In a live developer update aired on October 4, we could see that Diablo 4 Season 2 will be bringing some huge quality of life changes across the board.
Such as better inventory management and multiplicative EXP rewards. And the mount will feel better and more responsive. What’s more important is that the player’s item abilities will progress in a more meaningful way depending on the situation.
The developers have tweaked the existing endgame progression by adding some content, and of course the mechanics of the new season. Overall, it is said that going from level 1 to level 100 will be 40% faster than in Season 1. Among them, resistance, damage buckets, unique item tweaks and class balance will be discussed in the campfire chat on October 10th.
Inventories & Stashes
First, I want to talk about inventory and stashes in the new season. We’re looking for a loot filter, but unfortunately we can’t seem to search by gear affixes. Loot filtering will focus more on rarity and item slots, with the ability to filter by Ancestral and Sacred.
They are no longer Diablo 4 item rewards or monster drop gems, but drop in the form of gem shards. We can craft gem fragments at the jeweler, thereby reducing the amount of bloat we have in our inventory.
You will no longer see Non-Sacred and Non-Ancestral common magic and rare items in higher World Tiers. Instead, they drop as crafting materials that you normally get by salvaging them. This will ultimately reduce the number of times we need a blacksmith so we can keep farming more efficient.
In Season 2, we do higher level Nightmare Dungeons and pick up trash items just to get more Crafting Materials. And our picking up useless rare items was a way to farm Diablo 4 Gold before, so we may need to find a new way to farm gold.
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We also see more stashes added to towns in key areas, vendor NPC locations improved, and occultists coming to Tree of Whispers. So our towns are becoming more efficient.
By the way, Renown completion will continue from season to season, but skipping the campaign will only unlock static 10 Waypoint locations.
Endgame Changes
In terms of endgame additions, the developer demonstrated Tree of Whispers and how the endgame content process works during the live broadcast.
New Bosses
Also, we see the addition of 5 new bosses. Echoes of Varshan are returning, and this boss will be located near Tree of Whispers.
Complete Nightmare Dungeons Tiers 21+ to get Beast of Ice. World Bosses and Legion Events will lead us to the new vampire seasonal boss, Lord Zeer. And Galvanic Saint will be obtained by completing Helltides.
Component items used to gain access to these new bosses will be tradable between players. Each boss will be a way to farm unique items, and each boss will have its own unique drop table. The biggest boss will be Uber Duriel, whose Uber Uniques drop rate will increase. Uber Uniques will be more common than before.
Improvements In QOL
We’re looking at huge quality of life improvements in the endgame. Depending on the level of the monster you’re fighting, the power of items on equipment will change within a narrower range. So now there’s a better reason to want to fight higher level monsters.
As you level up, trash items will appear less and less frequently. Useless equipment affixes will also appear less frequently at higher endgame levels.
We saw some Nightmare Dungeons targets removed, and even the layout was modified to reduce backtracking. For example, Lightning Storm affix now increases movement speed by 35% for 5 seconds. If used correctly, this might make it a S tier Sigil. We could also teleport directly into Nightmare Dungeons so we could avoid 2 loading screens.
Multiplied EXP Rewards
For the final endgame, we once again get significantly increased XP from Whispers and Helltides. Whispers will also stick to cached item slots. So we won’t see any random necklaces dropped from the launch cache anymore. Helltide chests are getting new icons to indicate the type of chest on the map.
Their gold rewards will also be greatly increased. This is said to help offset the cost of enchantment. We see an increase in the cost of initial enchantments, but lower scaling costs for subsequent enchantments.
Whispers and Helltides caches will provide better item powered gear. So we rarely felt like we’re doing endgame content and getting trash gear all the time.
New Season Mechanism
The new season’s mechanic will be vampire powers. From what I understand, we will be getting a new UI element called Sanguine Circle, which will be used to manage our vampire powers. Each vampire power has a Pact cost to activate. We will find Pact as a consumable, which we can then place on our armor.
We’ll use blood type currency to upgrade and unlock various vampire powers. There will be seasonal endgame content that allows us to remove or inject pact into armor for further customization.
Blood Harvest
Blood Harvest will be a new Helltide style event. Starting at level 1 gives us more reasons to enter Overworld. Eris will be our new Cormond, an NPC we follow in Season 2 questline. Zeer is our new seasonal bad guy and his lieutenants will be invading our dungeons. Zeer himself will be the new endgame boss, which we can access by completing World Bosses and Legion Events.
The above are all the highlights and quality of life changes that I know about this developer's live broadcast. Hope this helps. May your Diablo 4 Season 2 adventure be both challenging and fun!
