Diablo 4 Devsteam Highlights Season 4 Changes from Player Feedback

The Developer Live Stream regarding the Season 4 Adjustment from the PTR has recently finished. Here’s a quick look at what to expect in Season 4.

This Developer Live Stream took place on May 2, 2024. The focus was Season 4, particularly Feedback they received from the PTR. Below we’ll go into what’s coming as well as the changes they made based on feedback in the PTR.

Season 4 of Diablo 4 is set to begin May 14th, 2024 at 11 AM PST.

Changes from Feedback

Below is a quick summary of what has changed from PTR, going into the launch of Season 4. We’ll explain the systems briefly, then talk about how they were changed from their previous PTR iteration.

Affixes

In general, Affixes have become applicable to more builds. The main goal is to make all items more likely to be upgrades for our characters. Many of the hyper-specific “Damage on Tuesdays” affixes are gone and condensed to more approachable affixes.

This includes new Greater Affixes which are only available on Ancentral Legendary and Unique items, which are 50% stronger than the max roll of a given affix. With PTR Feedback, it’s now more noticeable when these drop and are easier to see in your Inventory.

I see these changes as a HUGE improvement to the overall gearing process, especially when combined with the other options. They will need to fix the weighting issue that was present and cited as an issue in our Season 4 PTR Recap.

Tempering

Tempering is a new crafting system that allows us to temper, or craft additional affixes to our gear. These special Affixes are applied via Tempering Manuals, which hold a small set of focused affixes.

Each attempt will craft on a random affix from this smaller pool, at a random value. Unlike Enchanting however, you cannot retain an Affix if you choose to re-roll it.

Based on what was shown on the Devstream (also shown above), they may have done away with the Tempering Limit that plagued this system previously. It looks to now require multiple recipes, or each Manual now has its own limit, which doesn’t solve the issue with the system.

They also made it a much quicker process, adding the option to skip the animations. The results are also displayed clearly now, improving the overall flow of the system.

Sadly, the very popular Size Affixes are now Hardcapped at a 100% bonus. This is more than enough for many skills, and promotes more variety in these affixes. Still a great change overall for reduce screen clutter and clarity.

Masterworking

Masterworking is an endgame crafting system that lets us push our build power significantly higher. It will upgrade all the Affixes on your gear (excluding Unique Affixes), which a chance every four ranks to give a huge bonus to a single Affix. This results in any given affix being boosted by 45-120% depending on how many of the milestone crafts land on a single affix.

With feedback, this process is now much faster and less tedious. Only the Milestone Crafts every four ranks will play the animation, and even that can be skipped. This makes for a much smoother Masterworking experience.

They also remove the fail chance that existed for every rank past Rank 4 on PTR. They did compensate this by increasing the amount of materials needed. It removes RNG from the process, so overall a great chance for consistency.

They’ve also improved the ability to convert Masterworking Materials to lower tier as well by offering larger caches that convert at a quicker rate. But they are looking into ways to improve this further and require even less clicking.

Overall, the Masterworking System should be in a great spot for Season 4’s launch.

The Pit

The Pit of the Artificer, or just The Pit for short, goes hand-in-hand with Masterworking. Completing the Pit awards you with the materials used for Masterworking. Due to the monster level of the Pit, this is considered an Endgame activity.

When entering the Pit and selecting a tier, the UI now displays the tier breakpoints for when we get new materials. These tiers were also extended so that Tiers 1-29 award Obducite, Tiers 30-59 award Ingolith, and Tiers 60+ award Neathiron.

This will reduce the need for conversions early on, as we’re likely to end up with far more of the lower tier materials as we delve deeper.

Based on Feedback, The Pit was made more rewarding, for both solo and Party play. Now the player that opens the Pit for their party will gain 100% of the materials, while party members will get 50%. This is a significant improvement over the previous 60/40 split.

In addition to the materials, completion of the Pit also awards Obols. Combined with the change to the Obol Cap going to 2500 and the Obol Vendor always giving 925 Item Power gear at Level 100, this will be a good way to seek upgrades.

Most importantly, Shadow Boss attacks cancel or disappear on completion of the Pit. This means we won’t die from these attacks as you go to open the chest and claim our loot. This prevents a lot of accidental deaths, and puts it more in line with the end of Nightmare Dungeons.

Helltide

Helltides are also seeing a ton of improvements for Season 4. Alongside a slew of general improvements, Helltides will be available starting in World Tier 1. With the addition of Hellborne through the new Threat System, and a new Open World Boss to challenge, Helltides will be very interesting.

Based on Feedback, they’ve made Banefule Hearts appear more regularly through improving the drop rat and bad luck protection around them. This means less hoarding and more reason to fight the Blood Maiden.

The Blood Maiden is also being buffed to award more loot to players that use at least one Banefule heart in the summoning process. This does not stack with multiple hearts. While the Blood Maiden herself has been made more rewarding.

Aberrant Cinders are going to drop more often as well, meaning quicker and easier Tortured Gifts. Tortured Gifts will even be faster to open, taking 1.5 second compared to the current 3 seconds.

They are removing the Tortured Gift of Doomsaying that would occasionally spawn from Doomsayer mini-events found in the Helltide.

Instead, they’ll now just drop the chest loot immediately. This removes the waiting time of opening the chest, as well as the Cinder cost it previously had.

The Iron Wolves are now permanently part of the Helltide, adding a ton of additional mini-events within the Helltide.

However, during Season 4, they’ll also have the Call of the Wolves Reputation system, which grants additional Seasonal rewards. These rewards include materials, gear, and even a Resplendent Spark.

Hellborne in Seasonal Realm always drops a Profane Mindcage, a unique elixir that increases the Aberrant Cinder Drop Rate as well as increases Monster Level by 10. The monster level is still capped at Level 50 for World Tiers 1 and 2, even with this elixir active.

Overall, a massive improvement over existing Helltides. With them being available earlier, they’ll very quickly become one of, if not the best leveling option available. Especially with the Profane Mindcages in the Seasonal Realm.

Class Changes

They didn’t touch on everything that was changed based on feedback for classes, but did address a lot of the bigger changes to classes and new unique.

Armor now hard caps its Damage Reduction at 85% when reaching 9,230 Armor. The amount needed no longer scales with higher level enemies, and brings more classes in line with each other.

This is a big improvement over the existing Armor System, which often requires up to 13k armor to cap out against the highest levels of enemies.

With less Damage Reduction available in general on gear, Fortify is being buffed. It now reduces damage by 15%, rather than 10%. It’s not a huge buff by any means, but it’ll be noticeable for sure.

Druid’s Wolves are getting a massive 200% Max Life bonus, making it easier for them to survive. However, they’ll respawn 50% slower if they do go down.

Scoundrel’s Kiss for Rogue is now a Targeted Area of Effect, rather than Line Area of Effect. This gives unique consistent AoE and Single-Target Damage. It also removes the need to be in melee range for max damage.

Boss Ladder

With Boss Summoning Materials dropping from more locations in Season 4, they’re shaking up the Boss Ladder. This miss make it not only easier to farm these bosses, but also their new empowered versions. This also includes Andariel, who is joining the Boss Ladder.

There’s less need to run specific content to be able to farm bosses., which is a huge improvement. Most content will drop all kinds of Boss Summoning Materials. While they’re dropped at a lower rate compared to their targeted sources, we passively build up a stock of materials by just leveling or farming any content we want.

Bosses now all have Tormented variation. These are summoned in the same places as the non-Tormented Bosses, but require three times the resources and reward five times the loot. However, they’ll also be increased up to Level 200 and come with additional Mechanics to make the fights a bit harder.

To make everything even better, all of the Boss Ladder Bosses (specifically Grigoire, Varshan and Zir) have a small chance to drop Uber Uniques. It’s a smaller chance compared to Duriel or the newly added Andariel

Speaking of Uber Uniques, Uber Lilith will also now grant a Resplendent Spark the first time you defeat her.

Other Topics

These were mixed in with the other topics above, but have been separated out for clarity.

They’re reducing the overall Veiled Crystal Costs, to make all of the crafting processes more manageable. In addition to this, Sacred Tier items will salvage for double the items, while Ancestral will salvage for triple.

Glyph XP Gain is being increased by 25%. In addition to this, Season 4 will also have a Seasonal Blessing to further boost Glyph XP.

Each Season Journey will now include a set of Legendary gear for each class to enable a “complete build”. For Season 4 this will include Dust Devil Barbarian, Pulverize Druid, Minion Necromancer, Barrage Rogue, and Incinerate Sorcerer.