Diablo 4
Given that I haven’t played Diablo 4 in about a month, I sort of lost track of what they were doing with the store rotation, where they’d keep cycling in new, premium armor sets that cost anywhere from $20 to $35 each for a full look.
Now that season 2 ends tomorrow, we have the full scope of the absolutely travesty the cash shop was this season. In a sprawling image (too big to embed here), u/SheWhoHates compiled every free and paid armor set in the course of season 1. The grand total was a whopping 41 paid armor sets compared to the five free sets you get in the unpaid portion of the battle pass. A set that makes you look worse than the majority of the NPCs in the game. I thought it was a joke when I first saw it.
Diablo 4
41 sets across five classes. Utterly insane. Yes, I do have to make a comparison to another live service looter like Destiny 2. Let’s go through it.
- Diablo Free Battle Pass Set: 5 sets (5 classes)
- Diablo Paid Battle Pass Set: 5 sets
- Diablo Earned World Armor: 0 sets
- Diablo Store Armor: 36 sets
- Destiny 2 Free Battle Pass Set: 0 sets
- Destiny 2 Paid Battle Pass Set: 3 sets (3 classes)
- Destiny 2 Earned World Armor: 6 sets (season and reprised raid)
- Destiny 2: Store Armor: 6 sets (seasonal, holiday event)
And on top of that, Destiny 2 has an in-game currency you can farm for those store sets, most of the time.
Yes, it’s true that Diablo offers more sets overall but that’s almost…bad? They’re devoting a huge amount of design resources to those shop sets instead of making actual loot you could get in the wild. More or less all the loot design work goes into the store, none of it into seasonal gameplay.
Things are not changing. Not significantly. We’ve seen the free set for next season. It’s terrible. We’ve seen just a single armor cosmetic that can be earned from a boss, one crown, the same across all classes. Blizzard has promised some future Uniques will look different and be transmoggable, but if the store totals stay the same, the paid sets will continue to dwarf anything earned in a season.
Blizzard was very proud of the fact that at launch, earned sets would be just as cool and numerous as paid sets. They were. When seasons started, that went completely out the window. Dozens of paid sets at sky-high prices, and the worst free set you’ve ever seen. I’m like actually offended by this and it needs to change soon. It won’t in tomorrow’s season 2.
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