Diablo 4 Season 12 Review: Fun Gimmick or Filler Season? Butcher Gameplay, Bloodied Items & Endgame Rewards Examined

Season 12 has been live for a few weeks, how's your gaming experience?

As the shortest season in Diablo 4 to date, Season 12 is expected to last about a month and a half. Its main purpose is to bridge the gap between the hugely successful Season 11 and the upcoming Lord of Hatred DLC.

Most players speculate that such a brief season will be quite thin in terms of content. Here are some player feedback points that Blizzard needs to address.

First, I want to talk about my most anticipated brand new season feature: Slaughterhouses.

Butcher and Slaughterhouses 

The theme of this season is Butcher, whose image from Diablo 3 and his iconic physique make him one of the most iconic villains in the series. Butcher has several connections to Season 12.

When the season trailer was released, Butcher generated considerable excitement among players: you could wreak havoc on player homes, battling town guards and other humans. This gameplay revolutionized traditional ARPGs, placing you on the opposite side of conflict–monsters, evil, enemies, which allowing you to become a notorious villain, a monster incarnate–a refreshing experience.

In Season 12, you can transform into Butcher in several ways. The initial experience of entering Kyovashad with Butcher hook is indeed quite enjoyable.

Butcher's skills are fun, explosive, and easy to use. Mastering a few basic combos allows you to easily rack up kills, which is certainly enjoyable. However, most Diablo 4 players prefer to play as their own characters, using their own skills and abilities. Therefore, Butcher's popularity is destined to be short-lived.

You can obtain legendary items early in your character's journey through the new Slaughterhouses event. However, your novelty will quickly wear off, as the rewards from Slaughterhouses are not substantial later in the game. Once your character is fully leveled up and Torment 4 is unlocked, you'll need to farm Pit to upgrade glyphs and hordes to gain EXP and Diablo 4 Gold. Slaughterhouses, on the other hand, drop very few sigils.

Therefore, in the later stages of the game, you'll likely spend more time on hordes and dungeons rather than Slaughterhouses. A good brand new season feature must provide rewards and fit the game loop, but Slaughterhouses fail to do so.

Killstreaks and Blooded Items

The core mechanic of this season is Killstreak, essentially massacre bonuses from Diablo 3, which players can earn by chaining kills.

Killstreaks are maintained by killing and attacking monsters and disappear when your character dies. To complement Killstreaks, Blizzard has added Blooded Items, which provide buffs based on the current Killstreak, further enhancing your power.

Like Slaughterhouses, Killstreaks feel pointless. While Killstreaks and Blooded items are theoretically a good idea, they're insufficient for a full season, especially after two of the best seasons in the game's history.

Killstreaks are visually cluttered or appear in the center of your character, obstructing your view. I think this needs improvement. Killstreaks only work when paired with Blooded items.

Blooded items are gear with extra rolled affixes, which provide bonuses based on your current kill count, killstreak rank, etc. Any gear can potentially roll as blooded.

However, the biggest problem with these affixes is that they rely on kill counts, which are lacking in the early game. Accumulating a large kill count in Diablo 4 isn't difficult, but it still means some activities don't fully utilize these affixes.

Blooded items reward fast-paced builds with lots of area-of-effect damage abilities, offering little benefit to slower builds. Equipment only becomes effective after reaching a certain threshold if it provides a significant buff, and the buffs from Blooded items aren't particularly appealing.

Therefore, when creating new builds, Blooded affixes are merely a dispensable additional attribute, rather than a build-defining mechanic as they were in previous seasons. It's just a minor bonus that won't allow you to build a build around.

Lack of Obols

Another issue many players have complained about this season is the shortage of Obols. Each season, the developers make it harder to obtain certain materials through randomness, thus hindering your progress. The drop rate of Obols through all means has been significantly reduced.

Hordes, Strongholds, and Nightmare Dungeons are all new obstacles to item acquisition. Nightmare Dungeons rework and the addition of Hordes were intended to be a primary source of Obols. However, even in Torment 4, monsters in Nightmare Dungeons only drop 5 Obols. You can only obtain 700 Obols per run of Strongholds. This approach is meaningless for short seasons.

Fresh Meat

Fresh meat is also worth mentioning. It's essentially a seasonal currency, obtainable in large quantities by participating in seasonal events like morphing into Butcher. You can then use fresh meat to gamble for items. After the new season update, you can gamble on dozens or even hundreds of items simultaneously without a limit.

The only drawback is the lack of a storage facility and blacksmith to disenchant items. The music next to the butcher was added in a later patch.

Diablo 4 Season 12 brought a brief sense of novelty, but as a short transitional season, its insufficient core gameplay rewards, weak mechanics, and unbalanced seasonal material acquisition made the overall experience fall far short of expectations. Hopefully, Blizzard can address these shortcomings before the release of Lord of Hatred DLC, making this transition feel less rushed and superficial.