Season 4 Developer Livestream Summary: May 2nd

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.

Stream Link


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