“When it comes to sets, a lot of times you can think of within that framework, we give you an endpoint, then there’s only one road to get there D2R Items, which is acquire these two or three or six very specific items, and that’s the only way to get there. Our north star in Diablo 4, at least right now for design, is that we don’t want to be that prescriptive as far as the fantasies and things that we’re selling you.”

While I was a little skeptical when I first heard there were no sets, given how essential they seemed in past games, after seeing Diablo 4’s build design and hearing Adam’s answer, I do get it now, and how sets don’t really work within the framework they’ve built here. We have legendary items with variant abilities, we have the ability to extract those legendary powers and apply them to other items in other slots. We have unique items with fixed abilities in fixed slots.

And we even have legendary power nodes within the paragon system. It does seem more dynamic than “get six pieces of Tal Rasha’s to have the meta Sorceress build.” I have liked sets in games like this, from Diablo 2-3 to The Division, but I think there’s a clear reason they’ve shied away this time. Looking at another looter like Destiny, for instance, it’s a similar reason why that game, despite being a decade old, has never gone down the set route at all.

One thing I am deeply concerned about with Diablo 4 is not the quality of the game, the betas have already proven to me I’m going to love it cheap D2R ladder items, but now that it is heavily focused on being a live game, I will have a lot of trouble balancing it against other releases and my eternal marriage to ongoing Destiny 2 content.