Diablo 4
Diablo 4 season 2 has been rolling for a little while now, and I still find myself playing it daily. I have more hours in than I do for season 1, and my level 93 Druid has sailed past my level 75 Necromancer, the level where I stopped playing last season. This is about to be the first character I actually take all the way to 100, as even my OG story campaign Barbarian never got there. It was a slog by level 90, and I just didn’t see the point.
So, what changed? I mean, there’s a very long list this season, from an engaging new seasonal zone, to minibosses and uber bosses, to better gear farming at higher levels and so on. But I think there is one change that far and away made things feel better to the point where I’m logging in every day just like I did at launch.
It was the grind. The XP grind, specifically. That was the wall you hit previously at around level 70 or, and that, combined with essentially no increase in the quality of loot, meant that it felt like there was little point to continue.
But this season that grind has been decimated, in a good way. They changed XP so that it takes about 40% less time to get to level 100 than it did previously, and I can absolutely feel that more than anything else in the season. You are gaining first those skill points, then those paragon points, so, so much faster than before, so you always feel like you’re making significant progress toward furthering your build, even if you’re not landing god rolls drops (I think there’s still some work to be done on the loot front, but it’s a little better).
Diablo 4
The specific buffs to XP feel good everywhere. The incredibly dense Blood Harvest seasonal zones are loads of XP. Nightmare dungeon monster XP buffs are easily felt. The Tree of Whispers finally feels like something worthwhile in the endgame with large XP leaps. And in the season as a whole, free Smoldering Ashes can get you up to a bonus 20% XP boost natively for the season.
The end result? A level 100 Druid is on the way for me when I’ve never hit that before. And I’m doing that quickly enough where there’s plenty of time to start another class from scratch if I want to (I may not, I do have a serious backlog of other games I’m putting off).
I do think there have been many other positive changes that feed into (no vampire pun intended) how Season of Blood feels better, but if your main thought before was “this is such a slog” at higher levels, the XP potion of that is just infinitely better than before. They did really excellent work nerfing this grind so heavily, so quickly. It’s great.
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