Diablo 4: Blizzard’s updates to change the game entirely

Blizzard has announced a plethora of changes that will overhaul Diablo 4 entirely.

The dungeon crawling role-playing game has a hardcore following that is always vocal about the changes that can be made, but the announcement on Diablo’s YouTube Campfire Chat has left a lot of gamers wondering if this really is Diablo 4 2.0.

Diablo 4 big changes

The changes coming to the medieval fantasy looter impact all of the core gameplay mechanics and Joe Shely, the Game Director of the franchise framed the update by saying “Everyone knows what an ARPG (action role-playing game) is, but it is a broad category.”

Shely would continue that Diablo is a “SARPG, a systems action role-playing game. Systems are all foundational elements of any ARPG, but in a Systems ARPG the systems in particular, including the endgame itemization, and things like crafting, those are what comprise the soul of the game and they’re the lifeblood of a game like Diablo 4.”

This focus on rehauling the itemization and loot system in the game can be seen as the development team’s focus on the decisions “before, during, and after combat” that are important to Diablo fans.

They are the most time-consuming and as the Campfire Chat says “One of the persistent points of feedback that we’ve gotten since we launched Diablo 4 last year was that a lot of the items that you find in Dungeons and throughout the game you end up just sifting through a lot of junk.”

The developers recognized that “it never really felt great and so with this update that’s been our number one goal, to focus on making sure that when we do give you items they’re high quality items they’re much more likely to be useful for your build.”

So let’s break down this mass list of changes.

Loot and gear will now drop to give a better benefit to classes and have more worthwhile items of a higher quality. Base item updates will see many affixes taken out of the game to save players from being bombarded with irrelevant stats.

Only Sacred items will appear in World Tier 3 and only Ancestral items will appear in World Tier 4. More Unique items will drop in World Tiers 1 and 2 and Uber Uniques can now drop in World Tier 3 from level 55+ enemies. Dropped Legendary and Unique items will now be tradeable between players as well (with the exception of Uber Uniques).

Level 95+ enemies only drop capped 925 gear and gems that players receive will be “simpler, better, and have a much longer crafting tail.” In relation to this the gold cost for crafting will be capped and not be rerolled.

Forgotten souls will also drop occasionally from elites and more often from Whispers. Greater affixes will also drop with a 1.5 multiplier, but will only appear on Ancestral Legendary and Unique items.

A new “Tempering System” will also be added to the game that allows players to add cool new affixes to gear. Tempering manuals will be dropped from most content in the game and cannot be target-farmed. Manuals have four affixes and one will be randomly applied to a piece of gear. A tempered item will also have a limited durability, that can only be rerolled so many times.

Another new system will be the twelve-tiered “Masterworking” progress system for upgrades that will see one random affix added every four tiers that are applied.