Diablo 3 launches on Nintendo Switch this week, and good Lord it is a lovely thing. Blizzard’s opulent action RPG has been on a long journey since a difficult launch on PC in 2012, but it has been a genuine classic since 2014’s Reaper of Souls expansion blew the doors off the original game’s stodgy structure and balancing and introduced the endless Adventure Mode. Some of the groundwork for Reaper of Souls was laid by an impeccable console conversion in 2013, which had a generous feature set, a crisp interface and cleverly adapted controls. This console game has gathered up all Diablo 3’s expansions and content updates since as it has rolled from one console generation to the next, and arrives on Switch with one hell of an added bonus: you can now play Diablo on the train, which is one of the better inventions of my lifetime.
It is all but impossible to pick holes in Blizzard’s conversion work. We will have Digital Foundry’s technical analysis of it for you soon, but it seems to run perfectly smoothly at the game’s staple, and essential, 60 frames per second, and for such a pyrotechnic game it resolves surprisingly well on the Switch’s screen in portable mode. (It is quite battery hungry, though.) Every play option you could wish for is covered, including online multiplayer, local multiplayer between Switches or on a single machine, portable player profiles via Nintendo’s cloud save service, and a variety of control options. Then there is the fact, unique to this version of the game, that Adventure Mode doesn’t require a campaign playthrough to unlock and is available from the start.
Well, it depends on what you’re doing and on your build, which in Diablo is very freeform but tends to coalesce around the various high-level armour sets. Top Diablo YouTuber and theorycrafter Rhykker maintains a Tier list of the popular builds which he updates each season: here’s the latest. I have played Diablo 3 for hundreds of hours and I still do not understand the language around high-level play, but it looks like Crusader and Wizard builds come out on top. Hey, maybe I do know what I’m talking about after all!
Source: Eurogamer Diablo 3's classes – ranked