Three years later, some players are beginning to ask a slightly uncomfortable question: did we just take the scenic route back to Diablo III?
A community discussion asking exactly that has now grown past 160 replies, with players arguing over increasingly fast progression, easier access to powerful gear, enormous damage multipliers and the expectation that every serious build should eventually bulldoze the hardest content. Season 15 has become the latest focus because Blizzard is once again adding substantial character power while making some of Diablo IV's rarest rewards considerably more predictable to acquire.
The comparison is not entirely fair.
It is also becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Diablo 4 Has Removed a Lot of the Friction It Launched With
The clearest difference between launch Diablo IV and the current game is not one specific system. It is the accumulation of dozens of changes designed to remove frustration. Leveling became faster. Helltides became more rewarding and more consistently available. Bosses became easier to target farm. Mythics gained deterministic acquisition paths. Tempering became less punishing. Seasonal progression became faster. Build-changing items became something Blizzard increasingly expects ordinary players to actually see rather than read about on Reddit.
Many of those changes were improvements.
Launch Diablo IV could confuse inconvenience with depth. Spending dozens of hours without seeing a meaningful upgrade did not automatically make the eventual upgrade spiritually important. It sometimes just meant your helmet had remained suspiciously adequate since level 71.
But there is a cumulative effect when every source of friction gets sanded down. One player in the current discussion summarizes Diablo IV's development as a repeating loop of adding friction, receiving community backlash, reverting the change and then making the grind easier than before.
Eventually, convenience stops being a collection of quality-of-life improvements and becomes the design philosophy.
Season 15 Pushes Even Further Toward Predictable Power
Season 15 is a perfect example because several of its best ideas deliberately make character progression easier to control.
Blizzard is changing Mythic crafting so an upgraded Unique can become the Mythic version of that same item rather than disappearing into another random roll. We previously called this one of Season 15's most sensible Mythic changes, because upgrading an item should probably not resemble throwing it into a raffle.
Legacy Uniques are bringing Stone of Jordan, Leoric's Crown, The Furnace and other familiar items into Diablo IV. Soul Splinters provide enormous seasonal bonuses, including substantial multiplicative damage increases attached to various trade-offs. Rebirth removes the need to recreate the same seasonal character manually. New crafting systems give players more direct routes toward the equipment they want.
None of these systems is individually “Diablo III.”
Together, however, they continue moving Diablo IV away from “maybe you will find the thing” and toward “here is the path to the thing.”
The Rare-Item Argument Is Really the Same Argument
We saw exactly this tension last week when players started asking Blizzard to introduce truly rare items again. Mythics were originally so scarce that many players could complete an entire season without seeing one. The community hated that. Blizzard gradually introduced target farming, Resplendent Sparks, crafting recipes and eventually Mythic 3.0.
Now some players complain Mythics are too accessible.
There is something wonderfully Diablo about finally receiving exactly what you asked for and immediately missing the suffering.
But the concern is legitimate. An ARPG needs something beyond completing a checklist. If every important item has a predictable acquisition path, the loot hunt risks becoming less about discovery and more about assembling the expected equipment in the expected order before optimizing Greater Affixes afterward.
Diablo III eventually leaned heavily into that philosophy. Seasonal sets could establish an entire build remarkably quickly, after which the real game became increasing numbers, finding Ancient and Primal versions and climbing Greater Rifts.
Diablo IV is not there yet.
But the philosophical distance is shrinking.
The Pit Has Become Diablo 4’s Greater Rift Problem
The comparison becomes even harder to avoid when progression is measured through The Pit.
Diablo III had Greater Rifts. Diablo IV has The Pit. Both provide escalating numerical difficulty and inevitably become a public measuring stick for whether a class or build is “good.”
That creates a particular kind of balance pressure. If one build clears dramatically higher Pit tiers than another, the weaker build can feel broken even if it comfortably handles almost every other activity in the game. The target gradually shifts from “does this build work?” to “how far can this build push?”
The current forum discussion explicitly points toward this mentality, with players describing Pit 150 as the benchmark around which builds are increasingly judged. Once players expect the upper end of scalable content to be realistically attainable, Blizzard has to provide enough character power to make that expectation possible.
Then the numbers get bigger.
Then the monsters get tougher.
Then the multipliers get bigger again.
Diablo III veterans may recognize the architecture.
But Diablo 3 Becoming Faster Was Not Necessarily a Failure
Here is the inconvenient part for anyone hoping to use “Diablo III” purely as an insult:
lots of people really liked Diablo III.
Not necessarily launch Diablo III with its auction house and peculiar economic experiment, but the later seasonal game that knew exactly what it wanted to be. You created a character, assembled a powerful build quickly, filled the screen with enemies, watched increasingly unreasonable numbers appear and then pushed as far as you wanted before returning next season.
One player in the current debate simply argues that there is nothing wrong with Diablo IV following that direction because Diablo III became a highly polished modern ARPG. That position deserves more consideration than “D3 bad.”
Fast seasonal progression fits how many people actually play Diablo now. They arrive when a season launches, build something ridiculous, enjoy it for a few weeks and leave. Asking those players to spend two months hoping one required Unique appears does not necessarily create longevity. Sometimes it just means they leave sooner.
Diablo 4’s Problem Is That It Still Seems Unsure Which Diablo It Wants to Be
This is where the argument connects directly to our wider Season 15 criticism. The biggest concern is not that Diablo IV resembles Diablo III. It is that Blizzard still appears to be negotiating with itself about what kind of game Diablo IV should become.
Players who want a Diablo II-style loot hunt ask for genuinely rare items and meaningful long-term progression.
Players who treat seasons as six-week power fantasies want reliable builds, accessible Mythics and less wasted time.
Competitive players judge classes by maximum Pit performance.
More casual players want to finish a build without needing an external economics degree.
Blizzard keeps attempting to accommodate all of them.
That may explain why Diablo IV can simultaneously feel too generous and too grindy, too easy and too punishing, too deterministic and buried beneath RNG.
The game is trying to serve audiences whose definitions of “Diablo” are separated by twenty-five years of completely different games.
Maybe Season 15 Should Stop Apologizing for What Diablo 4 Has Become
There is a version of this story where Diablo IV slowly becoming more like Diablo III is not evidence that Blizzard has lost its way.
Maybe it is evidence that the game has finally discovered what most of its current audience actually enjoys.
Season 15's Soul Splinters look fun precisely because they offer immediate, dramatic power with interesting drawbacks. Legacy Uniques are exciting because players will actually get to use them. More deterministic Mythic crafting respects the time invested in an item instead of destroying it for another spin of the wheel. Rebirth removes pointless seasonal administration.
Those are good changes.
The danger is what comes next.
If every season needs to be faster, more powerful and more generous than the last, Diablo IV eventually runs into the same escalation problem Diablo III did. Damage grows. Difficulty grows. New progression tiers appear to contain the damage growth. Then players demand access to those tiers, requiring more damage.
At some point, the numbers stop describing combat and become astronomy.
Diablo IV does not need to become Diablo II again.
It does not need to be ashamed of borrowing from Diablo III either.
It just needs to decide which lessons from both games are worth keeping before “more power” becomes the only answer it has left.
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