Diablo 4 Season 14 is set to be one of the biggest shakeups for the ARPG in quite some time, even as Blizzard deals with what it described as „issues compounding issues.“
The upcoming season, titled Death Awakening, is bringing controversial changes to Mythic items, weakening many build staples players have become accustomed to while opening the door for any of the game’s 100+ Uniques to become „Mythic“ quality with a 30% boost to the item’s Unique power. This major update to items and how players construct builds isn’t just for the season, but is intended to come to the game in its entirety as a permanent change.
At first glance, it looks like a win on paper. Less one-item-fits-all solutions and more build diversity, a frequent ask from the community, sounds like a good thing. The issue has stemmed from Blizzard’s approach. It added a heavy dose of randomness to the game’s best items, first to Uniques in Lord of Hatred, then to Mythics as part of proposed changes for Season 14. A Unique or Mythic item could have completely undesirable affixes, making the dopamine thrill of getting what is supposed to be one of the best items in the game instead feel like Blizzard is playing a cruel practical joke. While players do have some control over adding and modifying affixes via the Horadric Cube, it felt like far more work (and luck) was required to get a usable item that will last long term, much less a great item that will last an entire season.
Blizzard knows it’s stuck between a rock and a hard place. Following a playtest of the new season on Diablo 4’s public test realm and feedback from a concerned community, Blizzard is now meeting players halfway. There is still some randomness to be found, but Unique and Mythic items will now have two set affixes instead of only one. Crafting Mythics via the cube will also be more focused. Instead of receiving a largely random item when upgrading a Unique into a Mythic, it will now match the slot of the original item. It’s a step in the right direction, but it remains to be seen how players will react to the season overall once it arrives in full.
Making Mythics
It’s all in service of ensuring Diablo 4’s long-term health, Dan Tanguay, design director for live services on Diablo 4, said in an interview with GameSpot. One of the main goals behind the changes was to make it so a handful of the game’s current Mythic Uniques–must-have items like Heir of Perdition or The Grandfather–don’t continue to dominate.
„There’s a handful of them that just become best-in-slot,“ Tanguay said. „Once you can earn that, you get lucky enough to roll it, drop it, or craft it, that’s it–you’re never going to worry about that slot again. And it kind of narrows the types of builds that players will pursue, especially if they’re reading Maxroll or Icy Veins or something like that. We really want to increase the possibilities at the end of the game for what your build can be, and we need to look at mechanics that allow us to do that.“
The fix the team came up with, and one it was excited about, Tanguay said, was to make regular Uniques more competitive by having them become Mythic and amping up their power. At the same time, the choice was made to bring down the power of the game’s existing Mythics, now referred to as Iconic Mythics, by inserting a level of randomness.
Random affixes for Uniques in Lord of Hatred did not go over well, but were done to combat how easy fixed-affix Uniques were to get and to increase the length of their „item journey,“ Tanguay said. Work on Season 14 was already well underway by the time Diablo 4’s second expansion launched and Blizzard started to receive negative feedback surrounding the Unique change. That led to what Tanguay called a „perfect storm“ in regards to the Season 14 PTR, where Blizzard looked to test its proposed revamp.
„We had started getting this feedback that people weren’t happy with some of these changes to Uniques, and we were like ‚Oh boy, well, we were building on top of that for [Season] 14,'“ Tanguay said.
That was, and still is, the plan, though Blizzard is having to roll with the punches and „split the difference“ based on feedback from the community. Now, Diablo 4 Season 14 is dealing with what Tanguay described as „issues compounding issues,“ as Blizzard looks to incorporate player feedback regarding Mythics and Uniques while still pursuing its goals for the game’s future.
„We really need to address both of those things right now while still making sure long term we have fewer best-in-slot problems and we’ve got a lot more build diversity at the end of it.“
Regardless of how Season 14 is received, Tanguay made clear Blizzard still had work to do in order to arrive at a consensus point where both players and Blizzard are happy with where the game is headed.
„We need to keep iterating at it, until we arrive at something that we think is good for the long-term health of the game and that players really like,“ he said.
Breach And Clear
Changes to Mythic items may be the biggest change for Season 14, but there’s more to a season than just itemization changes. Death Awakening also brings the return of a previous seasonal mechanic, Realmwalkers. Unlike their first appearance in Season 6, players won’t have to follow the lumbering giants around, but will instead battle waves of enemies and close rifts in order to open breaches to even more challenging encounters, including a new Lair Boss.
„We looked back at how we used the Realmwalker previously … and we felt we didn’t really do the Realmwalker justice in that case,“ Tanguay said. „You had to follow along, it would spawn enemies every so often, and you got a portal. It felt a little anticlimactic, so we really wanted to take another crack at the Realmwalker and make it a proper boss fight–something that could challenge our players.“
Mephisto’s defeat in Lord of Hatred will play directly into the threat of the new Risen enemy type in Death Awakening, offering more of a direct story thread than previous seasons, where seasonal storylines were largely disconnected from the game’s campaigns or even previous seasons.
„Even though Mephisto is dead, his impact is still felt across Sanctuary at this point,“ Tanguay said. „It gives us the opportunity to explore some new ideas … that there are unintended consequences of Mephisto’s passing and now we need to deal with those.“
Plans Within Plans
Of Lord of Hatred’s new features, War Plans was among the most impactful: a new endgame system where players can choose between different activities, level them up, and be rewarded for it. There were, however, some issues, most notably when playing in a group. War Plans don’t currently sync between party members, meaning players in a group have to spend time rerolling their plans in an effort to try to make their individual plans match up as closely as possible.
That is, thankfully, no longer the case in Season 14, with War Plans now able to be synced between party members alongside tweaks like increased activity XP. Party sync is something Tanguay said the team acted on „very quickly“ to ensure it made it into the season and was an „oh shit“ moment the team realized it needed to take care of immediately.
Other changes players have asked for, like realm-wide War Plans progression or some kind of catch-up mechanic for subsequent characters, are still being thought about, Tanguay said.
„That’s something we didn’t want to rush into, just because it would have some unintended consequences if we just quickly did it,“ he said. „We want to make sure there’s still a lot of legs for the War Plans system, and as soon as you make it account-wide, it’s a little less frustrating but then we lose some playtime associated with it.“
He said there is currently lots of feedback and ideas surrounding War Plans, including how they could be modified to reflect a given season’s theme. Blizzard also needs to address the issue of what happens when a player has maxed out each War Plans activity. Any kind of account-wide unlock system or catch-up mechanic would likely be implemented alongside larger changes that would address that question, he said.
Diablo 4 Season 14 launches June 30, and will bring with it an unexpected crossover with Overwatch. The season will also add a long-awaited solo mode, for those who are up for the challenge of being unable to group or trade with other players.