My interest has been waning in the Diablo 4 to the point where I didn’t really even bother with checking out the most recent campfire chat about upcoming changes to season 4 in May. Turns out that was a mistake.
Diablo 4 season 4 is introducing massive, sweeping changes to many aspects of the game, but most notably itemization, taking in loads of player suggestions and also drawing from recent games like Last Epoch to drastically improve its loot systems. And there are important developments for the endgame as well. Here are the highlights.
GENERAL LOOT CHANGES:
- They are removing unused affixes
- Only Sacred items appear in World Tier 3 and only Ancestral items in World Tier 4, no Sacreds there anymore
- Total Affixes on gear have been reduced to get what you want more often
- Legendary and Unique items will now be tradeable across players (not Uber Uniques)
- Level 95+ enemies only drop capped 925 gear (the cap is not being raised)
- Enchanting gold costs will be capped and not increase exponentially forever
- Forgotten Souls be able to be found from more sources, including from Whispers and occasionally elites
CODEX OF POWER CHANGES:
- A new storage system lets you upgrade a stored aspect a total of 16 times to reach max potential
- You can also salvage a max rolled aspect to permanently upgrade that aspect within the codex to max (max rolls only drop in World Tier 4)
TEMPERING
- This is a new crafting system where you can add new affixes to gear. Tempering manuals will be dropped from most content in the game. Manuals have four affixes and one will be randomly applied to a piece of gear. You can only temper an item so many times using this method.
GREATER AFFIXES
- These are the most powerful affixes in the game now that can drop with 1.5x the values of other max rolls (Last Epoch, anyone?)
- They can only roll on dropped Legendary or Unique items, they can also be Enchanted into items (but not crafted)
MASTERWORKING
- You can upgrade your affixes by 12 ranks. Most ranks upgrade all affixes slightly. Every four ranks one affix is massively upgraded
- A new endgame activity called The Pit is where you can find Masterworking materials for the new system. This is also a place where Stygian Stones will drop that can be used to summon level 200 Uber Bosses
Just a wild amount of huge changes here, and all of them sound excellent. These will go live with the launch of season 4 (the theme of which has not been announced), which launches May 14, but it will be tested before that in a PTR.
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