Summary

• Season 4 of Diablo 4 introduces significant changes to character builds and item management.
• Players can enjoy new, viable builds previously unavailable in the game.
• Greater affixes in World Tier 4 are rare and exciting drops not found elsewhere.

The Season 4 of 4 brings much more content added to the game than simply a new seasonal story and limited time quests. Diablo 4: Season 4 - Loot Reborn is a massive overhaul to many of the foundational game mechanics for character builds, inventory, and customization of play style for the entire game - both the Seasonal Realm and the Eternal Realm. This update fundamentally changes and improves many of the mechanics that have been giving players some frustration since Diablo 4's release last year and will include new ways for everyone to play the game.

In anticipation of Blizzard's full announcement of these changes, three of the lead developers of Diablo 4 sat down with Screen Rant to talk briefly about some of the things players can see from the changes. These include a redesigned way to manage items, particularly in endgame, and how players can now get more creative by making unique and fun character builds. Diablo 4: Loot Reborn will begin on May 14, 2024, and - don't worry - it will also include a fun Seasonal questline alongside all the new inventory updates.

Season 4 Is More Than Just Seasonal Content, But There Is Still A Seasonal Story

The Iron Wolves Are Powerful Allies

Screen Rant: "Will Season Four have a full story for the Season that is separate on a Seasonal Realm?"

Joseph Piepiora, Associate Game Director: “Season of Loot Reborn is not just a new season we are introducing to Diablo 4. There are obviously a lot of things that are going to make it over to the Eternal Realm in general, as we have made a vast number of improvements across the entirety of the game between new content types we are adding and constantly being revised. But the question of is there going to be a seasonal storyline that players can go through: the answer is yes. The focus and emphasis of the release has been primarily on ensuring the loot game experience is a lot more crisp, it’s more fun to engage with, there’s more opportunities for surprise and delight, which really has reached the endgame experience of Diablo 4. On introducing new content in the form of Artificer’s Pit: there’s now an extremely deep and dense dungeon environment for players to begin to engage with once they begin to get close to level 100 as they are playing their character, and, of course, the major updates to Helltide.

Now in the Season, players will be working with the Iron Wolves, the famous mercenary band that players have been tracking with since Diablo 2. They will be working with Soudeh, this new mercenary that they are going to be introduced to, as they work to push back against the increasing encroachment of these Helltides across Sanctuary. We are very excited about this. Players are getting an opportunity to learn more about the Iron Wolves and help them in their efforts here. And also earn, basically, fame and reputation with them as they assist these Iron Wolves. The rewards for going through these quests and helping the Iron Wolves are really dramatic. They are very significant.

We have thought a lot about the way that we introduced rewards in the season journey and in reputation systems in previous seasons. We really want to make sure that when you do get rewards from the Iron Wolves, they are mercenaries, they are sellswords, they are there for a job, and they are going to get paid, so you’re going to get paid when you work for the Iron Wolves, and we want that to feel like a big part of the premise. So yeah, there is absolutely a quest line, and you’ll get introduced to new characters, and you’re going to get an opportunity to work with them to push back against the Helltides."

Character Builds Can Become Entirely New And Exciting With These Updates

New Builds That Were Not Viable Are Now Possible

Screen Rant: "The three of you obviously know a lot more about what's coming than I even know to ask about at this point, so what are each of you, personally, most excited about what's coming up? Whether regarding Season 4 or in the future, that you can talk about?"

Adam Z. Jackson, Lead Live Class Designer: “I can talk about one, and it’s one that we don’t talk about very often. We have this idea of builds and different ways to play that aren’t really tied to the core things that we sell you on as a character when you first to the game.

So, for example, like Barbarians, you have this idea of berserking and bleed builds and whirlwind and different force skills right? But we have these other effects and legendary powers that spawn from you doing things but aren’t really tied to any build. These are things like earthquake, dust devils, dancing bolts on the Druid, things like that. And we always have these extra spawn things for legendaries that are really, really cool and very visual and really awesome, and it was always a hope when we launched the game that these would become builds.

They’re not just one-off that you do it and that’s it, but that you build around these effects and make it a whole new way to play that only exists by getting the right legendaries and powers and mixing them together. And, up until now, that hadn’t really come online in a way that we had envisioned and a lot of it had to do with the way that it scaled, and the way things worked under the hood, because when you get these powers they do a certain amount of damage. Like rogue grenades, for example, would do an amount of damage, but you could never really scale it up into the late game and there never was enough to make that a build you could play.

One of the things that we did in Season 4 was we tied that damage now to your weapon damage, so as you get stronger with your weapon, and you get more powerful, the thing will scale with you automatically. And we also, because we have this new tempering system, we can also add player agency, so now they can temper their items and create their own little progression system to make these kinds of effects really cool. And so that’s particularly exciting for me because it’s like a whole other subset of builds that were never really viable that now all of a sudden players can play with. I think that will enable a lot more ways to play and different fantasies that didn’t really exist before that I’m particularly really ionate about."

Colin Finer, Lead Live Game Designer: “To sort of rip off of what Adam said, my favorite part of the game, as a player myself, is the creative build crafting and trying to take those builds to new heights. I think, while we have talked a bunch about the different ways you can customize your items and create wacky builds, we have this new dungeon type called The Pit of the Artificer and that’s really going to be able to test your builds, and you can sort of refer to it as a measuring stick for your character.

You’re going to be able to go very, very deep into the Pit. I’ll say, it is pretty challenging. We have made monsters that are above level 100 pretty tough. We have gotten a lot of that the game has become a little bit too easy with the amount of power that we have injected, and we really think that this Pit is going to surprise players in of how far you can really push and how difficult the monsters become.

And to sort of second that, when the monsters become really powerful, I start to care a lot about optimizing my build, but I also care about bringing some friends in. And we have made a number of changes to get players to this end state much faster. We have increased the amount of experience you gain from not just World Tier 4, but World Tier 3 and World Tier 2, and all of this is really in the spirit of trying to get players into that really fun state of build modification and deep endgame of Diablo. So I’m excited that I’m going to be able to get there much quicker, and my friends will be able to get there much quicker. And a lot of these changes are going into Eternal, so regardless of where you play, it’s really a great time to sort of pop back in and try some of these things out.

Joe Piepiora: Once you’ve found a power that you really need for your build to come online, you have that from that point forward, and it’s a very useful thing in that way.

Joe Piepiora: “Okay, I’m going to cheat, and I’m going to do two, because I’m an associate director and this is my one opportunity. So, two things that I’m particularly excited about.

First, we got a lot of from players, and my own experience, about inventory management in Diablo 4. And, for the uninitiate, one of the problems begins to emerge particularly as you go into later world tiers, like nightmare tier, torment tier, World Tier 3 and 4, you have a tendency, as you pick up legendary items, you kind of want to hold onto these for a while because you can extract a legendary power from an item and then that item becomes a crystal that goes into your inventory. And when you use a legendary aspect, you are going to put that into an item one time and then that aspect is removed, and you can’t use that again. Once you’ve found a power that you really need for your build to come online, you have that from that point forward, and it’s a very useful thing in that way.

So, as a result, whenever any player finds a legendary power of a set that they really, really need for their build, you kind of naturally hold onto those things in perpetuity, because you never really know when you’re going to replace another piece of gear, and you’d need to go in an imprint a new aspect onto that thing.

With the changes that we made to the Codex of Power, now the way things work is when a legendary item drops, you can take that legendary item back, just to the blacksmith, salvage it (which doesn’t have a fee or anything associated to it like when you had to extract at the occultist), salvage that item and then that legendary power, at the role that it appeared at on that item, is put into your Codex of Power permanently, so you have that for the remainder of the Season, or if you are playing on the Eternal Realm you have it forever.

And you will only ever lose it because you have replaced it with an even more potent version of that power, so you never go below that again. Once you’ve found a power that you really need for your build to come online, you have that from that point forward, and it’s a very useful thing in that way.

Connected to this, is that in the Season journey, in the Season of Loot Reborn, season 4, when you’re playing on the Seasonal Realm, one of the things we did a little bit differently, almost kind of to Adam’s point earlier, is that in the Chapter rewards you get as you are going through the Season journey, you are going to start actually getting a small 2 or 3 legendary items that have powers that fit together to make a build once you start collecting more and more of these things for your class.

So if you’re playing a Barbarian, you’re going to have like three items dropping at the end of chapter 1 that are legendary in power and will give you a couple connected aspects you can use to build upon. Even if you get those items and don’t like those stats, you can salvage those items down and now you have those three connected powers you can use in perpetuity for the rest of the season. You’re going to get more of these as you go through the rest of the chapters of the season, so you can really get a fun build to play around with, or that we think is fun, for you to kind of step off with for the season.

And then, when we think about the other parts of the experience in general, so one thing about playing or testing a season in a game like Diablo, is that it’s very difficult to playtest something like a season of content or a major update for an hour. You really don’t get a lot of information playtesting for an hour. So, as a result, what you need to do to really see what, for redoing aspects and progression, you really want to playtest that for 80, 90, 120 hours, one person playing for about that much time as much as you can contiguously on one character, so you get a really good sense for the actual experience as opposed to a curated version where you step in and have to play for 30 minutes to check out what The Pit feels like at this particular Tier.

As a result of that, one thing I realized very quickly that I really appreciated is that when I approached endgame, 85+ 95+, I have clear and exciting goals that I’m chasing once I get to that point. It’s not about getting to level 100. It’s about all the things I want to do along the way and also the things I’m excited to do, even after I hit 100. Now I’m chasing down unique items that have 2 or 3 greater affixes on them. Now I’m chasing down masterwork materials that I need to try to crit on specific affixes to get my cooldown reduction as low as humanely possible. There are really exciting things to go after, and I think having those goals is so important for our game, and it just feels great to have that stuff to latch onto and to play with.

New, Rare, Greater Affixes Will Be Exciting Drops In World Tier 4

Special Loot Drops That Won't Be Found Elsewhere

Screen Rant: Will the new Greater Affixes be able to act the same as other affixes in the game, where you can get them transferred to other items?

Colin Finer: “Greater affixes only occur on dropped items, so you cannot roll into them at an enchanter. And tempering is not going to be able to add greater affixes. We really wanted to preserve that excitement when an item hits the ground and it has, for example, three rare affixes, we feel like being able to just roll into it or force it sort of robs that sensation and jackpot moment. So in Season 4 greater affixes will only appear on dropped items."