Blizzard has published a blog detailing the changes coming to Diablo 4 in its crucial fourth season, and given the season a name that lays it all out in the open: it’s called Loot Reborn. The focus of the season is completely revamping Diablo 4’s weak and fussy item game, making equipment drops more impactful and easier to understand.
Season 4, which begins on May 14, will work as a massive reset for Diablo 4’s underpinning systems — something that’s evident from the fact most of the content and changes will apply to the game’s main Eternal Realm as well as the time-limited Seasonal Realm for seasonal characters.
The name, Loot Reborn, reflects Blizzard’s focus on these changes over the seasonal storyline (although there will be one featuring the Iron Wolves, a mercenary faction from Diablo 2). It’s also surely a callback to “Loot 2.0”, a Diablo 3 update that arrived alongside the Reaper of Souls expansion and dramatically improved the game in the eyes of many in the Diablo community.
The content of the changes won’t be a surprise to players who’ve been following Diablo 4 closely, as Blizzard has been open about its plans in developer updates, and held the game’s first Public Test Realm testing session in April to gather feedback.
Briefly: Loot will drop less often and have fewer affixes, while those affixes will be more powerful and easier to understand. There’ll be fewer of the arcane, conditional effects (like a bonus to damage against non-injured Elite enemies) that would leave players scratching their heads or shrugging when trying to figure out the efficacy of an item for their character build (or at all). The gem system has been streamlined, as has the Codex of Power, a collection of the powerful Aspect affixes that can be applied to high-quality loot. The aim across the board is to reduce busywork for the player.
It wouldn’t be Diablo if there wasn’t some arcane complexity, however, so this has been shifted into two new crafting systems: Tempering, which allows players to collect and add additional affixes to their equipment, and Masterworking, an endgame system that supercharges your weapons using rare resources from a new dungeon type, the Pit of Artificers.
Alongside the loot changes, Helltides get a major revamp. These world events see demons take over large swathes of the game map for limited periods, and they’re a crucial part of late-game and endgame play in Diablo 4. The redesigned Helltides have a threat level that increases as the player kills monsters, directing more of the demon army toward them. Helltides will also become available earlier in the game, in World Tiers 1 and 2.
Blizzard didn’t say much about the Iron Wolves storyline for season 4 in the blog, and it’s unclear if this is because it’s rather slender compared to previous seasons, or because the developer is just being secretive. It’s notable that some of the content featuring the Iron Wolves will persist past the end of the season, which hasn’t been true of any of the previous seasons.
After an underwhelming third season and criticism of the item game that has persisted since launch, Loot Reborn could be a make-or-break moment for Diablo 4 — even as it welcomes a new wave of players from Game Pass and builds up to the release of first expansion Vessel of Hatred in late 2024.
Blizzard will go into greater detail about Season 4: Loot Reborn in a developer update livestream on Thursday, May 2, at 2 p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT, after which it says it will publish full patch notes.
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