"I want to feel happy seeing an item flash up."
It is of course a made-up accolade, but there’s a strong argument for Wudijo being the best Diablo 4 player out there: or at the very least the most hardcore. The German scourge of Hell is a veteran Diablo 3 streamer and became the first player to reach level 100 solo in Diablo 4’s hardcore mode (as well as the first to solo world boss Ashava), while making a ton of videos advising players on how to get the most out of their chosen class. Demons: after this guy’s done a day’s work, there’s a lot fewer around.
Wudijo’s been omnipresent in the Diablo 4 community pre- and post-launch, and recently answered a whole load of questions on the Diablo 4 subreddit (including his preferred breakfast choice of “nutella on bread”, which suggests my daughter may grow up to be an ARPG badass). I found it pretty intriguing how he talks about the game, which all comes from the fact that many of us as players flail wildly away at something like Diablo 4 (OK, just me) whereas he’s so clinical about what works and doesn’t and why. It would be surprising if anyone outside of Blizzard knows more about Diablo 4 than Wudijo.
One of the biggest player gripes at the moment is the grind after around level 70, where progress becomes glacially slow. “I agree the grind becomes relatively monotonous after 70-80 where you have all your legendaries, most of your gear, legendary paragon nodes and most important glyphs, so it’s mostly min/maxing from that point,” says Wudijo. “I doubt it will stay that way with seasonal content maybe introducing more ways to break the monotony of the grind, e.g. with more side content similar to Helltide […] The game is clearly built with a lot of room for adding stuff in seasons. I guess we’ll see where they set the bar with the upcoming first season reveal”.
That’s a rather positive outlook on what definitely feels like something of a heave in the game as-is, though we’ll soon enough see how big Blizzard’s ambitions for the post-launch support are. Wudijo also agrees the Vulnerability mechanic is currently an issue, in this case the trouble being it’s too good. Players feel like, if you’re not using Vulnerability, your build is automatically sub-optimal. “Vulnerable is way too mandatory, literally every good build NEEDS to have it,” says Wudijo, before suggesting ways it could be nerfed while remaining interesting and that “Blizzard could compensate with buffs elsewhere”.
Wudijo’s main is Rogue because “I always like the fast/agile classes”, and he ranks the rest as Druid > Sorceror > Barbarian > Necromancer. The Rogue’s only problem he reckons is Rain of Arrows because “The whole animation is way too long”. Most fun builds? “Twisting Blade, Barrage, Rapid Fire (Rogue in general is best in slot for fun)”. On hardcore mode Wudijo’s “glad they’re finally doing something about disconnects with the Scroll of Escape”. What’s the Diablo 4 endgame now? “Complaining about nerfs on Reddit”.
In terms of what he’d specifically like to see with endgame in future, Wudijo lists “more pinnacle bosses”, “pinnacle dungeons of some sort”, scaleable seasonal content in nightmare dungeons and other endgame content along the lines of Helltide. He also points out a feature many players would agree the game should add: “Loot filters: needs to happen, and soon. The amount of trash loot at high levels is daunting. I want to feel happy seeing an item flash up in a different color based on my choices once in a while instead of looking through 1000 items and just vendoring them all”. And some big praise amid the smaller criticisms: “Combat is by far the best in D4 out [of] all ARPGs I know”.
Finally, there’s a very sweet story about how Wudijo got into ARPGs in the first place: “There was this one guy playing Diablo 2 at a LAN party back when I was like 11 or so. I got it from him and tried it out afterwards, which is when I started playing ARPGs”. That guy, that unknown LAN legend, created a monster.
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