Diablo Immortal’s Forgotten Nightmares update adds more ways to get Legendary Crests, but is it enough?

The first major update to Diablo Immortal is Forgotten Nightmares, an expansive patch with a new dungeon (Silent Monastery), major updates to Warbands (including a guild housing in Castle Cyranger), a new Helliquary raid boss (Izilech the Misshapen), a new event (Scouring the Darkness), as well as another new Battle Pass season, complete with new themed cosmetics. But the most interesting thing in this update is the fact that there’s a new way to get Legendary Crests without spending real cash.

Sometimes games make a change, and I simultaneously think “that’s a good change” and “but not good enough” — that’s how I feel about this.

I enjoyed playing Diablo Immortal for a few months, but stopped because the relentless drumbeat of monetization was too much for me to endure. In theory, you can play DI without spending a dime (and I did), but it limits your opportunities to gain items. The game has plenty of fewards you can earn through gameplay or by simply clicking a button to get the day’s free treasure chest. The skimpy offerings in the free Battle Pass just felt bad — and with a new Battle Pass every month, you have to really push through content to earn them all.

Legendary Crests in particular are a sore spot for players who didn’t want to spend cash.  Using a Legendary Crest gives you better loot drops in Rifts, as well as a guaranteed Legendary Gem drop. As you level up, those gems are a big part of player power, and without Legendary Crests it can take a very long time to collect and upgrade the ones you need. There weren’t many options to get these high-powered crests without spending real money: once a month you could buy one with Hilts and you can earn one by hitting rank 20 of the free Battle Pass. You could also get a Legendary Crest if you were one of the top 10 groups on the Challenge Rifts leaderboard every month — but that’s not easy to achieve. That meant you could get a maximum of three per month without spending money, which meant sluggish progression through the end-game.

So the ability to spend 1600 Platinum a week for a Legendary Crest means that you can earn a maximum of seven Legendary Crests every month without spending money. On the one hand, that’s more than a 100% increase in Legendary Crests. On the other hand, it’s still not a lot of Legendary Crests.

So progression will be less sluggish — as long as you put in the time to get the platinum and hilts and Battle Pass levels to earn every possible Crest — but still sluggish. And after you use all of your Legendary Crests, Rifts will return to having disappointing rewards. And since Rifts don’t take a lot of time to complete — sometimes just a few minutes — you can easily go through every Legendary Crest you could possibly earn in a single afternoon.

There are more ways to get Rare Crests — and there will be even more when the Forgotten Nightmares update goes live — but you still can’t get an infinite number of them, and you could easily run through your supply in an afternoon as well. These offer better loot than using no Crests at all, but they don’t guarantee Legendary Gem drops. And since Elder Rifts are the most easily accessible solo content for the free to play Diablo Immortal player, it’s sad that your potions for running them are so limited.

Overall I absolutely like this change. But is it enough to make the game accessible for free to play players? Not even remotely.

Even in a free-to-play game, content should be rewarding and accessible without spending a dime on it, and Diablo Immortal hits a wall there pretty early on where you start feeling like you have to spend money to progress at more than a snail’s pace. More access to Legendary Crests is a step in the right direction, but only a step.

Forgotten Nightmares goes live on September 27, so look for these (small) quality of life improvements to be available soon.