News Tag: Diablo 4 Eternal Realm

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.

Diablo 4 Season 11 Will Bring Historic Updates | Changes About Waypoints And Eternal Realm

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.

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!

Tedious And Repetitive Strongholds

Whether it is the original Diablo or the latest Diablo 4, although the entire game series has been undergoing adjustments, updates and changes all the time, its core has not changed, that is, you need to always work hard to obtain resources.

Unlocking and collecting different weapons, amulets, and armor, and finding ways to improve the efficiency of Diablo 4 Gold farming not only allows you to enjoy the fun of obtaining loot but also helps you further get other higher-level resources to upgrade your character. Of all the channels that can obtain resources, strongholds have been a more popular one in the past.

In Diablo 4, strongholds are actually a settlement that is initially occupied by enemies, and you need to obtain loot by completing tough challenges in it. The enemies in the encounters in strongholds fight fiercely and are usually at least two levels higher than your character. Although you can earn renown points to upgrade your character later, many players feel that the time and effort required to clear the fortress is not commensurate with the amount of rewards in the end.

However, difficulty is not the most fatal problem of strongholds, because difficulty sometimes means that the combat process can be interesting. After Season 7 is launched, you will find that as you become more familiar with building a new character, strongholds become more and more boring, and even the last advantage is lost. Some Diablo 4 players even say they never play strongholds.

How To Improve It?

While most waypoints in Diablo 4 only need to be unlocked once, and they remain unlocked when you play with a new character, waypoints in the stronghold must be unlocked again. This will undoubtedly greatly undermine the fun and desire of starting a new Diablo 4 character, causing you to get bored with the game itself, eventually.

Therefore, we think it would be best for Diablo 4 to change the completion of strongholds to a universal feature for the entire account in the late Season 7 or Season 8, just like Altars of Lilith and renown. In this way, by continuing the progress of strongholds to the game progress of all your characters, unnecessary clearing time is saved, making the operation of strongholds more efficient and meaningful.

Eternal Realm Seems To Be Unchanging

Although seasonal content is the main content of each Diablo 4 season update and attracting players, they only last for a few months after all. As the seasons change, you will find that your Diablo 4 experience seems to be stuck in a vicious cycle: play some new seasonal content, quickly become familiar with them and get tired of them, then start looking forward to the next new season too early, and repeat.

This is not to say that seasonal content is not needed. On the contrary, they should be better, but in addition, Diablo 4 should pay attention to the update and construction of Eternal Realm. Although seasonal power and new unique items can make your character more powerful, the lack of core gameplay related to Eternal Realm makes you feel that these new powers have no occasion to play.

Add Seasonal Stories To It In A Timely Manner

As a huge system for storing your old characters, it may not be realistic to add new mechanisms to Eternal Realm frequently, but it should not be difficult to incorporate the main story of the season that has ended into it-in fact, Diablo Immortal did this.

Whether Diablo 4 wants to attract new players or retain old players, it should consider incorporating the main story of the previous season into Eternal Realm in a timely manner after the end of the previous season, even if it is just to watch the plot. Or the game can also add or retain some simple quest lines that can provide small rewards.

This way, regardless of whether players are familiar with Diablo 4 before, they can enter Eternal Realm to relive the entire main story after completing the seasonal content and enjoy the benefits of the new quests. In fact, this will also make the story timeline of the game world more coherent and have a sense of narrative integrity, and give every player the opportunity to experience the story of any character.

Gradually Losing The Challenge Of The Endgame

Although appropriately reducing the difficulty is conducive to attracting more players, as an ARPG, if Diablo 4 blindly reduces the challenge of the endgame, it may prevent you from enjoying the joy of victory, and eventually lose the desire to challenge, and even give up the game.

For example, in the latest Season 7, although the new witchcraft power and unique items are interesting and powerful, the lack of high-difficulty endgame content undoubtedly makes everything meaningless. In addition, the drop of loot has become easier, thereby pressing the accelerator for the entire Season 7 progress, making it impossible for you to really enjoy the fun of the game. Therefore, Diablo 4 should really improve this problem in subsequent seasons.

Despite the above shortcomings, this does not mean that Diablo 4 is not a good game. In fact, it has been committed to solving problems in order to provide you with a better gaming experience. I hope it can get better!