Diablo IV’s First Season is As Fun As A Sad Old Fisherman

Earlier this week, Blizzard launched another huge patch for Diablo IV to get things ready for the launch of the “Season of the Malignant,” but instead they set their own community on fire. The patch brought with it tons of nerfs and slowdowns, from arbitrarily lengthening the time it takes to exit a dungeon by two seconds, to knocking down the effectiveness of many popular Barbarian and Sorcerer builds, to dramatically increasing cooldowns for most skills that operate on them. It was a total mess. It kicked off dozens of think piece articles, rant videos, and angry forum posts. And then into the middle of that nightmare, the new season and paid battle pass content launched. Blizzard tried to control the damage this morning with an awkward livestream, but all they did was <a href="https://youtu.be/lFf3QzwPgzs" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">further confuse the hardcore community.</a> Right now, it feels like Diablo IV is in a deep dank hole. It’s like an old guy whose boat doesn’t work anymore but he still needs to catch some fish to eat. Yes, I’m still running with this whole fisherman thing. I’ve played several hours of the season over the last couple of days, and it’s nothing special in the ever-crowded world of live service video games. It adds two new large checklists of tasks to complete and one sort-of-new main mechanic. The checklists come in the form of Seasonal Tasks, which are kind of like the season lists in Diablo III, and a new Battle Pass which has both paid and free items along its 90-tier-level progression. <a href="https://xander51.medium.com/diablo-ivs-first-season-is-as-fun-as-a-sad-old-fisherman-82778c9fd8d3">Learn More</a>