Over the past few days, many members of the gaming press and Diablo IV content creators have had the opportunity to go hands-on with the Eccentric, the new class that was added to the game in October with the Ships of Hatred expansion.
Blizzard’s official gameplay demo was well-made and straight to the point, so it didn’t touch on any of the systemic, game-wide changes we’d expect to see in the expansion. However, for that, the community had to turn to interviews, gameplay shared by content creators, and more to find some answers.
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Aside from the gameplay details of Evilborn itself, the biggest highlight of the event was the level cap for Diablo 4. Currently, the highest level a player can reach is level 100. Item power distribution, damage scaling, loot curves, monster difficulty, and just about everything else related to the digital aspects of the real-time game are all tied to this.
By changing the level cap, these values can be completely altered, which will obviously have a major impact on gameplay. While Blizzard hasn’t revealed specifics, the developer has hinted that the game’s level cap will be changing in some way with the launch of Ships of Hatred. All previous Diablo expansions, as well as World of Warcraft expansions, have come with significant changes to the level cap; either increasing or decreasing it.
It’s unclear which path Blizzard is taking for Diablo IV’s first expansion, but most signs point to us heading for number compression, where the level cap is lowered to make each level count more. Based on some evidence gleaned from various interviews and gameplay footage seen on Reddit and Wowhead, the new cap could be 60.
The clues are plentiful. For example, the experience bar shows that the character is over level 50, but crucially, it doesn’t show the Paragon Point node (which unlocks at level 50 in the current version). Instead, we see a new level indicator, represented by a number below the character’s level.
Players suspect this is the new Paragon system, which looks to be a simplified version more similar to Diablo 3, through which you can continue to gain levels beyond the base level cap. The Paragon panel may remain, but its progression may change based on this information.
There are other factors that suggest level 60 is the new cap. The in-game tooltip is written as if 60 is the maximum level, not 100. This can be seen in the armor values and the stats of the unique weapon that Blizzard showed at the press conference – the weapon’s stats are the same as those in the current version of Diablo IV.
In fact, the level requirements for each tier of Alchemist Health Potion upgrades have also changed, completely altering their distribution. Once again, level 60 seems to have replaced level 100 as the new cap.
Lowering the level cap also means that all data in the game has to be compressed. This effectively means that damage numbers and armor values will be lowered, making them easier to read in the heat of battle. This is actually something some players have been requesting, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that players will deal less damage – just that the values for each damage stage will be more in line with the numbers on the screen.
Ship of Hatred will be released on October 8th, alongside Season 6. 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 be released in due course.
