Diablo 4 Mercenaries Unveiled At Gamescom

Blizzard was present at the recent Gamescom and of course, they bought a long a few new details for Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred which is set to release this Oct. 8. The presentation focuses mainly on the Mercenaries that are coming to the game along with the DLC and we’re very excited to see what’s to come.

Everything New Revealed For Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred

Mercenary Mechanics

Blizzard dove deeper into the mercenaries and explained the different kinds that you have: the Shield Bearer, the Berserker Crone, the Cursed Child, which can kind of turn into a demon, and the Archer.

 Now, you can hire mercenaries, and they're going to have a skill tree, which already makes them pretty interesting—better than the followers in Diablo I, where they had four choices, but it was pretty much nothing.

There's a very cool mechanic that they have called reinforcement. You can set the mercenary to help you either in a certain situation, like when you're crowd-controlled, or you can set the mercenary to do certain abilities attached to certain ones of your skills.

Blizzard showed of a clip of a really great reinforcement ability where you can take one of the mercenary skills and attach it to one of your powers so that when you use that skill, it calls them in to do a specific skill with you. 

That's actually a pretty awesome idea that adds new levels to gameplay, and if the mercenaries are going to be actually helpful, we're sure there's going to be a lot of min-maxing that you can do here. 

You're going to earn Rapport to pump up your mercenaries; we believe there are 10 levels of it, and if you earn additional Rapport beyond that, you're going to get tail marks, and then you can barter with your mercenaries as well. 

They're actually introducing a lot of things here, so you can have a hired mercenary, a reinforced mercenary—they have a skill tree, you can barter with them, you can level them up. It actually looks like a real system, which is a lot more than we've gotten in different mechanics in Diablo 4 at the launch of a mechanic. 

The Dark Citadel

The Dark Citadel is a new endgame feature that's coming in Vessel of Hatred. It's an entirely cooperative player experience, based entirely around working together with your party members to solve the challenges and face the First Karra hordes.

One of the outcomes of the Mage Wars is this giant crater and all the souls that were kind of lost in it from those wars. The goal of the First Karra, who are kind of the original Kazra, is to use the powers within the Citadel, found within this crater, to perform experiments to try and bring back their dark god. 

Only recently have people started going missing—they head into the Kazra region and disappear, never to be seen again. So, it's clear that whatever they're doing is about to come to fruition, and your job as the players is to get in there and stop it.

Citadels are a place where we take what is the best part of Diablo combat, and uou test it in a different way, which is by adding in cooperative mechanics that you have to manage on top of that. 

For example, a boss has an attack, and as a player, you have to collect an item that allows you to reflect it. You actually have to time your reaction shot. What's interesting is that when you get multiple people in there, we're each responsible for reflecting that shot once, so we all have to sort of master the timing of that move. You can't do that kind of thing without coordinating as a team, and that's sort of an example of what Citadel gameplay feels like.

So again, from listening to that one more time, it doesn't sound like you can do it solo. But they're going to implement some mechanics that are not just about zerging the boss down, and it sounds similar to Lost Ark, where a lot of times, one person cannot just carry it for you. It sounds like every person is responsible for reflecting it back in this endgame mode. 

We have a feeling that opinions on this are going to be mixed. Some people are going to think that's really cool and a cool way to do the raids; some people are going to be very upset if you can't solo it. Some people are going to love it. We think it's pretty cool—there looks like there's going to be a lot of things to do.

So, something different compared to some of the Lost Ark bosses—reflecting one singular ball back at the right time is nothing compared to what is possible in this game. We don't think they'll ever make it as hard as Lost Ark, but maybe there will be like an Uber Mythic version that's insanely hard. 

So, it explains how you're going to unlock it, and another thing that they talked about is there are going to be weekly rewards, and it sounds like they might potentially rotate, and some of them will be unique to the Dark Citadel. 

Between players to overcome challenges, every week there's going to be updated rewards, so there's always a reason to go back and do it again because there's going to be some new stuff in there, including one very big fan-requested feature, which is our Scroll of Retempering. 

So no more brick items—you'll be able to apply the scroll and get all new tempering charges on that item. We know everyone's very excited about that Scroll of Retempering. 

We like this idea—we feel like this will solve things. We wouldn't mind also if this is pretty rare, of course. We want the casual players to get in there and be able to get a few of these to retemper, but we also don't mind that retempering is something that you work toward.

Party Finder

Speaking of listening, another thing you guys are going to love—Party Finder. The feature essentially helps with match making and there are all sorts of parameters that you can add to make sure that you’re matched with the right people.

There's also new progression system. This shouldn't be that much of a surprise because a lot of people have been seeing little screenshots here and there of the level cap going up to 100. We don't know how far that's going to go, but they hinted that there's a new progression system that's very meaningful that they're going to talk about soon. We have some ideas as to what it could be, and we're curious what you guys think it could be.

More Things To Come

Diablo 4 Vessel of Hatred is looking more and more exciting. Hopefully, we get the full run down on what’s to come during the next stream.