Looks like Diablo 4 has Diablo 2’s most powerful hat, as Blizzard has now confirmed a Harlequin Crest drop in the new action RPG. Harlequin Crest may not be a name that means much to you if you didn’t play hundreds of hours of Diablo 2 or Diablo 2 Resurrected, but the unique hat—called Shako by veterans for the class of items it was based on—was a staple of nearly any powerful build. Blizzard’s global community development director for Diablo, Adam Fletcher, confirmed the drop of a Harlequin Crest for Korean players via Twitter: “Can confirm they do indeed have a Harlequin Crest :),” he said.
That legacy will probably live on, as reported by wowhead, because the Diablo 4 Harlequin Crest is a beast. It’s got a bonus to everything every class build wants: life, resource generation, every single stat, cooldown reduction, damage reduction, and a whopping +4 Ranks to all your skills.
How do you get a Harlequin Crest in Diablo 4? That much isn’t 100% clear, for now, but the current thinking is that—wherever it shows up—it’s not going to drop until you’re over level 90, whether it drops in nightmare dungeons or well into the game’s final reaches.
The Shako was a must-have item for Diablo 2 players, easily the most expensive helmet in the game, and by far the best-in-slot for endgame play on the highest difficulties. It had an extremely beefy bonus to magic find, to boot, which meant filling out the rest of your endgame build was easier if you got the Harlequin Crest early on. It was also, in Diablo 2 and especially Resurrected’s world of sharing equipment between characters, an incredibly versatile piece. It was the best hat for everyone.
By the way, if you’re the kind of person to be going legendary gear hunting we can’t recommend enough that you turn on advanced tooltips for the stat range indicators, as that’ll let you know whether to keep stuff for extraction or for re-rolling. Since, trust us, you’ll need that gold later on.
If you’re just getting started on Diablo 4 amid its very chaotic release window then we’ve got a beginner’s guide to Diablo 4 that just might suit your needs. I’m not being hyperbolic when I call its release chaotic, either. We’ve had stuff like North American wildfires, this whole not-E3 thing going on, and that’s just outside the game: The first Level 100 Hardcore player died due to a disconnect, for example. We’re also not enamored of all those premium skins, or the general microtransaction hell aspect of the open world.
Perhaps our Tyler Colp best summarized it in our Diablo 4 review, calling it “a live service action RPG that almost buries everything that makes it great.”
