Diablo 4 Soul Splinters offer choice, but the best picks already look obvious
Soul Splinters’ powerful bonuses come with drawbacks that favor certain builds.
Diablo 4's new Soul Splinters are supposed to make you think about how you build your characters. Each Splinter gives you a powerful bonus but comes with a drawback attached. The idea is that as you get stronger, you must also choose your build's weakness.
The problem is that some of these tradeoffs are much more meaningful for certain builds than others. On the Season 15 PTR, a few Splinters already looked like choices that would be surprisingly easy to make.
Eight Splinters, Eight Different Compromises
The Season 15 PTR introduced eight Soul Splinters. They can all be socketed into Jewelry and upgraded through the Horadric Cube. If you use Leoric's Crown Legacy Unique, you can also socket them in that helmet since it counts as Jewelry. They come in five rarities, with their bonuses becoming stronger at higher quality.
Most of them follow the same basic formula, for example:
Splinter of Anguish
Gives Critical Strike Chance and Attack Speed, but increases Primary Resource costs by 30%
Splinter of Sin
Increases Maximum Health by up to 40%, but reduces Maximum Primary Resource by 30%
Splinter of the Black Soulstone
Gives you stacking damage after killing enemies but also increases the damage you take
Splinter of the Mother
Makes you Unhindered and applies Vulnerable when you touch enemies, but eventually stuns you after enough contact
Those are pretty important tradeoffs, but then you also have Hellfire and Pain.
Hellfire Is Only a Bad Deal if You Need Critical Strike Chance
At Unique quality, Splinter of Hellfire gives 100%[x] increased damage, but removes 100% of your Critical Strike Chance.
That sounds like an enormous price until you consider the builds that do not really care about Critical Strike Chance in the first place. For those builds, Blizzard has effectively turned the drawback into something much less threatening. If your character was not relying on critical hits to begin with, losing your ability to crit is hardly the same sacrifice as it would be for a crit-focused build.
That is the interesting problem with Soul Splinters. The bonus is universal, but the drawback is not really.
A crit-focused build might immediately rule out Hellfire, but another build can look at the exact same Splinter and see a massive damage increase with very little to give up. Suddenly, there is not much of a decision to make.
Pain Has the Opposite Problem
Splinter of Pain takes the defensive approach. At its highest value, it gives 40% Damage Reduction, but reduces Movement Speed by 30%. For everyday farming, that sounds miserable. Diablo 4 is already a game where movement speed has a big impact on how quickly you can clear content, and losing 30% of it... You are going to notice the difference.
But the calculation changes when you are pushing difficult content. If you are building specifically around surviving the hardest content you can access, 40% Damage Reduction is a huge defensive benefit. The movement penalty might be something you are willing to tolerate if the alternative is dying. Again, the drawback does not disappear, but its value simply depends on what you are trying to do.
That Is Where Build Diversity Could Get Tricky
This does not mean every Season 15 character is going to use the same two Soul Splinters.
Anguish could make much more sense for a build that can comfortably generate its resource. Sin could be attractive for characters that do not depend heavily on their resource pool. Black Soulstone has its own ramp-up mechanic, and Lies and Damnation are much more obviously suited to particular farming situations. That is a good thing. Soul Splinters do not need to be equally attractive to every build. They just need to create situations where you are genuinely weighing one option against another.
The concern is what happens when the game figures out the drawbacks a build does not care about. By that we mean that the more specialized the build becomes, the easier it can be to find the Splinter whose downside barely matters. And that could lead to people picking the same builds and the same Splinters that go with it, just because these are not impacted by any of the drawbacks, but can benefit from the huge bonuses.
Numbers Can Still Change
This is still PTR territory, and that is important. Blizzard explicitly describes the PTR as a way to test new systems and make adjustments before the season goes live. So it is too early to say that Soul Splinters are going to destroy build diversity or that every build will end up using the same combinations. But the underlying problem is worth watching.
A choice is only interesting when both sides of the choice matter.
If Blizzard gets the numbers right, Soul Splinters could give Season 15 some genuinely interesting build decisions. If the bonuses become too powerful and the drawbacks can easily be ignored by specific builds, we will end up with another system where the "choice" is mostly something a build guide tells you to equip.
And that would be a shame, because the basic idea is pretty good. Keep an eye on BlizzCon because we will probably know if numbers change or not during the event.