In addition to the seasonal mechanics and powers that are new to you, each season of Diablo 4 will upgrade and adjust some of the inherent mechanics when it goes online to ensure that these contents can adapt to the changes in the game, to ensure your basic game experience.
But it is difficult to satisfy everyone, and the ideas of developers may not always be correct, so some adjustments may not be welcomed and recognized by you in the end. For this reason, players usually criticize and reflect these “meaningless” changes in the game community or other social media, hoping that Diablo 4 can make relevant changes.
However, not every time Diablo 4 will actively respond to your demands. For example, in the recent 2.2.0 PTR for Season 8, the reduction in the drop rate of boss loot has been widely discussed, and no developer has yet said that this practice will be cancelled; and the long-standing problem of the weakening of the presence of Nightmare dungeons in Diablo 4 has existed since Season 6 and has not been resolved yet. Therefore, this time we will focus on these two issues and analyze what the next steps of Diablo 4 may take in the future.
2.2.0 PTR Reduces The Drop Rate Of Boss Loot
The PTR was launched on March 11 for a week and is now coming to an end. Like most of the PTRs launched for the new season of Diablo 4 in the past, the 2.2.0 PTR shows you the various new seasonal mechanisms that will be launched in the eighth season in the future, as well as some adjustments to the inherent game mechanisms.
Although the new seasonal power-boss power, and the return of the classic boss Belial from Diablo 3 have been well received and expected, other adjustments may not satisfy you. Along with the changes in the boss-related mechanisms, the corresponding loot system has also been changed in the PTR, that is, the loot drop rate has been greatly reduced.
Regarding the issue of loot drop rates, the fact is that you may never agree with the developers: you should always want to get as much Diablo 4 Gold as possible through combat, and the developers may be very stingy with the loot in order to force you to extend the game time or make you have to activate the premium battle pass.
That is why you will unfortunately find that Season 8 is expected to slow down your game progress by changing the loot system, but on the other hand, this behavior is actually a response to the previous players’ perception of the endgame’s difficult reduction. That is why Diablo 4 thinks this approach is absolutely reasonable.
According to the performance of the PTR, if no other adjustments are made later, after Season 8, it is expected that the drop rate of legendary items will be reduced before you upgrade to level 60, and the drop rate of ancestral legendary items will be even lower (even if they are already rare). To make matters worse, the boss system, which has been extensively reworked in Season 8, has even nerfed the chances of loot dropping for you by more than 91% - Torment 4’s drop rate has dropped by 91.7%.
In the past, when you were farming bosses in Diablo 4, you could get six unique items from the corresponding loot pool each time you defeated a boss. However, starting in Season 8, not only will you only get five unique items in total, but besides two of them being guaranteed to come from the boss, the other three are random, so after working hard to complete the boss battle, you are more likely to get some garbage items.
In addition, if you think that team battles can alleviate this, you are wrong. According to the performance of the 2.2.0 PTR, you can see that the loot drop rate in the four-player cooperative mode has even become worse! You and your three teammates may have received a total of 24 unique items from four kills in the past. Now each group is only guaranteed two.
Nightmare Dungeons Should “Go Back To The Past”
Nightmare dungeons used to play an integral role in the endgame content of the game, providing more challenging built-in quests where you could get higher-level loot, more Diablo 4 Gold and XP, and upgrade glyphs. However, somehow, starting with Season 6, the place to upgrade glyphs became The Pit, and Nightmare dungeons were further reduced to an area where only late-game materials could be cultivated.
At the beginning of the launch of Season 6, some players expressed dissatisfaction and concerns about this change. However, now that Season 7 is about to pass the halfway point, this situation has not changed, and even the item drop rate in the new seasonal dungeon Rootholds has been criticized.
In fact, you may have discovered that this change to Nightmare dungeon is one of Diablo 4’s attempts to explore how to upgrade the endgame content, and on the other hand, it is to make you focus more on The Pit. It’s not that The Pit is bad, but The Pit’s system is a timer. Although it can cater to faster character construction, paying too much attention to it will inevitably make people feel that it destroys the balance of the game.
Interestingly, some people think that maybe Diablo 4 can try to unify Nightmare dungeon and The Pit to form a new dungeon with both hordes of demons and a final boss, fully guaranteeing all your related item farming needs. Although I don’t know how the game developers view this suggestion, it is an indisputable fact that Nightmare dungeon is in urgent need of adjustment.
I believe you will find that whether it is the change in the boss loot drop rate or the content related to Nightmare dungeon, it is actually one way that Diablo 4 tries to fully upgrade the endgame. After all, players think that the endgame content of Diablo 4 has always been unsatisfactory recently. Although these methods are not all right, it is normal to encounter obstacles in the way forward. At least Diablo 4 is trying to make changes for you, right?
