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Compass to Carnage event, originally scheduled for November 4th, was postponed to November 25th, and now it's just one day away! If you're unsure how to proceed, it's not too late to start preparing!

Since this event is based on Infernal Hordes, you'll need to understand all the event mechanics and choose a build that can quickly clear out enemies in Infernal Hordes.

Therefore, we'll recommend and introduce Hydra Fireball Build, a Sorcerer-class build, to help you maximize its value in Compass to Carnage event.

Hydra Fireball Build Overview

Hydra-oriented Sorcerer builds shone brightly in Season 9, but their effectiveness diminished after Season 10, until we discovered that combining Hydra with Fireball is incredibly effective at clearing enemy hordes.

This isn't hard to understand. As primary Sorcerer skills, Hydra and Fireball both offer significant AoE damage output. Their effectiveness is amplified when stacked with core skills and rare gear, especially in Infernal Hordes (where enemies always appear in groups).

First, Hydra allows you to summon a three-headed hydra that lasts for 10 seconds, each head dealing fire damage to enemies within its area of ​​effect. Fireball, on the other hand, throws explosive fireballs at enemies.

It's important to note that to maximize Hydra Fireball build's effectiveness, you must unlock Fireball enchantment, which generates an additional fireball when you kill an enemy with any skill, dealing damage to even more enemies upon explosion.

This enchantment is the biggest reason this build surpasses other standard Hydra or Fireball builds, and it's also the main reason for its astonishing mob-clearing speed.

Skill Usage Strategy

Frankly, Hydra and Fireball are basically sufficient for this build. The principle for combining other skills is to maximize the effectiveness of key skills.

Generally, you should first use Hydra, then hold down Fireball key to ensure it remains active as long as Hydra count isn't at its maximum, thus consistently dealing enough fire damage to clear enemies.

If you want a damage multiplier increase, you can unlock Inferno. It's also a fire-summoning skill, but adding it isn't mandatory, so you can use other similar skills for higher output if desired.

Another recommended skill setup is to use Teleport. This skill puts you in an Unstoppable state, allowing you to dash to a target location and deal damage upon arrival.

While choosing Teleport means you need to constantly press it, it does significantly increase the build's speed, allowing you to reach the next enemy gathering point faster in Infernal Hordes, improving event completion efficiency.

Skill Tree Configuration

After adding skills, the next step is to configure the skill tree. First, you need to max out Fireball skill points, then increase mana for additional damage.

Next, you can decide whether to select Teleport based on your needs, and then max out Hydra for more critical strike damage. Also, don't forget Primordial Binding, which provides the following buffs:

• +2% Summon Damage
• +2% Movement Speed
• +4% Mana Regeneration

These buffs stack based on summons, adding one stack per summon, up to a maximum of 10 stacks.

Additionally, Sorcerers can use NaguCeh Runewords to summon a pack of wolves like Druids, then trigger a vulnerability effect and apply a freeze effect to enemies, dealing more damage to them.

What Are The Best Gear Options?

If you have the ability to acquire mythic items, we recommend equipping Heir of Perdition with the greater affix. Its main effects are as follows:

• + 200% Damage to Angels and Demons
• + 20% Critical Strike Chance
• + 20% Lucky Hit Chance
• + 20% Movement Speed
• + 2 to Core Skills
• + 60% Damage Output

If you have to settle for unique items, Crown of Lucion is the best choice, and it's best to take advantage of the season's advantages and equip Chaos Armor version. Its combat effects include:

• + 489-526 Maximum Life
• + 8.1-8.8% Cooldown Reduction
• + 7.0-8.0% Lucky Hit Chance
• + 40.0-50.0% Shadow Resistance
• When using skills that consume resources, increasing consumption increases damage output

After choosing your first gear based on your needs, you should then add Aspect of Shredding Blades, Banished Lord's Talisman, and Locran's Talisman. It's worth noting that, except for the gloves, it's best to choose Chaos Armor version for all other gear.

Best Chaos Perks

As one of the most popular mechanics in Season 10, Chaos Perks have given many builds a new lease on life this season. For Hydra Fireball Build, suitable perks include:

• Erupting Chaos: Chaotic Bursts randomly erupt and deal damage, adding a 4-second damage over time effect on top of the initial damage.
• Power Siphon: Increases core ability damage, but reduces maximum current resource consumption for 6 seconds.
• Erupting Chaos: Killing enemies grants stacks of Chaos, which unleash a powerful Chaos Burst to increase critical strike chance and damage.
• Brawn Over Brains: Significantly increases maximum health, healing received, and suppression damage, but reduces maximum resistances and armor damage reduction caps.

That concludes our overview. If you want to earn more loot in the upcoming week-long Compass to Carnage event, give this build a try!

Wanderers, Diablo 4 Season 11 is less than 1 months away! Are you ready? Because of significant changes to itemization, the addition of The Tower endgame mechanic, and a brand-new item upgrade system called Sanctification, you may not be able to gain an advantage with the same builds and playstyles as last season.

To get ahead in Season 11 and dominate the new Tower leaderboards faster, you need to prepare now. Here are a few things you can do now to help you transition smoothly to Season 11.

Complete The Campaign

First, completing the campaign before Season 11 begins is crucial, as this will unlock the ability to skip campaigns for all future season characters and give you a head start by automatically carrying over some progress. This includes your mount, all unlocked Altars of Lilith and their corresponding renown, and a fully unlocked map, allowing you to jump straight into the season content.

Once any character completes the campaign, all future season characters can skip the entire story. Your mount is immediately usable on your new season character, saving you time completing related quests.

Furthermore, progress on all discovered Altars of Lilith is retained. While these statues no longer provide permanent stat bonuses in Season 11, the extra experience and rewards gained from unlocking them are a significant part of significantly boosting your character's strength early in the season.

More importantly, if you complete the campaign, you don't need to start exploring the map from scratch, as the areas you've discovered will automatically unlock for your new season character. You can immediately skip the campaign and jump directly into season mode, allowing you to start farming the new The Tower endgame content much faster.

Find The Right Team On Discord

For the next tip, we recommend joining a Discord server, a great way to prepare for the new season. If you're used to playing solo and have sworn never to play with others again, joining a Discord server will definitely change your mind.

The changes to XP gain and monster difficulty in Season 11 make group farming much more advantageous, especially for Nightmare Dungeons and Helltides. Don't you envy other groups who always seem to work together to accumulate tons of XP and loot?

On Discord, you'll always find like-minded companions. Sign up in a group now and dominate Sanctuary with your new team at the start of the new season. You can share gear, experience, and learn about all the new mechanics coming in Season 11.

Choosing The Right Leveling Guide

Next, finding the right leveling guide is crucial to maximizing your leveling efficiency in Diablo 4 Season 11. These guides pre-plan your skill points, gear, and activity progression, minimizing wait times and confusion.

This is especially important with the new Season Rank system, which replaces Renown, requires players to focus on milestone missions, and skill points may change, slowing down initial leveling.

Choosing the right guides in advance can help you efficiently handle these changes and focus on the most effective character build and objectives from the start, allowing you to reach the late game faster. Following the guides minimizes waiting time caused by aimless wandering or repeatedly resetting skill points, allowing you to experience endgame content as soon as possible.

Transferring Your Seasonal Items

This tip is about what happens to your character when transitioning from Season 10 to Season 11. If you're new, this is your first season, and you create a seasonal character as soon as you join the game.

Diablo 4 is divided into two distinct realms: Seasonal Realm and Eternal Realm. Eternal Realm doesn't have any seasonal content; it's just the base game without the flashy Chaos Armor, Perks, endgame content, etc., but they are always present.

Several things happen when you first log in and transition from one season to the next. First and foremost, all your Diablo 4 items will not carry over to the next season, including your hard-earned gear, gold, materials, boss materials, armor, gems, and runes. However, everything will be transferred from your Seasonal server to your Eternal server. So, your gold will continue to accumulate over time.

But please note that all your gear from the current season will be transferred to a Withdraw Only tab. Once you retrieve these items or empty this inventory at the end of the season, this tab will disappear and be replaced by all new content.

Therefore, if you want to keep your gear, such as some Mythic items you acquired in Season 10, and keep them on your permanent character, you must log in to your character from the previous season and retrieve them from Withdraw Only tab.

Finally, we want to emphasize: enjoy the game! New seasons always generate a variety of discussions, both positive and negative. But regardless of the scale of the discussion, don't rush to make any definitive judgments. It's best to wait until the season officially begins before making any decisions. Because PTR doesn't fully reflect the actual situation of the season.

Therefore, make your own decisions, enjoy the game, and don't start with terrible expectations, lest you ruin your season experience from the outset. Have a great day!

Diablo 4 Season 11 PTR brought many changes, such as leveling, crafting, and new leaderboards, but the experience wasn't as good as Season 10.

However, Season 11 hasn't officially launched yet (its release date is December 9th), so there's still plenty of time to fine-tune it. In a recent developer interview, the developers discussed their plans for Season 11 and future updates, even hinting at the next expansion for Diablo 4.

Sanctification

Sanctification is one of the seasonal features of Season 11. Its operation is similar to Vaal Orb in Path of Exile. Using it on an item might give it better affixes or remove its useful affixes, rendering it worthless, and the item cannot be sanctified further. This feature is mainly for trying to upgrade items that are close to their endgame value; players can also choose not to use it.

The developers understand that players don't want to destroy valuable and unique gear and Mythic items, but they also feel that a completely risk-free experience would reduce player excitement. They believe that ideal sanctification should allow for an unlimited number of sanctifications of the same item, rather than a single, decisive result.

They plan to protect very high quality Diablo 4 items; for example, sanctifying Ancestral and Mythic items will not remove their affixes and will yield better results. Sanctifying rare items, however, still carries risks.

Masterworking

In PTR 2.5.0, Masterworking has been significantly modified. It now only increases the item's base stats, such as weapon damage, jewel resistances, and armor values. This prevents players from acquiring significant amounts of key modifiers like cooldown reduction, attack speed, crit, and skill levels through Masterworking, resulting in a substantial decrease in character strength.

The developers believe the current Masterworking system is similar to Blacksmith's Whetstone and Armourer's Scrap in Path of Exile; the gear-up process is monotonous and uninteresting, simply clicking to upgrade until the maximum level, failing to provide players with surprise and satisfaction.

They mentioned adding a new Masterworking bonus on top of the existing one, though they didn't specify what it would be. Any change, however, would be beneficial.

The Towers Rewards

The Towers is a new leaderboard system with more detailed rankings than The Pit, but it lacks rewards, resulting in a lack of player motivation. According to PTR data, even the strongest classic Barbarian builds are far from reaching floor 150 in The Towers, and after the new patch, even reaching floor 100 may be difficult.

The developers have reduced the HP of the Towers bosses and shortened the reward interval from every 10 floors to every 5 floors, up to floor 150. They believe that even with these changes, reaching floor 150 will still be extremely difficult. They speculate that players' progress in The Towers will typically be about 10 floors lower than in The Pit.

They plan to design The Towers as a more competitive endgame mode, differentiating it from the more diverse and fun-filled Pitfalls mode. This will involve optimized map generation rules, such as prioritizing upward routes, reducing unnecessary dead ends, and preventing important enemies from spawning in remote corners.

Finally, based on player feedback, they plan to offer rewards for players challenging The Towers. For individual players, rewards based on clearing specific floors will be introduced, such as gear and transmogs. Players who rank high on the leaderboard will receive functional rewards, prestige titles, and halos (cosmetics).

Finally, a Build Viewer will be added, making all builds on the leaderboard public and transparent, while also optimizing the leaderboard UI and notifications.

Future Update Plans

The development team stated that the future focus is on adding depth to existing content, rather than simply bloating the game with a large number of new events. They don't rule out adding new content but prefer to refine the existing systems.

Magic Item Upgrades

The developers mentioned considering giving magic items affixes and making them upgradable. This could make more types of items valuable in the endgame. This isn't without precedent; at least in Diablo II, magic items proved useful due to their potentially high specific skill bonuses.

However, to encourage players to forgo some legendary aspects in favor of magic items, their affix strength would need to be five to six times greater than it is now. This change is expected to be implemented as early as Season 12.

Chaos Uniques Items

Season 10 Chaos Unique items, including Chaos Perks and Chaos Rifts, are highly popular mechanics among players. The developers are happy to integrate them into the game, but they need to find a suitable way to avoid disrupting long-term balance and diversity. They mentioned that some Chaos Perks might return as Legendary Aspects.

Gold And Material

The developers' long-term goal is to ensure that gold primarily comes from killing monsters rather than selling items. They have already significantly increased the amount of gold piles dropped by monsters in Season 11.

They are also considering changing Boss Materials to a currency, so they don't take up inventory space, but the trade-off might be that they will become untradeable.

The Next Expansion

Finally, Zaven, the game's Associate Director of Expansion, hinted that all Diablo fans should pay attention to The Game Awards on December 11th. He strongly suggested that there would be an announcement about Diablo IV expansion pack, and perhaps we'll even see an exciting trailer.

That concludes the main content of this developer interview. Overall, the official team has listened to player and community feedback while also having its own update plans, and Season 11 experience should be better than the PTR.

Since its launch, Diablo 4 has released a new season every 2-3 months, accompanied by various updates and new seasonal content related to the season's theme, ensuring there's always something new to play and keeping the game fresh and dynamic.

However, besides this type of new content, sometimes the release of a new season brings long-term, historical changes that will have a profound impact on the future development of Diablo 4.

Take Season 11 as an example. Although it won't be available until December 9th, a month later, 2.5.0 PTR has already largely confirmed the new content it will bring, as well as the long-term updates we're talking about.

We've previously introduced the seasonal content of Season 11 in several articles; this time, we'll bring you the overall changes that will begin with the new season and analyze their impact.

Skip The Campaign, Unlock Waypoints Directly

If you choose to play the new season, you'll need to create a new character. This means that everything, from leveling up to farming available Diablo 4 items, will have to start from scratch.

Furthermore, at the start of each season, you had to traverse the map on horseback or on foot to clear the fog, unlocking corresponding areas and waypoints so you could teleport directly to specific locations later.

While this process wasn't difficult, repeating it every season was incredibly tedious and time-consuming, even if you knew the map and waypoints by heart.

Fortunately, after two years of this "torture," Diablo 4 finally decided to remove this mechanism starting with Season 11!

This means that once you've completed the campaign before, you can skip the process of unlocking basic waypoints to get them directly. At least in Season 11, you can immediately start farming XP and gold, reaching endgame faster.

As for the waypoints added in Vessel of Hatred DLC, once you've completed the campaign within it, you can also skip them and directly enjoy the full map and travel experience.

This way, veteran players no longer need to endure the pointless fog of war cleanup every season, while new players can still experience the campaign and gradually explore the game's areas.

More importantly, if you're a veteran player who has completed campaign at least one time, you'll be able to complete farming much faster in all new Diablo 4 seasons than before (before Season 11), allowing more time to enjoy the new season's exclusive gameplay.

Frankly, this change should have been implemented a long time ago, as the player community has been complaining about the repetitive fog of war cleanup for a long time. But regardless, it's finally here.

The Impact Of The New Mechanism On Eternal Realm

As you should know, the entire game is divided into the seasonal realm and Eternal Realm. The former is used to experience the new season, while the latter is a relatively stable realm storing all characters from previous seasons.

Generally, most players will prioritize experiencing the seasonal realm, but if you really like a character and their builds created in a particular season, or if you want to delve deeper into the game's fundamental mechanics and general events, Eternal Realm is a better choice.

Since seasonal content is not carried over to Eternal Realm, it's essentially unaffected by seasonal updates, except for character additions. However, Season 11's adjustments to the gear upgrade mechanism seem to change this.

First, Tempering and Masterworking mechanics have reformed the way affix upgrades affect gear, either by reducing the randomness of selected affixes or by directly influencing the upgrade's effect on the gear itself.

Second, Season 11 will add a new mechanic called Sanctification, allowing you to further enhance your gear after utilizing other mechanics. Once Sanctification is complete, your gear cannot be altered further.

Based on 2.5.0 PTR, these updates have received mixed reviews from players, and whether they are truly worthwhile remains to be seen after the new season launches. However, you'll find that they will definitely impact build usage in Eternal Realm.

Builds are essentially combinations of skills, gear, and other combat bonuses, such as Season 10 Chaos Perks, tailored to a specific class or combat scenario to maximize offensive/defensive damage.

Related: Diablo 4 Players Debate Chaos Armor Removal | Should This Mechanism From Season 10 Be Retained In Season 11?

Since Eternal Realm doesn't retain seasonal mechanics, builds are essentially the same regardless of which season's character you play, except for class differences.

However, Sanctification introduced in Season 11 means that the gear component of your builds will undergo a fundamental change. Previous gear will become obsolete due to the inability to obtain Sanctification.

This means that after Season 11 ends, if you want to play in Eternal Realm at your strongest, all the builds you crafted during Seasons 1-10 will be ineffective, as they cannot compare to builds affected by Sanctification and the updated Tempering and Masterworking.

Overall, this change won't negatively impact your Diablo 4 experience too much, as Eternal Realm's playability is inherently lower. However, this is a historic change for Diablo 4 itself.

Besides the confirmed changes Season 11 will bring to Diablo 4, the specific release date of the second DLC should also be revealed soon. Previously, it was only known to be in 2026.

Last year, the development team hoped to release the second DLC in 2025, but ultimately postponed this plan by a year when releasing the roadmap. With 2025 drawing to a close, players' curiosity is even stronger.

In short, Diablo 4's performance throughout 2025 has been relatively uneventful, but the changes brought by Season 11 may mean that the game will bring you new surprises in 2026. Let's look forward to it!