The Queue: They’re all good dogs

In Diablo 4’s latest expansion, my Necromancer has more pets than ever. I can have up up to 27 necromantic minions, and though I don’t yet have the gear to have quite that many at once right now, I did equip a new Runeword that is helping to fill the loneliness in my heart by summoning ghost wolves, based on the number of other minions I have up. Though the ghost wolves only last for seven seconds, they’re constantly being resummoned, and so I am surrounded by a veritable army of the goodest ghostly boys at all times. Truly a miracle of dark magic.

Sure, I can’t find myself on screen in the chaos, but it’s worth it.

If you’re new around here and don’t understand, this is the Queue, our daily Q&A column, and today we’re talking about lot about Diablo and little about kaiju. It’s a perfectly ordinary day, so let’s get to the questions.

I think it’s great. I have some complaints about the story, but I enjoyed it overall and I think the updated gameplay is really fun, with an improved progression curve because of the extra difficulty levels — which now set the difficulty across the entire game, so you can do any content, any time, and it’s equally challenging, so you aren’t just pushing Pit tiers forever. It also means you can spend your time doing things that used to be extremely unrewarding and still earn levels doing them, like side quests.

Diablo 4 has great quests, but they used to be almost a complete waste of time after hitting max level because the world didn’t scale very high, which pushed you into repetitive activities that had adjustable difficulty, primarily the Pit, while other activities became completely pointless. So I’m glad to see the open world scaling more, which lets me explore and still earn XP and rewards.

Highly recommend for fans of Diablo 4 who dropped off after the initial launch or after Vessel of Hatred (which was a little disappointing). Even if you don’t get into the infinite seasonal grind (which is the franchise’s favorite thing), it’s worth the cost of admission to play through the story once and enjoy it. If you’re a Diablo fan, there’s a lot of new lore as we explore Skovos, which is a fascinating place. If you’re an ARPG fan, the gameplay is more even-handed on difficulty scaling and gear scaling, with more customization options for your rewards to get the perfect gear. And if you just like a good single-player RPG, honestly it’s worth playing through the story campaign once even if that’s all you want to do.

The game doesn’t have a playable Amazon class, but I’m continuing to tell myself that this is only because Blizzard plans to add them in a future patch. Yep. Definitely gonna happen.

That’s a bit of a tricky question, since most of the classes in D4 have very obvious Warcraft parallels… to the point where in the newest collab, you can buy Warcraft tier 2 armor sets for your Diablo 4 characters. Diablo 4 has Barbarian (Warrior), Druid (Druid), Necromancer (Death Knight), Paladin (Paladin), Rogue (Rogue/Hunter hybrid, but without any Warcraft Hunter pets), Sorcerer (Mage), Spiritborn (Shaman/Monk hybrid), Warlock (Warlock).

The Spiritborn is the only one that doesn’t feel like a neat fit. Most of the others match large class archetypes pretty well.

I think the better question is which of these Diablo 4 classes would you add as a specialization to a World of Warcraft class? And in that case, I think the Diablo Rogue has a lot going for it, in that it’s a hybrid melee/ranged class that can specialize in one or the other. Give WoW Rogues a ranged spec you cowards.

However, if we’re going beyond the scope of Diablo 4 (for the moment), the answer is obviously Amazons.

War Plans are a great system that give some extra structure to the end game, and you really can’t go wrong logging on, setting up a War Plan, and doing a War Plan. You get the rewards from all of the activities you’re doing, plus a sizable bonus when you finish them all. You’ll make a ton of progress chaining through War Plans, and as you do, you get to customize those end game activities in unique ways. it’s a complete win.

However, there are a couple of things you may well miss if you only do War Plans. First is the Pit. While you can do the Pit in War Plans, it doesn’t suggest you do it any more or less than any other content, and the Pit remains the only way to level the glyphs on your paragon board, which can provide substantial power boosts when leveled. You may want to lean into the Pit on your War Plan option, or do some extra on your own.

Secondly, as SJHawk pointed out, if you’re playing a seasonal character you definitely want to look at your Season Rank (formerly called Season Journey, but it’s really the same thing). It’s essentially a long list of achievements to work on, which will provide rewards like experience, caches, skill points and paragon points, and seasons blessings. When you finish each chapter, which usually requires a capstone dungeon, you’ll unlock bigger rewards as well as access to the next chapter of rewards.

The game doesn’t really point you to this, but it’s a worthwhile to do list alongside your War Plans.

As to whether WoW should adopt this sort of system… you’re right, this could be a neat fit in with the Adventure Guide, and it could solve the same problem it solves for Diablo: having too many things to do and not knowing where to start. WoW has already borrowed ideas from Diablo, and it looks like we may be getting a heroic world tier in the next patch, which we saw Blizzard test out during Legion Remix. However, I think the challenge may the reward structure.

It’s worth doing War Plans in D4 because the rewards are huge, but I think it’s harder to offer those same rewards in Warcraft because the balance game is very different. WoW carefully limits how much loot of what quality players can collect in a single reset, whereas Diablo has always let you get as much loot as you’re willing to work for — the balance being that in WoW, the gear you get is likely to be good, whereas in Diablo there’s so many random drops and so many random stats that you’ll throw away hundreds of pieces of gear for every one thing you wind up equipping, something that gets more extreme the further you progress. This very different loot philosophy would make it difficult for WoW to implement a system like this, and if it did, it would have to be limited in some way — perhaps you can only do it once a week, or perhaps it only has rewards up to a certain level.

So I don’t know if I can see this actually happening. Maybe.

I figure the average kaiju is more likely to go for bigger nearby targets, like New York City or Boston, so I’m probably safe.

However, if a kaiju is in my immediate vicinity, I feel like there’s a good chance it’s because I live very close to a nuclear power plant in which case I would follow the evacuation instructions for an incident at the plant and go to my pre-planned evacuation center.

The most important thing in any emergency is to stay calm, and deal with the problem without panicking. One of the very best ways to do that is to have a plan in advance, so I do hope that this question has gotten everyone thinking about their emergency plans.

That’s all for today, my friends. Take care of yourself, always be alert for kaiju, and I’ll see you in the comments section.