I have been truly addicted to very few games in my life. You could argue one of them is a constant, low-level addiction to keeping up Destiny 1 and 2, but that doesn’t usually involve insane grinding sessions long into the night, even if I’m always following its new content.

Two other games? Diablo 2 and 3 in different points of my life, the last of which being the Reaper of Souls release almost exactly 10 years ago in March 2014. But Diablo 4 never got to that point at launch or near it. That has now changed.

The alterations to Diablo 4 in season 4, mainly to gear, but also to leveling and endgame pursuits, have shaped something that yes, I am now fully addicted to, at least for the time being. The process they’ve set up here is simply excellent for carrying players from on goal to another, getting stronger and stronger in the process. Here’s how it goes:

• Low Level Progress – This is close to the same as it’s always been, and getting through those first few dozen levels and three World Tiers is still not terribly fun, but with XP gains and enemy-dense Helltides, it’s a lot better now.
• Paragon Maxing – Then, your goal becomes to hit level 100 and get all your points on the board for maximum build strategy outside your gear.
• Glyph Maxing – Then, you head to Nightmare dungeons to make sure all the glyphs on your board are max level to increase your power as much as you can there.
• Legendary/Unique Farming – Along the way you are of course grabbing the legendary aspects and uniques that you want for your build, but that’s only the start now.
• Tempering – This attaches two new affixes to all your legendary gear so you have even greater customization. Bad RNG can make you “miss” what you want, and then you have to start over with a new piece, but it’s still better than it was.

• Greater Affix Farming – Now, you can find gear with 1, 2, 3 or even 4 greater affixes that drop with 150% of their stat value. So you might have a piece you like, but what would be better? One with 150% values in multiple slots, of course. So you end up trying to replace all your existing legendary gear with that.
• Masterworking – Once you have the gear you want, you work your way through 12 levels of upgrades to increase all stat values by 5% each level, sometimes with 25% random boosts ever four levels. This requires farming increasingly difficult levels of The Pit, a new Greater Rift-style activity that rewards those materials and it’s a long haul to get a fully masterworked set going.
• Materials Farming – You will have to run essentially everything that is not the pit to farm things like gold or Uber Boss materials, and even gems now require a lot more investment than before to max, so you’ll need those fragment materials as well.
• Uber Bosses – Traditional farming for targeted drops, Ubers with Duriel and Andariel, but now it’s possible to summon level 200 versions of bosses with better drops and some of the hardest challenges in the game.

It’s hard to fully explain just how well all this flows together, but it really does. The old list would have stopped essentially at “Legendary and Unique farming” and almost everything after that is brand new and takes you far deeper into the endgame than you’ve ever been before. They really “cooked” here, as they say, and I am deep, deep into this season in away I’ve never been before.

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