Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred review: Fun, but not $40 worth of fun
Shortly after Starfield Shattered Space released to tepid reviews (check out ours here), it was Blizzard’s turn too launch a full-sized DLC for Diablo IV. However, unlike Shattered Space, which introduced nothing in the way of new gameplay mechanics, Vessel of Hatred completely reworks numerous in-game elements; even for those who did not purchase the DLC. It is, for all intents and purposes, Diablo 4.5 with a dash of new lore and an entire new map region to explore. At $40, it isn’t exactly cheap. Blizzard being Blizzard also sells more expensive versions that come with shiny in-game cosmetics, and yes, I purchased the Ultimate Edition which gave me access to new pets and some wings. Anyway, is Vessel of Hatred worth considering over the laundry list of games available on the market now?
Before diving into the actual review, it is important to mention that Vessel of Hatred’s launch was pushed back by a few hours due to ‘technical issues’, following which one had to sit through a ~23 GB update. All the Vessel of Waitred jokes aside, this is unacceptable for a company Blizzard’s size, but at least, it didn't charge people extra money for early access this time. I tested the game on my desktop (AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, 48 GB DDR4-3200) and could easily hit 4K 60 with DLSS Performance and high raytracing. However, later, more mob-dense areas in the game resulted in significant frame drops, so I had to switch off raytracing and use DLSS performance for a more stable experience. Unfortunately, the game crashed on me a few times at seemingly random moments.
Campaign
Vessel of Hatred expands upon Diablo 4’s cliffhanger and expands upon Neyrelle’s journey into Nahantu, a region Diablo 2 veterans will recognize instantly. Before proceeding, there’s one glaring plot hole that still irks me. Neyrelle (and later us, The Wanderer) is shown taking a boat to Nahantu. However, if you look closely at Sanctuary’s map, there’s a thin, but very traversable, passage between Zarbinzet and Nahantu that Neyrelle could have used. But doesn’t fit the scene set by Diablo 4’s ending cutscene. Moving on, we start off in Kyovashad, follow a few quest markers and end up in Nahantu cosplaying as a piece of driftwood. Then, you click a few more buttons, watch a few cutscenes, reunite with Neyrelle, run a bunch of errands, fight the bad guy, only to be greeted with ending cutscene. Of course, there’s a mandatory sequel/DLC bait at the end.
As expected, Vessel of Hatred attempts nothing new and sticks to the time-tested ‘good vs evil’ tropes found in all Diablo games. Like many AAA titles from established publishers, the story is ‘safe’ and anyone who has played video games for long enough can see the ending coming from a mile away. If you blaze through the campaign and do nothing else, you’ll be left between level 50 and level 55. Side quests are just as bland as the base game, but you should do some of them for the experience rewards. Essentially, the campaign left me, a hardcore Diablo enthusiast, disappointed because you can easily breeze through it in 5-6 hours from scratch. The $40 price tag is a tad high if you’re a casual player who just wants to experience the story. Those looking for end-game content, on the other hand, will feel differently.
Nahantu isn’t all bad, though. There are plenty of callbacks from Diablo 2, and even the map layout is similar-ish. You traverse through many familiar locations, that do justice to the region. Kurast Bazar is now your central hub where you’ll find yourself between quests. There’s even a brief encounter with one of Diablo 2’s most annoying Act 3 enemies. Nahantu has three new strongholds to conquer, one of which is clearly a ‘borrowed’ concept from Last Epoch’s Lightless Arbor. The new legacy dungeons are a welcome change from the ones found in the base game, and instead of Altars of Lilith, you now have to comb the map for Tenets of Akarat. Unfortunately, discovering them does not give any passive stat bonuses and just region renown, which you can max out easily with side quests and dungeons. A new region boss would have been nice, but there’s plenty of things to do otherwise. Kurast Undercity is a great way to target farm specific aspects/runes/materials. After you’re done with the campaign, Vessel of Hatred signposts you towards some in-game activities such as the Pit of the Artificer, Helltides and Realmwalkers for seasonal characters.
Itemization
As an ARPG, Diablo 4 is all about loot. You still have the magic and rare items to carry you through the early game. However, legendary items start dropping relatively early in your playthrough, rendering aforementioned loot unusable. Unlike previous patches, there are just two categories of legendary items: plain and Ancestral. The latter start showing up in Torment1 and are guaranteed to include at least one Greater Affix (marked by a star). You can now temper your legendary gear with two affixes, but masterworking count is capped to 8. On the other hand, Ancestral Legendary items can be masterworked 12 times. Additionally, the process now requires just one item: Obducite, which can be obtained from caches, Kurast Undercity, Nightmare Dungeons and Infernal Hordes.
Vessel of Hatred comes with a bunch of new aspects, Unique and Mythic Unique items. Target farming a specific Unique remains the same, look for a boss, gather up summoning materials, (optional: find 3 more people for added efficiency) and pray you get the right stat rolls. Mythic Uniques, on the other hand, continue to remain elusive. While you can technically get one on Torment1, the chances are astronomically low. But you can craft one of your choosing with two Resplendent Sparks and specific runes. You get one Resplendent Spark by killing Tormented Lilith, another at the end of your Season’s Journey (seasonal characters only) and a third when you kill your first boss in Torment4. Once again, the third method has not been communicated properly and I didn’t know of it until I watched a YouTube video. Plus, it will be unattainable for casual players because of the reasons stated below.
Gameplay and Difficulty
One of the most noticeable changes brought forth by Vessel of Hatred is a complete redesign of the difficulty/level system. Mobs no longer have levels and scale according to difficulty. This alone kills any sense of power/progression required of any ARPG, more than the base game did. Speaking of difficulty, you can now pick between ‘Normal’, ‘Hard’, ‘Expert’, ‘Penitent’, ‘Torment 1’, ‘Torment 2’, ‘Torment 3’ and ‘Torment 4. Your character can now go up to level 60 and Paragon level 300. I started my campaign on Hard, ramped it up to ‘Expert’ midway and finished at ‘Penitent’. For most players, ‘Hard’ should be an ok starting point, and ‘Normal’ for those who want a more relaxed experience. Each increase in difficulty comes with a gold/experience boost at the expense of Armour/resistance. At Torment4, you’ll need to pay close attention to your resistances because hitting the coveted 70% cap is nigh impossible without Tyrael’s Might, a notoriously difficult to craft Mythic Unique.
The endgame, however, starts at Torment1. You can, technically, experience everything the game has to offer at Torment 1 as a casual player. Unlocking Torment 1 has you run through the Pit of the Artificer, which is now also the only way you can upgrade your glyphs. One of the more divisive changes with glyph upgrades involves the addition of probabilistic elements. For example, you’ll be guaranteed an upgrade if your glyph is level 1 and pit tier is 20. However, a level 20 glyph has a remarkably lower chance of getting said upgrade at pit tier 23. While this incentivizes players to attempt higher pit tiers, I preferred the guaranteed experience provided by nightmare dungeons in previous seasons. Speaking of glyphs, Vessel of Hatred (and the base game) now lets you level your glyphs to level 100. You get a radius increase at level 45 and a bonus ‘legendary’ aspect at level 46. Blizzard has done a poor job of communicating the latter, resulting in many players (myself included) wondering where their legendary aspect was at level 45.
Plus, you can only have 5 paragon boards active at a time. On the one hand, this should prevent players from attaching all eight boards with the extra 100 Paragon levels; on the other, an artificial restriction on what a player can or cannot do with their character in a role-playing game is frustrating. Additionally, pushing past Pit 100 will be a chore for most classes/builds, effectively forcing you to play a ‘meta’ build whether you like it or not. The difficulty increase is more or less linear between the first 3 Torment tiers. However, the jump from Torment 3 to Torment 4 is a significant one. It will require your character to sport powerful gear with the right temper rolls and greater affixes. Thankfully, you have to grind only once every season (or just one on the Eternal realm), as the paragon level progression carries over to all subsequent characters. With a little elbow grease, you can easily get to paragon level 200 at Torment 3, but the same can’t be said for the last 100 levels.
At the time of writing, my character is at level 225, and I have no immediate plans of pushing to level 300. That said, season 6 gives you plenty of experience boosts. Between Seething Opals, Elixirs, Incenses and EXP wells in nightmare dungeons, and the season pass boost, you can easily gain a dozen or two levels in one sitting even as a casual player.
Runes and Mercenaries
Even though they might seem straight out of Diablo 2, Vessel of Hatred’s implementation of runes and mercenaries are remarkably different. There are fifteen Runes of Invocation that generate ‘offering’, which can then be spent on 26 Runes of Ritual. The latter offers an interesting mix of upgrades, such as skills from other classes, increased HP/critical chance, etc. On paper, that can result in thousands of potential combinations. A character can have a maximum of four runes equipped at a time spread out across two items. Vessel of Hatred creates an illusion of unlimited choice, but in reality, you’ll only end up using a handful of rune combinations towards the end. Rune words completely change how you interact with Diablo 4, and it’s a shame Blizzard paywalled it behind DLC, especially when they make crafting specific Mythic Uniques easier.
Mercenaries, on the other hand, aren’t nearly as useful. Unlike Diablo 2, where you could kit out your merc with leftover gear from your build, Diablo 4 mercenaries are support units that occasionally cast a skill or two. You can have one active mercenary alongside you and enlist a second as backup. The backup character can cast one skill based on pre-determined conditions. There are only four mercenaries to choose from, all of which have to be unlocked via separate quests. Each mercenary comes with a healthy mix of abilities/passives. It’s a healthy mix of defence, crowd control and aggression, and I quite enjoyed mixing and matching different combinations. Further in the game, you can barter with mercenaries in a central hub called “The Den”.
The Den uses a separate currency from the main game called 'Pale Marks'. You can earn it by increasing your renown with each mercenary. After you max it out, you'll continue to receive additional Pale Marks in increments of 100. Don’t sleep on this because the shop is often stocked with powerful gear and caches full of materials. In conclusion, mercenaries feel like a great addition to the game, and it’s a shame that it too is paywalled.
Spiritborn
Vessel of Hatred’s most notable addition is a new class: Spiritborn. Previous Diablo 4 class names gave you a clear idea about their abilities. A Barbarian is a frontline fighter who relies on strength and weapons. A Rogue is a fast-paced fighter with melee/ranged options. Sorcerers and Necromancers channel magic, Druids the force of nature. A Spiritborn gives no such indications, and a look at its abilities makes the class even more confusing. Blizzard essentially mashed together the best aspects of a Rogue, Barbarian and Necromancer to create an unholy amalgamation of a class that has no identity of its own. However, Spiritborn is undoubtedly one of the most fun classes to play in Vessel of Hatred. One of its builds, intuitively called ‘Eagle Evade’, involves you spamming the ‘evade’ button till everything dies. Consider it Blizzard’s tribute to Vampire Survivors.
It has since been nerfed, but there are plenty of other builds that let you deal trillions (with a ‘T’, yes) of damage with the right gear, effectively trivializing any end-game content Diablo 4 has to offer. Other classes simply do not measure up to the Spiritborn’s power, and the ones that do (eg. Sorceress) still rely one the same overpowered build from last season. On the plus side, Minion Necro is somewhat good again. Now, one can’t fault Blizzard for making the Spiritborn overpowered at launch, being a new class and all. But some of its mechanics and interactions are straight up broken and need balancing. While Blizzard has been rolling out a bunch of patches addressing issues with the Spiritborn, it ultimately creates an unfair advantage for players who took advantages of said bugs before they were quashed.
Conclusion
As mentioned earlier, Vessel of Hatred has very little in the way of new lore and barely moves the overall story’s needle. You get nowhere the amount of content you did with other $40 DLC such as Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree and Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty. The boringly short campaign makes it evident that Blizzard split the story in two halves and plan to sell them separately. You should probably wait for a sale as a casual player, and to an extent, even as someone who plays seasonally. There’s plenty to experience in the base game and season 6. Every character gets new skills, affixes, and paragon board; plenty of content to keep you occupied. Getting to level 300 will be a chore in itself. Sure, rune words, mercenaries, Nahantu and the Spiritborn are exciting, but they’re not $40 worth of exciting.
Diablo 4 was, and continues to be afflicted by bland writing, boring art design, visually inconsistent hitboxes, lack of set items and a vacuous open world. The Tormented Lilith fight is easily one of the worst bosses to exist and one can’t fathom why Blizzard hasn’t changed it even though it received overwhelmingly negative feedback. There’s still no loot filter and on-the-fly-build switching is still a ‘work in progress’ feature over a year after launch. You can, however, switch between cosmetics on the fly because that is clearly more important than switching skill builds. Earlier Diablo versions understandably had to cap the amount of available inventory/stash space due to hardware limitations, but there’s no reason for such a restriction to exist in 2024, especially when smaller projects like Last Epoch pull it off effortlessly.
Vessel of Hatred aims to breathe new life into a fundamentally flawed game, and while some of the changes definitely make it better, Diablo 4 needs a lot of work before it enters its redemption arc. Currently, it tries to be a hybrid of Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 and fails to capture the essence of both. Yeah, the game only launched last year and has plenty of scope for improvement but this isn’t 2002 anymore and there are plenty of other, much better ARPGs you can sink your time in.
Source(s)
Own
