Diablo 4
My journey with Diablo 4 has been very enjoyable, but also…pretty easy. The campaign on World Tier 2 was a standard experience. You might die here and there a few times since you’re playing somewhat carelessly on a not-hardcore character. The Butcher will show up and ruin your day on occasion. But generally, it was fine.
The same is true for endgame stuff. World bosses are…nothing in World Tier 3, just essentially waiting out a clock. Helltides are very fun! Also not hard. The toughest thing you could really do is just Nightmare Dungeons way above your level. But my stun Death Blow Barbarian was crushing through most of those.
All those fun times have now come to an end. I have hit the capstone dungeon which serves as the barrier to World Tier 4 and true endgame loot and leveling. And man, I am hitting a wall.
The dungeon itself is fine. Long, kind of hard, but not terrible. Then you hit Elias, the campaign boss who has been reborn as a death-dealing monster with armies of minions. My normally decently tanky Barbarian is getting shredded by fast-moving fire projectiles and insta-exploding floor circles. I can stun him, I can get a good smash or two in, but all it takes is a wrong step and I’m toast.
It reminded me of the only boss I had a significantly tough time with during the campaign itself, the final boss of the Bear Tribe campaign that was mostly about shooting little projectiles everywhere that you had to dodge, then on Barbarian, you had to run back in for a hit or two before he’d do it again. This is like that, except he hits harder, shoots more and spawns giant minion clusters.
Diablo 4
No no no, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying capstone Elias needs to be nerfed. The challenge is fine. But what I am coming to terms with is that perhaps I have finally reached the point where my off-meta stun build is just not going to work, and I may have to respec the entire thing to something more traditional to get past him. This build smashes through Nightmare Dungeon bosses but it just cannot do the same with Elias. Plus the whole fight I was thinking “man, this would be so much easier on my Rogue” as kiting endlessly with a melee class is something less than enjoyable.
I do think this sort of challenge is good. It’s making me go back and reexamine my build. I still want to try to beat it with my own setup rather than scrapping everything to go meta. I’m trying to figure out where I can better balance survivability (because I’m now getting roasted) and boss damage and mob damage.
Still, it’s a bit frustrating because I feel stuck. The XP gains in WT3 are so paltry I’m barely making progress there now. My gear is about as good as I’m going to get and I need to start getting that WT4 Ancestral stuff. So this is the literal gate standing between me and the true endgame.
I’ll keep trying, I guess, racking up 300,000 gold repair bills in the process.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to my free weekly content round-up newsletter, God Rolls.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
