We’re liveblogging the latest Diablo 4 livestream dedicated to Season 4!
Highlights
- Masterworking animations have been removed for ranks 1-3.
- Based on PTR feedback, they’ve added material conversions for Masterworing, this is a temporary solution. A permanent one is coming in the future.
- They have a star indicator for affixes on items, gone are the days of Roman numerals.
- The cost of imprinting affixes has been reduced from 75 to 16.
PTR Lessons
The developers are now sharing the lessons learned during PTR testing.
- End-game survivability issues:
- Enemies are kinda easy, then they 1-shot you.
- Hard to balance top-end survivability.
- Variability in player defensiveness is high.
- Armor is confusing.
- Some stats can get very hight, allowing for crazy things.
- Blizzard likes crazy things, but have to take computer performance into account.
- Balance changes, bug fixes.
- Here’s how armor works today.
- In Season 4, Armor caps when fighting level 100 monsters. Once you get 9230 Armor, you are finished with your journey.
- New Caps
- Cooldown Reduction cap – 75%.
- Increased Area Size cap – 100%.
- Cooldown Reduction cap is only from gear – you can still get cooldown resets or additional cooldown reduction from other sources like the Skill Tree.
Balance Updates
Blizzard is making some balance changes ahead of Season 4 start based on PTR testing!
- Blizzard fixed a ton of bug fixes thanks to player reports!
- Druid’s Hurricane incorrectly scaled damage.
- Ebonpiercer’s extra missiles incorrectly had a Lucky Hit chance.
- They fixed an issue where Flameweaver was able to split a Firebolt multiple times if the Fire Walls were stacked on top of each other.
Helltide Changes Based on PTR Testing
- Cinder Drop Rebalancing
- Issue: Gathered feedback revealed Cinder drop rates felt slower than expected.
- Solution: iterate on Drop %’s to hit closer to expectations.
- Result: Increased Cinder Drops
- Blood Maiden Rewards level Improvement
- Blood Maiden’s overall value is greatly improved (Legendary’s, Forgotten Souls, lord Zir Mats, % Chance End-Game Boss Mats)
- Doomsayer “Chest of Doomsaying” Variants now just explode into the premium loot directly.
- Reduced channel time to open Tortured Gifts from 3 seconds to 1.5.
Pit of the Artificer
- The new permanent feature was too easy based on PTR feedback, so they made it more difficult by adjusting the rates.
- The Obol cap has been raised to 2500.
Season Journey Changes
- Season Journey will reward a curated list of legendaries for pre-made builds for each class.
Q&A Time!
- The team love the idea of Season Powers and we will see new ones in the future.
- Season 4 builds new foundation on how end-game works in D4.