Making the numbers go higher.
A Diablo 3 retrospect on the dawn of Diablo IV.
With Diablo IV dropping in June, I figured it would be nice to look back on my tenure in Diablo 3. D3 holds a very special place in my heart for being one of my ardent obsessions in a past life. I spent many late nights with my close friends playing Diablo 3, pushing Greater Rifts, farming bounties, rerolling for Ancient Legendaries, the works. It was frankly some of my most cherished times as somebody who plays video games. Team Fortress 2 with my clan server was a hoot-and-hollering good time, but there was something intimate about two or three of my close friends working together to push content. Ah, those were the Halcyon days.
Let's talk about credentials. I have about 1235 hours in Diablo 3 across all my current characters; this doesn't factor in rebirth or deleted characters I have. 552 of these hours have been spent on Crusader. When I still played, Paragon 1000 was considered a lot, and breaching Great Rift 100 was considered an accomplishment. During the early phases of Reaper of Souls I managed to remain in the top 100 Crusaders for a few brief seasons. I mostly ran a Hammers build, even when it was sub-optimal. I also played a shitload of Demon Hunter, but the builds varied with what was meta and what was fun, but I enjoyed the Marauder set the most; setting up turrets to tactically nuke enemies from across the map has some of the greatest visceral satisfaction I've had in a game.
In general I think that was a major reason I stuck with Diablo 3 as long as I did. The combat is some of the most satisfying I have ever played in a game, and revisiting it for the sake of writing this article has only reinforced that opinion. Everything has a weight to it, a meatiness to dismembering enemies that evokes a primal joy blowing shit up. And that's a testament especially considering how fast the game plays—you will seldom stand still long enough with the blistering pace the game pushes you up to. It's almost similar to a Doom 2016 where stopping means death, and you have to keep moving otherwise you're going to get blown to shreds. Whether you're a nimble wizard or demon hunter smoothly evading all that comes towards you, or you're a freight train of death like the Crusader or Barbarian, there's a snappy feeling of immediacy to your movements that lends each class its own feel.
But let's all be real here, the actual reason we're playing Diablo 3 is to watch the numbers go up.
Do you like big numbers and fat crits? Like, ludiciously thicc numbers to really emphasize how big your e-dick is? Diablo 3 has been power-crept to Hell (HAH) and back so the numbers are more inflated than the US Military spending budget, with far more entertaining explosions. I failed College Algebra more times than I care to admit, but the statistics-crunching in Diablo 3 has me horny for numbers in a way I never thought I could be. First you need a shitload of your primary stat, whether that be Intelligence, Dexterity or Strength. That determines your damage and your health pool, but also your durability. And you're going to need a lot of health, like 500k to a million HP if you want to stand a chance. Combining that with armor and dodge chance and you have your Toughness stat, a stat that starts as low as 10 million but with buffs active balloons to over 100 million. Then you have your Recovery stat which dictates your health regen and life steal, because you need that because you're going to be taking shitloads of damage and you gotta recover it somehow.
And then there's what we all came here for, the DPS stat, a deceptive number that involves having a lot of your primary stat and then stacking shitloads of Critical Chance and Critical Damage and Attack Speed. To blow up all these stats you have to shove gems into your gear, because gems are outrageous and they will feed your power. Shove those rubies into your armor to buff up your strength, shove those emeralds into your weapon to increase your Critical Damage, shove that Diamond into your helmet to give you Cooldown Reduction. Oh right, don't forget to stack shitloads of cooldown reduction to increase the uptime of your skills. And also Resource Regeneration/Cost reduction so you have more resources to spend.
Did I cover all of it? HELL FUCKING NO I DIDN'T. THAT'S JUST THE BEGINNING, MOTHERFUCKER. Time to talk about shiny legendaries and legendary sets, because those end up augmenting your toughness and DPS by the ten-folds and empowering certain skills and abilities with unique passives. Ever wanted to be a beyblade of death flinging grenades in every direction? Now you can with the right legendary weapon and legendary quiver. Get tired of choosing which Elemental Rune your skill's going to have? Get a legendary and choose them all. Ever want to throw a tantrum like a big baby and create earthquakes wherever you jump? Surprise motherfucker, there's a legendary set for that too.
If you like watching fat numbers go up with a ton of build variety and various ways to maim, dismember, or frankly just blow something the fuck up, Diablo 3 has you covered. I love the shit out of this game, even if the plot was garbage and the writing was garbage and the general aesthetic wasn't the grim darkness people had hoped for.
I played the open beta of Diablo IV, and I came away from it impressed but not convinced. The combat weight is there, and the potential for a deep and engaging system of buttons and levers to tune your character seems to be there, but the beta only took you up to 25. And if there's one thing to be taken from all this, the leveling experience and endgame of an ARPG are very, VERY different. I have to get to the endgame of D4 to really gauge a feel for if this is the game I've been waiting for. And frankly I'm not a huge fan of the game being turned into effectively an MMO in the process; I liked the intimacy of four people in a world at once, spreading out and coming together. I'm not sure the busyness of an MMO is much for the ambiance of this game, but maybe I'm just nitpicking.
Ultimately though the one thing it can't replicate are the Halcyon days of my college years with all my friends. Those friends have lives now, spouses, responsibilities. Even I don't have the time or energy to waste away grinding in a video game like I used to. I've enjoyed a lot of my MMO/multiplayer game experience, but none made me feel as intimately working together with my friends to grind out content as much as Diablo 3 did. Except maybe Warframe or Spiral Knights, but those are ghosts for another discussion later.
Diablo IV awaits us in less than two weeks. I will be there, and I will hit the ground running. And I will lovingly send off Diablo 3 as I do.
