And considering how fast my sorcerer is becoming a godlike being (with a mysterious mark from Lilith) it feels possible I might be the someone that's coming to Sanctuary to make things worse.īlizzard has said that Diablo 4 is a 'return to darkness' to evoke the tone of Diablo 2 instead of 3, but the absurdity of playing as a walking winter storm participating in open world events where demons crawl out of the ground like ants at a picnic doesn't quite match the vibe that it's pitching.

Lilith, the demon mother of the humans who we saw in the BlizzCon cinematic, is set up as that someone early in your journey, but I doubt that's the whole story. You meet people in and around the main city of Kyovashad who believe something or someone is coming to Sanctuary. Diablo 4 begins in a frozen wasteland where people cling to flickering torches and faith. Diablo 3's Reaper of Souls expansion ended with the extinction of 90% of all humans. The sheer level of destructive power I have and the apocalyptic state of Sanctuary are hard to square. Playing Diablo 4 is much closer to playing Elden Ring than I thought it would be. You can spend a few gold to unlearn skill and place the points elsewhere, and sometimes rare gear will give a spell for free-which is why my sorceress is stuck with those frozen orb gloves. It's on you to work out the order of operations and adjust your skills accordingly. Frost bolt starts as your main focus and quickly becomes the filler spell between frozen orbs, blizzards, ice blades, and ice armor windows. Every level you gain is an opportunity to drop a point into the skill tree and expand your toolbox as the monsters get nastier. There are dozens of choices to make about your character before you leave the introductory zone.

I think in terms of cold damage efficiency because that's the build I've chosen over the 10 or so hours I've spent playing Diablo 4's first act.

And if I can get the big guys frozen before I've drained over half my mana, they do even more damage-maybe even enough for a one-shot. A few frost bolts and a frozen orb are enough to slow weak hellspawn down, but a blizzard and a frozen orb can freeze an elite one in place, teeing them up for critical damage.

That's just how the math works out in Diablo 4, the long-awaited Blizzard action-RPG that was announced way back in 2019.

Playing diablo 3 because diablo 4