Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred is the game’s big first paid expansion, adding a new class, more story, tweaking mechanics and (in my opinion) attempting to right D4’s wrong in a way like Reaper of Souls did for Diablo 3. The new class is pretty fun, the new bit of story they’ve wrote is alright and the mechanics they’ve added and tweaked are pretty hit or miss. Ultimately this doesn’t change Diablo 4 enough for me to want to go back to it regularly, so I’m not sure if they’ve accomplished their goals. Diablo 4 is still fine, but I’d rather go back to Last Epoch if I had the jonesing for an ARPG at the moment.
The story they’ve wrote this time is classic Blizzard fare; the extremism of zeal, corruption, redemption, and wanting to protect what matters to you at all costs (including your soul). It’s a fine romp in the Diablo 2 Act 3 locales of marshes, Travincal and Kurast and their cinematography and cutscene direction is pretty good. The new characters are okay, the stakes aren’t super high (because I rarely play this kind of game for the story) and it gives you a reason to go from A to B to C.
The new mechanics don’t fare as good, there’s a mercenary system, all new characters that you can recruit through different story beats that come into action using active and passive abilities that unlock as you rank them up, but it really didn’t feel like it mattered that much to my ultimate survivability or killing potential, it was fine to have a bonus here or there, but really trying to figure out if I was doing better or worse because of the added characters in my party was quite difficult. I’m not a fan of how everything is a reward track with tiers in the game and every track looks the same either.
The spiritborn class is pretty neat, a bit more than a glorified monk, it uses abilities from four spirit animals that you can also equip passively in two special class slots. Each of them are focusing on a specific stat (or effect), like block chance, poison, attack speed and stuns, but you can mix and match to get some interesting builds going.
Over the board, stats and numbers have been crunched down, where before certain things were in the thousands they now seemed to be in the tens or hundreds. Health for instance, kinda shocked me, with how little the value now was. Paragon levels are now shared between characters, and they’ve added a ‘runeword’ system where you can socket two runes in gear, one stating a condition and the other an action, in order to create potentially interesting effects. In practice, I never found anything really meaningful to do with this system.
The challenges posed by the story were reasonable, but there was a new activity, a timed dungeon that you can customize a bit, that I couldn’t just succeed at and always ran out of time. I have no idea why and I wracked my brain thinking about anything wrong I could’ve been doing without avail.
Ultimately, Diablo 4 still suffers from the same issues, in my opinion. You go through the skill tree too quickly, each piece of gear having a potentially build defining unique power that you have to manage, extract, upgrade and bring forward to new gear is more trouble than it is fun, and you feel severely underpowered and most moves are unsatisfying. That’s just me tho, if you want more Diablo 4, you’re in luck!
