Once again, Diablo 4 is about to change in a big way. The list of permanent updates Blizzard plans to implement in its next season bring foundational reworks to loot and combat that will trickle down into the rest of the game.
All of it will be on the PTR next week to test out, but so far it seems like Diablo 4 is about to become a tougher but more satisfying action RPG. Monsters will be meaner and your gear will be more customizable to help you face them. Old systems are returning in new ways and leaderboards are finally back.
The change with the most impact—and the most risk of under-delivering—is with combat. Blizzard says monster behavior was “too predictable,” in a draft of a blog post it provided to PC Gamer, and that it’s tweaking things to give each demon a stronger identity. On paper, this sounds like Diablo 4 combat might actually require some target priority, like taking care of a caster in the backline before the tank in the front. I’ve mindlessly torn through enough dungeons in the last few years to be a little skeptical about how much this will shift the feel of combat when your character is fully geared, but it sounds promising.
Supported by other major changes to loot and your character’s defenses, Blizzard says monsters won’t get blown up before they’ve even landed a hit on you and that it’s gone through and reworked the affixes they gain in combat (and added new ones), which previously were things like resistances to certain elemental damage types or postmortem poison explosions.
If this works like it says it will, Blizzard might solve Diablo 4’s tendency to turn into a lawn mowing simulator the moment you pick up a few legendary items. I would love more of a challenge in the early-game so every gear upgrade feels meaningful. Everyone should be able to get to the point where they’re flattening monsters before they crawl out of the ground, but it should be an incremental journey to get there, not one big jump like it is now.
One of the best things Diablo 4 had when it launched, and lost over time, was satisfying moment-to-moment combat where every hit mattered. Now, you clear through entire screens of enemies by spamming the biggest attacks you can find. Blizzard’s pitch for the future of Diablo 4’s combat sounds like it might return to that older style, which seems like it’ll be necessary for the rest of the changes coming in the next season to matter.
Loot reborn again
The second major rework is coming to items. Diablo 4’s two crafting systems, tempering and masterworking, will work a lot differently next season. Instead of rolling the dice to try to get the right stat, or affix, added onto your gear with tempering, you’ll be guaranteed to add whichever one you want. Legendary items will drop with four affixes and you’ll be able to add and replace the fifth one at will.
My favorite addition is a new chaotic step to the item upgrade process coming to the game that sounds a lot like a popular item in Path of Exile.
Masterworking upgrades won’t increase the values on an item’s affixes anymore, it will now increase its “refinement”. When you masterwork a weapon, for example, each upgrade will boost how much damage it does—which is a number you couldn’t previously improve. This also means that you can only increase the armor values and elemental resistances on your other gear, leaving the other stats the same unless you get lucky and the final upgrade turns one of them into a greater affix.
This might seem like a small difference, but the implications could be pretty big. Diablo 4 players are used to running around with massive chunks of stats on their gear from masterworking. The new system means most of those stats will be the same values as when the items dropped. Blizzard will probably balance the game around this reduction in your character’s overall strength, but it might make it harder to hit certain thresholds for builds to function correctly.
My favorite addition is a new chaotic step to the item upgrade process coming to the game that sounds a lot like a popular item in Path of Exile. Every now and then you’ll have the opportunity to visit a forge of the angels that will let you “sanctify” an item. This final upgrade will prevent you from modifying the item any more, but it has a chance of altering it in a few powerful ways, including giving it a unique affix, replacing an affix with a unique one, changing an affix into a greater affix, preventing the item from needing to be repaired, or adding a second legendary power onto it.
That’s right—Blizzard put Path of Exile’s unpredictable Vaal Orbs in the game, finally letting Diablo players participate in teasing each other about not having the guts to sanctify a perfectly rolled item. This change alone should help loot stay exciting when you’re deep into the endgame churning through hundreds of items that previously had no chance of being an upgrade.
Come prepared
Harder monsters and weaker items will help slow down the pace of combat in Diablo 4 and so will Blizzard’s plan to make investing in defensive stats actually matter again. The “toughness” rating from Diablo 3 is making its way to Diablo 4 and it basically means you will need to worry about survivability a lot more than you do now. Armor and elemental resistances can’t be solved by reaching a cap and never thinking about them again. They will both have diminishing returns with their effectiveness against the hardest monsters in the game, forcing you to manage it at every step of your journey.
Much like the monster changes, the new toughness system could fundamentally change how Diablo 4 is played as long as it works like Blizzard says it will. I doubt everyone is going to love having to worry about dying again, but Diablo 4 has been in desperate need of some friction when it comes to pushing into harder difficulties or facing endgame bosses.
Leaderboards are back
The Gauntlet, Blizzard’s first attempt at a dungeon where speed is king, didn’t work out so well. Bugs and other issues discouraged players from competing on the leaderboards so it was removed when the Vessel of Hatred expansion came out.
Blizzard is going to try it again with a new mode called The Tower. This timed dungeon is meant for high-level players to benchmark their builds and compete for the fastest clear times. The pitch for this new dungeon type relies on the new monster behavior giving players more opportunities to skillfully clear them out. You’ll have to strategically plan around pylons that give you damage buffs and develop an optimal route.
Blizzard says The Tower is a beta feature that it will iterate on each season. I know a lot of players who’ve been looking for something to do once their characters are fully built out and this looks like it could be it.
All of this will come alongside a full suite of new seasonal powers that let you control the kinds of rewards you receive from the various activities—another thing players have wanted for a long time. Given the sheer amount of stuff that is changing, I’m not surprised Blizzard is launching the PTR next week on October 21 to get as much feedback as it can before the season goes live for real in December.
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