TheDiabloseries has always been big on healing. You can heal with potion and spells, or passively heal with item effects to regenerate health over time, or even heal as you’re dishing out damage. Having all these options may sound nice at first, but by the time we reachDiablo 3, there was a bit of an overabundance.
Passive regeneration was so readily accessible, that it left many abilities and game mechanics you could use to heal feel completely useless. While healing potions did exist in Diablo 3, they were far from your primary healing source. Your item passives were usually enough to keep you alive, and potions went on cooldown after being used, so they weren’t very consistent.
Thankfully, healing inDiablo 4has improved in a big way, ramping up the challenge and making us actually have to actually pace and think about our healing in the game.
First up, healing from item effects is now much more circumstantial. You can only passively regenerate health in Diablo 4 if you’re out of combat, and item effects that can heal you while fighting require you to be doing something to trigger them like dealing damage or killing enemies. These item effects can be helpful, but powerful enemies like bosses can deal much more damage than you can recover using this method.
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The reduced efficiency of item effects makes other sources of healing, like class abilities, feel valuable again, while potions have - like in the good ol' Diablo days - once again become your best friend. Instead of going on a long cooldown, using a potion will remove one from your limited stash and put it on a one-second cooldown.
Enemies will sometimes drop potions when defeated, and you’re able to refill them at healing merchants or healing globes, but it’s still important to keep track of whether you can afford to use a potion or not. This system works especially well in boss fights, where they drop potions when their health falls below marked thresholds. You need to balance keeping yourself alive by playing cautiously and not taking too much damage, while also dealing enough damage to have enough potions. It feels very finely tuned.
Diablo 3 had a system similar to potion drops where enemies would drop an orb that instantly healed you, but it felt significantly worse because you consumed it the second you touched it. This happened even if you were at full health (which you probably were since it was Diablo 3).
Making it a requirement for the player to manage when they need to restore health makes sense for Diablo, where resource management is a big part of the loop, and this change feels like it leans into that. Most combat encounters in Diablo 4 are against large numbers of enemies, and every class has to manage a resource bar to use abilities effectively. Sure, Diablo 4 may not be the hardest game in the world, but at least now it has a solid baseline of challenge thanks in large part to this change.
