In the first season of Diablo 4, I didn’t choose the dog walker class; he chose me. I have three fierce wolves on a leash and I have a tendency to get feral myself. I hadn’t even progressed far enough to reach Wolves in the Druid skill tree before picking up a gem that gave me three whole ranks for free. Aside from the recent patch and a few bugs, Season of the Evil One has exactly the kind of ridiculous vibe that Diablo 4 should have had when it launched.
The balance patch that accompanies Season 1 is its own story. Nobody is happy about it. Not even Blizzard, who promised never to make a patch like this again. The drastic reductions to player damage and survivability are the kind of drastic changes that would go much better if made right from launch. You can’t give away a bunch of toys and then smash almost all of them without people getting mad – and rightly so.
No matter how necessary the patch was to prepare for Season of the Evil One and beyond, Blizzard absolutely needs to do better to make future seasons count. It’s a shame the patch had to be like this because Season 1 takes significant steps to make you feel truly powerful in Diablo 4.
Your first quest of Season 1 teaches you how her new items, Malignant Hearts, work. These gems give bonuses to the level of a legendary item. I got lucky and caught a perfect roll on a Moonrage gem which gives any kill a small chance to summon a wolf to my side and three ranks to the skill. While I had no intention of playing a druid with furry friends, I now play a druid with furry friends – and that’s kinda the rules, especially coming from my necromancer with his pitiful minions. I’ve already started modifying my skill points to support the evil heart I have and I’m not even at level 25 yet.
My druid is able to make his way through a room like a showerless Cesar Milan shaking a bag of treats and watching the wolves appear. It’s kind of like playing a hunter in World of Warcraft where my pets can take care of everything while I’m busy. If there’s a tough boss or an elite enemy, I can deal with it while my puppies chew on their friends. And those nasty little explosive fiends are much easier to deal with when they’ve been taken care of off-screen.
power play area
These powers help ease the pain of trudging through Diablo 4’s normal mode. Diablo 4’s regular mode, Eternal Realm, is an extremely slow game type. New gear and abilities come quickly in the early hours, but eventually the fireworks die down. Sitting in a build at level 30 and spending the next 70 levels refining it has never been my favorite way to play these kinds of games. I love experimenting with other skills and ways of playing. Classes in Diablo 4 are a buffet of tasty ideas, and I want to try them all, regardless of their late-game viability.
It’s a relief to see how few restrictions there are on items with so much power.
The Malignant Hearts system kicks things up a notch and gives you absurd options that just wouldn’t work in a game so desperate to set you up for the endgame by pushing you into a single build. Druid companion builds, according to Diablo’s most hardcore theorists, aren’t viable, but I’d like to see them stop. I will kiss my wolf children until I find a better heart to use.
It’s a relief to see how few restrictions there are on items with so much power. You can loot the hearts of corrupted enemies in Malignant Tunnels, a new type of dungeon, or craft them from the materials you get by collecting those you don’t need. You can even create Summoners that allow you to spawn a monster that will drop a specific category of Malignant Heart, which I’m sure will be vital once you settle into a deeper build in the game. The season is raining hearts, and aside from my cramped inventory, it’s a promising sign that Blizzard isn’t afraid to give you Diablo 3 power levels as soon as you log in.
In my future, I can look forward to the Unconstrained Heart of the Beast in World Tier 4, which will allow my druid to simply refuse to be stunned, frozen, or knocked down half the time and turn into a bear instead – a crucial trait for late-game dungeons. Some cores hook directly into builds players have been using since Diablo 4 launched, but others seem to create new ones on their own. There is a Necromancer-specific core that causes corpses to automatically use one of your corpse skills. Players have already found a way to make him use Corpse Explosion so consistently that in some close combat your character will play himself.
The sheer power of hearts can fade as you climb through world tiers and increase the difficulty of the game. This is where you really need to choose a proven build and stick with it. But they present some wildly creative ideas for how all of Diablo 4’s classes can be amped up in a way that encourages you to learn how they work and learn what you love about them. And you feel super powerful doing it.
The first season of Diablo 4 is what the normal game should have looked like. It really sucks that even to play as the Malignant Hearts you have to finish the campaign first. Diablo shouldn’t be about eating your vegetables so Blizzard can painstakingly build the most boring version of Sanctuary yet; it should be about crushing demons with the most ridiculous powers you can find in a world that has celebrated this from the start. At least we finally get dessert.