Diablo 4

Blizzard

I’ve been enjoying Diablo 4’s new Lord of Hatred expansion, currently pushing my way up the Torment level ladder with my “explode everything on the screen” Apocalypse Warlock (thanks Moxsy). But there is one weird thing that Blizzard didn’t really seem to have figured out before release here.

One big change in Diablo 4 is its skill trees, in that it has now created a bunch of branching nodes that allow modification of skills not just in terms of their effects, but often the core of how they function, practically like three unique modifiers per skill. Many even change the entire type of skill it is. For my character, for instance, that effectively doubles the amount of potential Hellfire skills I can use.

But the actual tree is pretty weird. It takes exactly four skill points to get the skill and the next three nodes for those modifiers. And there are only six moves you can even use at any given time (plus ones like Warlock’s class ability demon isn’t even on the skill tree).

What that ends up resulting in is a system that has dozens and dozens of skill points that just sort of sit around and are dumped into a pile after level 30-40 or so. Each skill now maxes out at 15 rather than 5 as it used to, and between your points up to level 70 and those that the seasonal challenges are awarding. You pretty much just dump 15 into maybe 4-5 out of six skills on your bar. It feels very weird to essentially stop caring about skill points when you’re barely halfway to max level, plus unlocking more as a bonus as you move through the endgame. It feels like it just should have stayed at 5, and maybe the rest became paragon points early or something.

The good news is that in order to try out at least the baseline line-up of skills for any build, all you have to do is get a couple dozen levels into the game, and given how fast those early levels move, that’s going to be very quickly. By level 40, I believe, you unlock every single modifier node for the full package. I suppose I would trade the loss of dozens of points on top of that for the ability to more creatively buildcraft with this new node toggle system, but it does feel a little half-baked.

The next stage after this, the Paragon board, is not changed all that much from past versions, as there’s no grand revamp of the node/board rotation/glyph system. Don’t fix what isn’t broken, I suppose. But know that at a certain point, leveling is going to be for its own sake until you hit that 70 mark, and the more useful points start showing up again.

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