So you’re unsuspectingly slaughtering your way through a burial chamber full of desert skeletons, killing a monstrous, spider-like abomination. Suddenly, this quest appears in your quest log: Reach level 35. From level 30 at the latest, Diable Immortal will link campaign orders to a level limit. Umm, ok?
This is unexpected and seems as if someone in the ICE suddenly pulled the red lever out of curiosity at full speed. You can’t even accept the next quest to find out for yourself that the opponents are too strong. Immortal doesn’t allow any advancement until you’ve ground yourself to the required level.
And this grind lasts. How long exactly, I cannot say with certainty. Because in my version, I was missing some options for experience points. For example, the Battle Pass was deactivated in places, and there was also a lack of side quests. This also makes it difficult to assess whether there are nasty Pay2Progress thoughts behind these barriers or whether Blizzard just messed up the balancing. But regardless of that, I never think it’s a good idea to block progress in such a clumsy way.
To make matters worse, the grind is also tedious because level-ups in Diablo Immortal rarely bring a real sense of joy. A level-up results in a new and mandatory skill at most every few levels. In Immortal, only equipment and gems determine which characteristics make up your character.
Strategic decisions are never due. With my Necromancer, I already had all the skills I wanted from level 15, and after just four to five hours and after that, any level up lost its appeal for me because I rarely got to look forward to anything new. Combined with the compulsion to level up, I was very quickly bored.
Does the item hunt motivate?
Alright. I was only really bored during the grind passages. I would have liked to have continued the story undisturbed, and personally, the bounties (slaughter this, slaughter that) and the elder portals with the quite repetitive portal guards were not much fun for me in the long run. But that doesn’t mean that Immortal doesn’t know how to motivate.
After all, Diablo always includes the hunt for new and better items. This is also available in Immortal, and here I found excellent carrots, which I gladly ran after. However, with restrictions.
Because the search for items only gets exciting when the first rare and, above all, legendary pieces of equipment appear. Everything you collect beforehand never forces you to weigh things up. Standard pieces of equipment only increase your damage or your life force. You already know from the numerical value which piece is best suited.
Magic equipment also offers various improvements to properties such as vitality or strength. Still, the bonuses are minimal and, due to the tame level of difficulty, so trivial that any thought of them is wasted. If an item in the inventory has an up arrow, it will be equipped.
You can even transfer higher ranks and magic gems to the Blacksmith without hesitation, provided the suitable sockets are available. This makes items apart from legendary equipment interchangeable.
Rare items then have slightly more excellent bonuses like higher fear resistance. But even here, it is not necessary to pay attention to it. Legendary weapons and armor alone stimulated my collecting instinct. These parts not only look chic, but they also change your skills.
The legendary objects become fundamentally crucial to playing your characters the way you want them to. For example, my Necromancer can now freeze enemies with his corpse explosion thanks to my Lone Keeper Shoulder Guards. My Welcome End shield turns the stationary Skeleton Mage into a winged demon that attacks my enemies with his sickle.