I’ve set down Diablo 4 pretty much since two weeks after season 1 launched, given that there’s not a whole lot of reason to go back to it other than leveling my seasonal character to 100. But I got to the mid 70s and stopped due to a common problem, it’s a huge slog to get from 70 or 80 to 100.
Now, Blizzard is doing its best to change that. A new hotfix that’s just gone live has dramatically buffed XP gains across the game. Namely:
- World Tier 3 monster kill XP has been buffed by 5%
- World Tier 4 monsters kill XP has been buffed by 15%
Also keep in mind this joins a bunch of other XP-boosting patches in the past. Last week, Blizzard also buffed the XP gain urn in Season of the Malignant to go from an 8% XP buff to a 20% XP buff, making seasonal play by far the fastest way to get your characters to the highest levels in the game.
Before that, we previously saw buffs to monster XP inside Nightmare Dungeons, and buffs to activity completion for essentially all the endgame activities like dungeons and tree caches.
So, now it takes less time to get to rank 100 and max out your paragon points. Is this fixing Diablo 4’s current playability issues? Uh, I would say not really. I mean, it certainly helps this specific part of the game, given that high level XP progression has not felt good, but I maintain that the biggest problem with Diablo 4 remains itemization, this deeply strange system that means rare drops with good stats and rolls are more valuable than legendary gear, given how common they are, and that legendary gear is just rare gear with a random affix that usually doesn’t matter and can be replaced. And besides that, there are only a few set “unique” drops that create good builds on each class, and most of the time those too are outpaced by affix-infused rares. It’s very weird, and makes loot farming not very fun.
Diablo 4 is heading toward its second season that will launch in October. While I did not really like the Diablo 3 seasonal model, I thought I would given Diablo 4’s a shot given how much I liked the base game, but it really hasn’t clicked for me. Future seasons are supposed to be more involved than this one, so we’ll have to see what changes in a month or so, and if it’s worth playing for more than a week or two, XP boosts or no.
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