The Queue: Just a little obligatory treasure hunt

Why do we have a treasure hunt for statues of our (maybe) enemies? I don’t know, but now it’s become a trend and we have to run with it. More statues, please.

This is the Queue, your daily Q&A column where we do our best to answer your questions. Let’s get to it.

I’m not sure any of us are playing Diablo 4 for the innovative statue mechanics, but I honestly liked the original statue hunt, in which we played a variation of Where’s Waldo? all over Sanctuary, looking for the Lilith statues tucked into corners or behind greenery, barely visible in frame with the camera. It was a fun little treasure hunt.

In Vessel of Hatred, I didn’t enjoy the statues so much. I didn’t even bother to unlock them all, because the main statue was obvious but the other things you had to interact with weren’t always, and for some reason I just didn’t enjoy hunting them down as much. It didn’t feel like a fun treasure hunt, it felt like an annoyance.

In Lord of Hatred, it’s not much of a treasure hunt at all, because the statues are larger and more obvious. There’s a small puzzle to them, in that you must make an angel and a demon statue turn to face a third statue, but knowing they’re always in an arrangement of three makes it easier to find the other two. What I like best about these is that each one has a tiny narrative payoff, changing the message on the first statue after you’ve unlocked the arrangement.

As to what’s next… I almost which things would go back to the treasure hunt of finding Lilith statues originally, but after having two expansions with different statue puzzles I don’t think the game will go back to that simplicity.

I avoid this problem entirely by only seriously playing one character at a time. I have alts, but I rarely play them to a serious level or do much end-game content with them. It’s a tactic that makes it super easy to figure out what to do with which character.

Though I admit, I have been leveling professions (slowly) on a few characters, and that does require tracking who’s done their weekly profession quests, used their treatises, and so forth… but I admit my enthusiasm for keeping up with this has been waning. It’s easier (for me) to pick a character and focus on it.

Absolutely the charms — and I do find it interesting that basically all of us are naturally inclined to call charms runes, even though runes are the things you use to make runewords, so we’re just confusing ourselves in tangled terminology here.

Things start to get interesting when you collect set charms, and there appears to be a set of charms for each classes’ different skill types the class has, plus a few generic sets. These all have set bonuses for equipping two, three, or five of them, which can be mixed and matched in different ways, but so far the payoff for the five-piece bonus seems to be worthwhile.

I’m currently using the Necromancer’s minion set, which has a two-piece bonus that reduces the cooldown of Army of the Dead (minion ultimate) by 1 second whenever one of my minions attacks.

I have 25 undead minions who are constantly attacking. As long as my minions have something to attack, my ultimate cooldown is now essentially nil. Then I picked up a legendary that causes using my ultimate to reduce my other cooldowns, so the 10-second cooldowns to command my skeletons and my golems are now also essentially nil. I am a nonstop whirlwind of death, walking in the midst of a skeletal army, and it’s great fun… but it all started with that set bonus. Charms are really fun.

These are perfect to save as a topping for something else, like some crunchies on top of a salad or a bowl of soup.

Or, you know, just eat them immediately.

The Alliance Onyxia key quest.

It’s been a long time, but this remains some of the most epic quest storytelling the game has ever done, ending with an explosive dramatic reveal. I think even the first time I did it, I knew what was going to happen at the end, and I think it would be incredible to go through it completely cold.

Of course I am looking back on it with some rose-colored glasses. It was a long quest chain, and it included an agonizing escort quest in Blackrock Depths. (It’s the escort phase of the quest that I remember most clearly, because I did it countless times to help others get their key.) It wasn’t all fun and games at the time; the quest chain was a long grind and it required a good group to complete parts of it (like the escort).

But in hindsight, I look back at it and think it was really epic, impactful storytelling in this early quest. Even over life of the game, I don’t feel like we’ve seen many quests that have had this much impact on the world around us as exposing the ruler of Stormwind as a black dragon and fighting dragons in the throne room to retake the keep. It was such an epic moment.

It could be a clunky, awkward quest chain. And with modern phasing, it could have been done in much smoother ways, causing fewer newbie deaths in the keep. You could no doubt make an even more epic moment, using all of the techniques and tools Blizzard has developed since the game first launched.

But I still look back on it fondly, and would love to experience it again for the first time.

That’s all for today, friends. Take care, have a great week, and I’ll see you in the comments section.