The pace of levelling in Diablo 4 is going to change when Blizzard releases the Lord of Hatred expansion on 28th April.
The intention is to make the earlier character levels last longer, so you won’t have an experience whereby levels whizz by at the beginning of the game and then slow down dramatically after. But that won’t mean a longer levelling experience overall.
Game director Colin Finer explained it to a group of press I was in at Blizzard headquarters recently. “We’ve actually rebalanced it a little bit,” he said. “We’ve increased the level cap [from 60 to 70 in Lord of Hatred] but the time it takes to get max-level is the same.
“What the curve is going to look like is today, you get through one to 20, one to 25, really quick. It’s almost over in a second. What we’re doing is front-loading a lot of the monster cleaning you do early, so it’s slower early, but then in the later levels, it’s much less. Imagine it takes 20 hours to get the max level: we’re essentially saying the first 20 levels are going to take a little bit longer but the back half is going to be much faster.
“The thought is you’re going to have a lot more skills at your disposal, you’re going to be killing way more monsters, and we want that to be snappy and more evenly paced throughout.”
A positive knock-on effect is that by having more time between levels early on, players will learn their characters and their powers more gradually. The drip-feed of new ideas and systems is deliberate, and if you level so fast as to have many ideas rush at you at once, it can be overwhelming.
I felt this for myself recently when reinstalling Diablo 4 to try the paladin class. I levelled from one to 30 in about half an hour, courtesy of a shared-world quest boss that kept respawning. It was such a blur of advancement that I was none the wiser, after experiencing it, about how the class actually worked.
The Lord of Hatred expansion brings a lot of new things to Diablo 4, not least two new classes – a warlock and a paladin (that you can try for free next week) – a new area, a new storyline, new systems, quests, and more. But perhaps a more exciting change comes in an overhauled and expanded skill tree alongside the expansion, and Blizzard hopes this will bring much-needed build variety to the game. It’s also a declaration, alongside loot overhauls and other reworks that have been done to the game, that Blizzard isn’t afraid to tackle core areas of the game should they need it. It means that three years in, Diablo 4 is in better shape than ever.
