Highlights
- Diablo 4's Season of Blood has brought highly-demanded changes and a shift in difficulty curve for world bosses, pleasing a significant part of the community.
- While some players still find fully-realized endgame builds to be too powerful against world bosses, many appreciate the increased challenge in World Tiers 2 and above.
- The Blood Harvest events have been a highlight of the Season of Blood, with fans seeing them as an improvement over the previous Helltides events.
The Season of Blood is in full swing for Diablo 4, and its players are hoping that the developers keep the deadly difficulty of the game's world bosses untouched. For a title that has endured an array of controversies since launch, Diablo 4 broke several Blizzard milestones and established itself as one of the best-selling games in 2023. That being said, many players have since taken a break from the world of Sanctuary as Diablo 4's popularity experienced a dramatic drop in the wake of its Season of the Malignant debut.
The initial changes that came with Diablo 4's inaugural season were harshly denounced by its community, as many fans felt their vision of Diablo 4 was at odds with the direction that its developers were nudging it towards. The endgame in Diablo 4 was widely criticized for being stale or tedious, with Nightmare Dungeons and poor itemization cited as the prevailing reasons behind the unhappiness and apathy that now permeated in the community. Blizzard realized that something had to change, and thus the Season of Blood focused on course-correcting Diablo 4 towards a direction that could better satisfy its players.
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Diablo 4's Difficulty Curve is a Good Thing
Season of Blood introduced several highly-demanded quality-of-life changes to the game, and even rebalanced Diablo 4's attributes from top-to-bottom. As a result, the difficulty curve for some content such as world bosses has wildly shifted compared to Season of the Malignant. In World Tiers 2 and above, bosses such as Avarice are heavy hitters, and Diablo fans are hoping that Blizzard will not nerf them back to their previous state. The community still has fond memories of Ashava killing Diablo 4 players left-and-right in the open beta, and the world bosses in the Season of Blood feel much the same in spirit.
Though fully-realized endgame builds in Diablo 4 still make short work of its world bosses, the difficulty curve is nonetheless welcomed by a significant part of its community. Some players are even clamoring for harder encounters in World Tiers 3 and 4, given that they represent the endgame experience of Diablo 4's open world. However, the true star of the Season of Blood in Diablo 4 has been its Blood Harvest events, which many fans think are what Helltides should have been.
It would seem that Diablo 4 is on the right track to fix its major shortcomings, but players should keep an eye out for BlizzCon 2023 all the same, as it's highly likely that Blizzard will have much to reveal about the long-term future of the game during its opening ceremony. It's not unreasonable to expect an expansion announcement for Diablo 4, and though there is no guarantee that lightning will strike twice for Blizzard, Reaper of Souls has established a precedent of a Diablo title redeeming itself through the release of its expansion pack.
Diablo 4 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
