It's been a little over a year since Diablo 4 released now. Back on release it was a pretty alright game, albeit a little slow and grindy. Endgame was almost non-existant, development was a mix of slow and lazy and the game made you burn out long before you made it to level 100. Apparently they've fixed a lot of the issues with the last couple of seasons and since season 5 just dropped a few days ago I decided to give it a go.
For my return to Diablo 4 I decided to make myself a Sorceress. I haven't played this class since the beta and I've heard that they buffed it through the past several seasons. It was quite underwhelming when the game was new. Whenever I play a sorceress or mage type of character I always go for fire type magic if I can. With the Sorceress, I can.
So far I've burned my way to level 50 and it's been great. Leveling is fast and the Sorceress class feels really good to play. I've tried a few different builds just to see if everything is viable and it feels like it is. I've settled for a fire build focused on burning and damage over time damage which seems to be working really well.
It took me barely 10 minutes of playing this season to figure out that Diablo 4 is much smoother and way more fun that it used to be. There's two things that mostly contribute to this. For starters, leveling up is a lot faster so you can get your builds going faster. Experimenting with builds is the heart of this game afterall. I'm very happy about this.
Secondly, there's more and easier options for creating builds. Collecting legendary aspects is a lot easier than before and you can play around more with the stats on your gear through a new feature called tempering. Legendary aspects will now be added into your codex when you dismantle them instead of cluttering your inventory. Whenever you dismantle a stronger version of that aspect it will update itself in this codex. So much better than what it used to be.
Tempering is something brand new to me. As far as I know it was added in season 4. Since I haven't played since season 1 there's a lot of new stuff for me to discover. Tempering is unlocked at roughly level 20 at which point a certain type of scrolls will start to drop. These are tied to different kinds of stats and when learned you can temper them into your gear. When you do you'll roll on a few different stats available, hoping to get the one you want. If it fails you can re-roll the tempering on each piece of gear a set amount of times. That means there's a bit of luck involved but it's cheap and easy to do so I don't mind.
When I ended my sessions yesterday I had just made it to world tier 3 and started the quest line focusing on this seasons content. This sees us going back to Hell for the first time since the campaign and I'm quite excited for that. I hope the season activity is fun and rewarding. I'll be back here to praise or hate it anyways.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.
