You might be ready for Diablo 4 DLC, but not as ready as the streamer who hit level 100 and beat a Tier 100 Nightmare Dungeon using nothing but gear found at level 1

“Yeah, rescaling in Vessel Of Hatred seems like a good idea”

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The first bigDiablo 4 DLCis set to launch on October 8, and alongside Vessel of Hatred we’re alsogetting a massive revamp to progression. For the most hardcoreDiablo 4players, that change can’t come soon enough, as evidenced by an absurd level 1 to 100 grind from streamer Wudijo using nothing but gear equipped at level 1.

“So I managed to level 1-100 and complete a T100 Nightmare Dungeon on Hardcore using only items I equipped at lvl 1 and never changed,” Wudijo says onTwitter. “Difficulty & itemization rework in #VesselOfHatred was overdue I’d say.” That gear was, of course, upgraded through imprinting and tempering, but this does all very much prove that early gear is still viable for the endgame.

“I found a set of gear in like 15 minutes on a Rogue, opened some caches in Helltide, put it in the stash, tempered it, and now we have these random level 200 items,” Wudijo explains in thevideo above. “I was like ‘okay, let’s do Capstone, and then do the other Capstone.’ I uploaded that toYouTube, actually. I entered World Tier 4 at like level 20 after 15 minutes, doing Capstone and the other Capstone.” The ultimate grind to level 100 took under 10 hours, but that’s not including the ultimate Nightmare Dungeon challenge.

Exactly how the new, post-Vessel of Hatred leveling curve will work in practice remains to be seen, but given the squish down to level 60 with the update, it looks like Blizzard intends those changes to be major. As Wudijo puts it in the description of that video: “Yeah, rescaling in Vessel Of Hatred seems like a good idea.”

Diablo 4 may have peaked because players are now dealing literally infinite damage on the PTR server, and by players obviously I mean a Whirlwind Barbarian.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He’s been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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