6 Things I Wish I Knew Before Playing Diablo 4: Vessel Of Hatred

So, Blizzard could’ve just opened up the DLC area, told you, “Go have fun you little scamp,” and called it a day. But no, they’ve actually taken the opportunity to tweak the basic experience a little. If you’ve been away a while, it’s worth spending a little time getting acquainted. For starters: if you decide to make a new character to try out the Spiritborn class, keep in mind that whether you do the campaign again or jump right into Vessel of Hatred, you still need to clear the Prologue. After that you can exit out and go to the Seasonal mode at your leisure.

Once you do jump in, you’ll notice there are quite a few more options for difficulty as well, with the World Tier system changing from just Worlds I-III to around half a dozen Torment levels, each more hostile than the last. Jewels now get their own tab instead of taking up valuable space in your loot inventory. And there have been tweaks to each existing class’s damage outputs and movesets as well, along with a change in level cap (Paragon system now unlocks at lvl 60). The list goes on, and it’s worth taking an hour or so to get reacquainted before heading out on your quest.

Once the main Vessel of Hatred story quest takes you down to Nahantu, you’ll run into the blacksmith Rahair. He wants to introduce you to his Mercenary friends, from whom you’ll select one person to follow you around and fight by your side persistently, and another who’ll show up if you perform a specific action every 20 to 30 seconds. While the narrative will put you on Neyrelle’s trail immediately after opening the new Den hub area, we highly recommend pumping the brakes and getting the gang together before you do anything else.

That is to say, do the Mercenary missions first. One, because they’re narratively pretty excellent, somewhat akin to Mass Effect 2’s Loyalty missions. The demon child Aldikin’s heartbreaking life after the death of his parents is the most affecting of them, and Subo is just a sneaky asshole, but the winner is Varyana, a cannibal barbarian crone with a score to settle. Just a quintessential tough old bird. She rules.

But two, the earlier you can start pumping Rapport XP into your mercs of choice and upgrade their support abilities, the better. The bottom-tier abilities for all of these folks are invaluable in the later stretches of the DLC. Not to mention, eventually Rahair will move his daughter Fayira into the Den. Why’s that important? Well…

….because Fayira will run the Barter store at the Den. We all know the town stores are hit and miss when it comes to legitimately good upgrades, but the Barter store at the Den is usually all killer, no filler. That’s especially true early on, where many of the available options will easily be +20 or better over whatever you’re currently wearing.

You also get to control when Fayira refreshes her stock—the first refresh is free, in fact–—and while that costs some of the Barter store’s currency, if you get caught out there in a tough activity, it’s the first place you want to go looking for some extra help. Plus, Fayira is a delight; the voice of a 9-year old Turkish street moppet, the soul of a 57-year-old New York bodega owner.

Well, yes, this is a good rule for life in general, please look after your mental health—but in Vessel of Hatred, that’s pretty literal. See, while there were a few very missable sidequests in the main game, where the solution to a puzzle involved the emote menu, Vessel of Hatred puts a couple of these in your way during a couple of the critical path quests.

The earliest will come if you’re playing as Spiritborn. The Sacred Hunt quest has a step where they will literally have you calling to the spirits using the actual Help emote from your emote menu when prompted. And you’re definitely going to want to go after that one as soon as possible.

There are, of course, those absolute maniacs who will do 80 hours of sidequests before going through the main campaign, and bless your hearts for your ambition. But if you’re using a Spiritborn character, and you’re at least at level 20, if you do literally nothing else in the campaign, make sure to hit the Sacred Hunt quest—it unlocks the Spirit Hall.

Hopefully by then, you have a good idea which abilities suit your personal style, so you can definitively pick which animal to specialize in, but there’s also a fringe benefit to keep in mind: Selecting a spirit also adds that animal class to every single skill you currently have. That creates some interesting synergies off the bat, allowing any attack to build Ferocity for Jaguar attacks or Resolve for Gorilla. It’s actually a good excuse, before you get too deep in the weeds on your skill tree, to go back, prune anything you aren’t using, and fine-tune things to get those passive abilities generating with every ability.

One of the most fun new activities in Vessel of Hatred involves the Undercity Dungeons, a procedurally generated speedrun through multiple levels of baddies for fun and profit. These things are absolutely swarming with unique baddies to put down, but this is one of the few areas of the game where you’ve got to suppress the instinct to kill everything with extreme prejudice.

There will be tough enemies marked with an hourglass on the map, who add time to the clock, and enemies marked with a skull who’ll power up the meter that gets you better rewards. Literally every other enemy you come across should be invisible in your eyes. Also, take your time in the starting circle to sneak a peek at the map of the floor, so you know in which direction you’re headed. If there are skull enemies marked on the map, and they’re not on your road, don’t take a detour, time runs down way too fast for that.

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