As fun as it is to see bigger damage numbers than you probably should in action RPGs, Blizzard has been able to keep players from completely trivializing Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred’s satisfying character progression, and—most surprisingly—its work-in-progress competitive leaderboards system.
Lord of Hatred has a mode called The Tower where you slay monsters to fill a progress bar as fast as you can. There are 150 levels of difficulty so players can measure how powerful their characters are compared to others on its leaderboards.
When you look at the leaderboards, you’ll see a lot of names of players you probably won’t recognize, save for a few notable streamers. Over the weekend, however, there were several top-ranked players on the NA and EU leaderboards sharing the same name: “INFbuilds”.
Article continues below
Image 1 of 3
Marketing yourself through a leaderboard might get the attention of players who do actually care about that sort of thing, but the real challenge will be finding a foothold in Google (and YouTube) search results—which is where most people go looking for guides. The rank 1 stamp of approval can only get you so far, especially for a game that appeals to a much wider variety of players than something like Path of Exile.
Right now, the leaderboards are still shifting around quite a bit. The strongest classes are surprisingly not the two new classes, paladins and warlocks, but sorcerers and barbarians. Sorcerers have a popular build right now where they fry everything in their path with lightning orbs, and barbarians are enjoying the benefits of becoming a walking tornado with the return of ‘spin-to-win’ builds using the Whirlwind skill. I certainly don’t have the time to min-max my characters as much as the players in InfinityBuilds do to top the leaderboards, but I’m excited to check their builds out if only to see how they tick.
Read the full article here
