Walking over a potion when your character is at max health won’t automatically heal you as it did in Diablo III, so there’s more strategy involved. There’s no cooldown after you use one, and you gain refills by slaying enemies or bringing a boss down to certain thresholds of their health.

When you first start playing, your character can carry a maximum of five potions on them. The potion system, meanwhile, represents a hybrid of the systems that existed in Diablo II and III. At first, you can only use your dodge once before it goes on cooldown, but as you level your character, you’ll find magical and rare boots that give you additional charges. Carrying over a change Blizzard made for the console release of Diablo III, each class comes with a dodge ability built into their kit. At first, I dismissed it as marketing, but after playing the game for about a dozen hours, I started to believe them.

“We think Diablo IV can be a place that welcomes players from any previous Diablo game and people who have never played a Diablo game.”ĭiablo IV existing as a project that takes all the best aspects of past entries in the series and iterates on them in meaningful ways is a theme Shely and his boss, Diablo franchise head Rod Fergusson, repeat early and often. Shely took over leadership of the Diablo IV team in the fall of 2021 after the game’s previous director, Luis Barriga, left Blizzard when California’s fair employment agency accused the studio of systemic gender discrimination and sexual harassment.

“Certainly, there are a lot of things about Diablo II that we think are really cool and need to be in Diablo IV, particularly when you look at the depth of systems and itemization… and, as you noted, there are things about Diablo III like the smooth and seamless combat that we wanted to bring forward to Diablo IV,” game director Joe Shely tells me during a roundtable interview. That might not seem like much, but it’s refreshing when you consider Diablo III’s original lead designer called his Diablo II predecessor a “loser.” It feels like a game that was designed by people who love the history of this franchise as much as I do.

Diablo 3 playable characters