The situation is not looking good for Diablo 4 at the moment. But the changes that Blizzard intends to make to its flagship title will change a lot of things, probably for the better.
During a very long “Discussion by the Fire” stream, Blizzard announced the major changes to come for Diablo 4. Changes so massive that they will require a postponement of season 4, as well as a test server. Let’s look into the flames to see what awaits the heroes of Sanctuary.
Massive changes in every sense of the word for Diablo IV
After an explosive launch, Diablo 4 is now experiencing a drought. The fault is an endgame which has difficulty attracting players, and seasons of uneven quality. To try to save the third in this area, the developers even had to bring back mechanics from the popular Season of Blood. However, these are only patches, the needs to bring to the game to revive interest being more profound.
As such, the latest stream from the Diablo 4 teams has clearly kicked the anthill. Major changes are on the horizon. Among the most important points to remember: a profound overhaul of the loot system. On the one hand, the game intends to favor quality instead of quantity in the future. There will therefore no longer be a question of a rain of objects, the majority of which will end up in the trash. Players should therefore fill their bags less quickly, and with better quality loot. This serves the dual purpose of wasting less time for players, to better concentrate on the main interest of the game: killing the demon. The statistics of each item will also greatly gain in clarity, with certain bonuses that are far too situational left aside. In addition, the affixes that remain will be much more impactful overall.
To stay on the affixes, all of the Legendary Aspects can now be extracted from items to be applied to other pieces, instead of just a few until now. Better yet, decrafting a legendary item with a given Aspect will improve its effectiveness for future applications. Regarding craftsmanship, this will also greatly improve in efficiency. Two new systems will appear to improve the chances of obtaining the perfect item for our build.
A profound overhaul that will take time
In addition to these profound changes to itemization, each class in Diablo 4 will also be significantly overhauled to make them more effective and diversified. Blizzard only had a few examples per class on this subject. However, the team promises us a literal wall of patch notes for major changes to come.
In this sense and for the first time in Diablo 4, a PTR (public test server) will be deployed on the PC version from April 2 to 9. This will allow everyone to test all these new features, with a character directly propelled to level 100. Blizzard warns us that encountering bugs on this server may be a very common occurrence. The objective is to gather as much feedback as possible in order to offer season 4 and a major update as successful as possible.
So, season 4 will arrive a little late. The date for all this exciting news is now set for May 14. To find out all the details announced by Blizzard, you can find the latest stream in its entirety below.