To be honest, the campfire chat of Diablo 4 Season 9 and the related 2.3.0 PTR should come earlier than you think. Although it is not a bad thing to experience the new season as soon as possible, it may also mean that the game officials find that the current season 8 is not satisfactory.
As one of the leaders in ARPG, although players are accustomed to “finding faults” after most games are launched for a long time, Diablo 4 has indeed performed too mediocre in the past year. Except for DLC Vessel of Hatred, which is rich in content and innovative, the performance of other regular seasons is lackluster.
Therefore, facing the seemingly tighter season update interval than before, you may wonder whether Diablo 4 has finally taken this fatal problem seriously, so it decided to show you their determination to change through 2.3.0 PTR.
Based on this, we will combine PTR content that has been made public, and collect feedback from players in the community to analyze what new changes will make Season 9 better.
2.3.0 PTR Main Content
From the overall mechanism point of view, Diablo 4 has not abandoned their traditional season mode: new themes, new seasonal powers, and new ultimate bosses. However, the game will make adjustments in details, such as more freedom to customize the attributes of seasonal powers, etc.
New Theme And Power
Almost every Diablo 4 seasonal theme is related to new available powers or bosses. The theme of Season 9 is Sins of the Horadrim, and the seasonal power is Horadric Spells. The special thing about this power is that it is not directly utilized after it is obtained, but can be customized.
In order to customize this power, besides consuming a certain amount of Diablo 4 gold during the production process, you must also have 3 types of raw materials. They and their corresponding functions are:
- Catalysts: Provide basic damage for your spells.
- Infusions: Modify the elemental damage type caused by your spells.
- Arcana: Modify the baseline power of spells.
And each raw material includes a lot of specific content, which means that in fact, there are many possibilities for customizing your Horadric Spells in the end, which fully enriches your combat options and experience.
New Dungeons
As one of the sources of important items such as Diablo 4 gold, XP, gear, etc., the nightmare dungeon has a relatively core position in the game, and the season 9 will make adjustments based on this, and strive to give new vitality to the classic mechanism.
First of all, the dungeon itself will add an advanced mode called “Upgrade Nightmare”, which requires you to challenge three nightmare dungeons with different new affixes in a row. The affix content determines the difficulty of the challenge and the final reward.
In addition, the new season will add a new mini dungeon called Horadric Strongrooms to the nightmare dungeon. The entrance to the dungeon is hidden in the nightmare dungeon, and you need to explore and enter it by yourself.
New Boss
Like Lilith or Belial before, Diablo 4 adds Astaroth as the final boss of Season 9. This boss has appeared in Diablo series before, but this time it is special in that Astaroth will split into two during the battle, bringing a double boss battle.
Existing Shortcomings Of Diablo 4
Although it is still unknown how the actual performance will be, from a conceptual point of view, the above new changes in Season 9 are still quite attractive. However, in order to truly satisfy your Diablo 4 gaming experience, in addition to the novelty, you also need to consider your actual needs.
At present, you should think that Diablo 4 has the following main problems as other players:
Upgrading Speed Is Too Slow
Reaching level 60 as soon as possible and unlocking Paragon system to continue to become stronger should be the basis for your character to pass the season. But I believe you should also feel that the character upgrade speed of Diablo 4 has been getting slower and slower recently.
The upgrade process is full of training and can certainly exercise your combat ability, but too slow will destroy the overall balance of the game and the player experience.
While you can equip leveling builds to speed up your progress, the more important thing is that the game itself needs to make relevant changes.
Loot Drop Rate Is Reduced
There is probably nothing more frustrating than not getting enough loot after winning a battle. Although there are still many ways to obtain the essential gold, other rare Diablo 4 items are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain.
Overall Imbalance
The above two problems, combined with the influence of other details, ultimately lead to a relatively unbalanced combat experience before Season 9 is launched, making it impossible to craft the builds you need as usual, thereby reducing your combat efficiency.
Make More Changes Based On PTR
Although PTR content represents the main direction of Season 9, other more detailed mechanisms can actually fully in time to make changes based on the existing opinions of players and the final feedback of PTR to fully solve the source of your poor gaming experience.
For example, to address the problem of slow upgrades, Diablo 4 can develop more side quests that can provide XP as rewards, or regularly launch reliable limited-time XP boost events to ensure your upgrade needs from multiple dimensions.
As for the drop rate of loot, some can be directly increased, while others can be increased by enriching their farming channels to increase their availability.
After all, no matter how rare the item is, the ultimate function is to provide you with combat benefits. Simply showing its “rarity” through extremely low drop rates seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
In short, Diablo 4 has the responsibility to make itself better and better, because the entire Diablo series is a classic and charming game IP, and Diablo 4 should contribute to expanding its influence, right?
