Over the past few days, many in the gaming press and community of Diablo 4 content creators have had the opportunity to get their hands on the Spiritborn, a new class that will be joining the game in October with the Container of Hate expansion.
Blizzard’s official gameplay reveal is well-crafted and straight to the point, so it doesn’t touch on any of the game-wide systemic changes we can expect in the expansion. To do this, however, the community has had to turn to interviews, gameplay shared by content creators, and more to find answers.
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Aside from the nuances of the gameplay of Spiritborn itself, the biggest highlight of the event has to do with the level cap in Diablo 4 . Scaling, loot curves, monster difficulty, and pretty much everything else related to digital aspects of real-time gameplay are relevant here.
By changing the level cap, these values can be completely changed, which will obviously have a significant impact on gameplay. While Blizzard didn’t reveal specific details, the developer hinted that there will be some changes to Containers of Hate’s game level cap. All previous Diablo expansions, as well as World of Warcraft expansions, have arrived with major changes to the level cap; either increasing it or decreasing it.
It’s unclear which path Blizzard has chosen for Diablo 4’s first expansion, but most indicators suggest we’re heading towards digital compression, which means lowering the level cap and making each level more important. Based on some evidence gleaned from various interviews and gameplay footage seen on Reddit and Wowhead, the new cap may be 60.
The clues are quite abundant. For example, the experience bar shows characters over level 50, but most importantly, it doesn’t show the Paragon Point node (unlocked at level 50 in the current version). Instead, we see a new level indicator, represented as a number located below the character’s level.
Players suspect this is the new Paragon system, which appears to be a simplified version more similar to the system in Diablo 3, through which you can continue to gain levels beyond the base level cap. The Paragon Committee may remain in place, but its progress may change based on this information.
There are other factors that suggest level 60 will also be the new cap. The in-game tooltip is written in such a way that 60 is the maximum level, not 100. The same statistics as in Diablo 4.
In fact, the level requirements for each stage of Alchemist Health Potion upgrades have also changed, completely altering their distribution. Level 60 seems to have once again replaced level 100 as the new upper limit.
Lowering the level cap also means that all stats in the game will be compressed. What this actually means is that damage numbers and armor values will be reduced, making them easier to read in the heat of battle. This is actually something some players have been asking for, but it doesn’t necessarily mean players will deal less damage – just that the value of each damage phase will more closely match the numbers on the screen.
Hateboat Season 6 will launch on October 8th. Now that the Spiritborn class has been revealed, it’s safe to assume that more details about the expansion itself (including any updates to the underlying systems) will arrive in due course.