The Best Change In ‘Diablo 4’ Season 4 Is A Quality-Of-Life Godsend

Diablo 4 has brought sweeping changes to the game in season 4, including big alterations to loot like Tempering and Masterworking, in addition to a total revamp of Helltides to make them the most enemy-dense activities in the game.

But there is one change in particular that is by far, the best thing Diablo 4 has added in season 4, one that makes my vault cry for joy now that it’s able to breathe. I’m talking about the new Aspect codex system.

Previously, the codex only contained a certain number of base level Aspects that you could apply in an emergency. Now, every Aspect is in there, and you can now save your best Aspect roll you’ve found for application to all future gear going forward.

What this means is that if you hit World Tier 4 and find a weapon with a maxed out Aspect stat you want, but the rest of the weapon isn’t going to work for you, you can dismantle it and it will save that max level stat for the Aspect. Then, you can apply that to a different weapon going forward.

I cannot tell you not just what a great “chase” this is, but what it does for quality of life for looting. Previously, my vault was probably 95% full of legendaries that had Aspects I was saving for some future drop, or some future build I wasn’t doing yet (if I wanted to switch between fire and ice sorc, range or melee rogue, etc). This meant you had to fill pages and pages with Aspect-having gear that you weren’t going to otherwise use, multiple copies sometimes as you knew you’d probably rotate through equipped gear and would need to once again, reapply the same Aspect you just left behind.

Now? My vault is almost all just Uniques and…materials? That’s really it. There’s just no reason to save legendary gear for Aspects alone, just if it’s an alternate great stat/affix drop you might want to swap into later. Again, this has cleared almost all of my old vault clutter and the Codex system is miles better than what we had previously. It very much reminds me of an almost identical system in The Division where you could store similar gear modifications. I am really glad to see that “stolen” here.

It’s a good season, if you can get past the non-existent story and the very dull early leveling process. The changes to loot and quality of life are excellent, and this really was the shot in the arm the game needed. I’m re-addicted to it for sure right now.

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