore players can then push the Torment system for optimal rew🌟ards. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
Tempering Expectations
In practice, the entire Torment system falls apart due to the scarcity of Ancestral items, which is the reason you’re cranking up the difficulty in the first place. These items were reworked in V🌼essel of Hatred to be significantly stronger than your average item:
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They always drop at 800 item power, 50 more than standard gear.
- This influences item stats and base DPS.
- At least one greater affix is present, granting a 50 percent stat buff.
- Ancestral items can be masterworked 12 times, up from eight.
A good Ancestral item is twice as powerful as your average item, but you’d be lucky to find more 𓄧than a couple per hour. In my 40 hours revisiting Sanctuary, I’ve found maybe 70 Ancestral items, half of which had useless affixes for my character. Higher Torment difficulties don’t have a perceivable drop rate boost, 𒅌so you might as well grind the easiest difficulty to maximize your drops per hour.
It’s a shame because the itemization in Diablo 4 is finally in a good place. Gone are the days of getting items that only buff your dওamage while in crescent moonlight during April. Items now drop with simple affixes like skill ranks, critical damage, and attack speed. The meat of this rework came with the addition of tempers and masterworking. Players can forge two affixes onto their items through tempering recipes found in the world. Once tempered, you can then masterwork an item with endgame materials for incremental stat boosts.
Vessel of Hatred hasn’t made any significant changes to these systems, but I cannot stress enough how much better itemization feels. Crafting might seem antithetical to Diablo’s core design, but the tempering system helps smooth out early-game progression while adding depth to buildcraft ♐for endgame players. The eternal loot chase is still there through Ancestral items and Mythic Uniques, but now you aren’t at the mercy of RNG if your build is playable. You’re always just a temper away from an upgrade.
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Nine Circles Of Grind
Upg🥃rading your gear has been heavily streamlined in Vessel of Hatred. Nightmare Dungeons and Infernal Hordes are now your primary sources of masterwork materials. Once you’ve upgraded your character, you can dive into The Pit to upgrade your Paragon Glyphs and unlock harder difficulty tiers. Target-farming gear is still available through pinnacle bosses and Helltide.
Curren𒊎cie𒁃s have also been streamlined. Obducite is now the only masterwork resource, and Stygian Stones have been removed entirely.
To help players grapple with the sheer number 🌳of changes, Blizzard added a quest t♎o the end of the DLC campaign that guides players through each endgame activity and reward incentive. You only need to complete this quest once; alternate characters skip it entirely. Most material descriptions have also been updated to make drop sources readily apparent.
Most Diablo players will find this new endgame structure much more intuitive than previous seasons. Nightmare Dungeons are better suited as a source of crafting materials, and The Pit is a solid testing ground for your build. I’m not a fan of limiting Glyph XP solely to Pit runs, but this feels far🔯 more appropriate than the lackluster masterwork farm it was before. The only thing missing from Diablo 4’s endgame was some way to target-farm affixes on gear. Thankfully, the expansion has an answer for that.
What’s New In Vessel Of Hatred?
Owners of Vessel of Hatred will have access to a couple more endgame activities. Kurast Undercity is a Greater Rift-style timed dungeon where you speedrun floors for rewards. You can choose the types of rewards you want at the end of the dungeon, including specific aspects or affix tags. It was easily my favorite activity in my 40-hour playthrough. Runs are short and give you a means of target-farming affixes in a way that’s previously been impossible. I suspect the Undercity wi🍨ll become a fan favorite for many.
Blizzard has also added a cooperative-only activity, The Dark Citadel. I wasn’t able to play it during the preview window, but I’ve heard good things about it from colleagues. It’s structured similarly to a traditional MMO raid, with encounters broken up into wings. The rewards are solid, and the difficulty is much lower than one might expect—you can clear the entire thing with a partner and no voice comms, just text chat and pings. Blizzard is apprehensive about making more content like this, so it remains to be seeꦯn if raids become a core addition to Diablo 4.
Regarding the endgame, Vessel of Hatred has been an exercise of iteration more than expansion, but that’s exactly what the game needed. Diablo 4 was beginning to buckle under the weight of its overlapping activities and lopsided systems. Vessel of Hatred has done a great job streamlining the endgame experience for every type of Diablo player, casual to hardcore. If Blizzard makes a few changes to Ances✱tral drops, this will easily be the best state Diablo 4’s endgame has ever been in.
Diabl𒆙o 4: Vess🐽el Of Hatred Review - There And Back (To Hell) Again
Vessel of Hatred deepens Diablo's lore while streaꦚmlining the end-game in several ways.
