On October 16th, Diablo 4 held its Sanctuary Sitdown preview for Season 11 and the associated 2.5.0 PTR, providing a preview of a host of new content and changes expected in the new season and PTR.
While Sanctuary Sitdown didn't include any further details about the second DLC and the 2026 plans as previously predicted, it's clear that Season 11 will feature significantly more changes than previous seasons.
Based on Sanctuary Sitdown and other official information, we'll provide a preview of 2.5.0 PTR content.
When Is 2.5.0 PTR Expected To Launch?
While the release date for Season 11 remains to be determined, we can confirm that 2.5.0 PTR will be available to all PC Battle.net users on October 21st. As is customary with Diablo 4, PTR typically lasts about a week, so it'll likely end around October 28th or 29th.
You can actually infer a possible release date for Season 11 from this, but honestly, that's not the main point right now. Understanding the content in 2.5.0 PTR will help you get started with the new season.
In general, 2.5.0 PTR consists of three main components: a major overhaul of existing core mechanics, the return of previously removed features, and new dungeons and bosses.
Interestingly, most of this content wasn't announced on 2025 content roadmap. Clearly, Diablo 4 intends to utilize Season 11, the season connecting 2025 and 2026, to deliver a surprise at the end of the year.
What Changes Will Be Included?
The changes primarily focus on item upgrades, Renown system, and reworks or optimizations to how potions work. We'll cover each of these.
Tempering And Masterworking
Once you've acquired your ideal gear in Diablo 4, as your abilities increase, you can enhance it to match your character's strength through the specialized systems. These systems are primarily Tempering and Masterworking.
Tempering allows you to add one affix to your gear, but each Tempering session can yield three possible affixes. Unlucky enough to randomly receive a poor affix can actually lower the value of your gear.
Similarly, the results of Masterworking are also tied to luck. This system requires you to consume Diablo 4 gold and other necessary materials to upgrade your gear's existing affixes, but if the desired effect isn't achieved, you need to reset.
This can easily lead to wasting time, effort, game materials, and gold on enhancing your gear, especially with Masterworking, as resetting only returns a small portion of the materials.
However, in 2.5.0 PTR, both systems are undergoing changes, arguably with the sole purpose of improving your experience.
First, Tempering recipes allow you to directly select the specific affix you want, eliminating the need for randomized modifiers and allowing you to change them at will. However, to balance this change, gear can only receive one Tempering affix in total.
Masterworking, on the other hand, will now improve the overall quality of gear, up to level 20. After that, you can continue to roll for a Capstone bonus, upgrading a random non-premium affix to a premium affix.
Building on this, 2.5.0 PTR will also introduce Sanctification, allowing you to select another random buff for gear after completing Tempering and Masterworking. However, after Sanctification, the gear cannot be modified.
Changes To Healing And Defense Mechanics
The changes in defense mechanics are truly revolutionary. By making armor and resistances a rating system, Diablo 4's defensive potions are rendered useless.
In 2.5.0 PTR, equipped armor will reduce damage taken from all types, and the armor and resistance penalties associated with Torment difficulty will be removed. All your defensive attributes will be represented by the new Toughness metric.
Regarding healing, potions will now instantly restore 35% of your total health. This translates to a reduction in the amount of base potions you can carry, but they will recharge faster. Additionally, the stats of all health-boosting affixes will be increased.
Renown System Rework
In most previous Diablo seasons, you earned Renown points by progressing through the season, which in turn led to rewards for progressing through Renown system.
Starting with Season 11, while you will still be able to progress through Renown system in Eternal Realm, it will be merged with Season Journey into a new system, Season Rank, on seasonal servers.
In fact, the changes are minimal functionally, because you'll still need to complete various objectives to earn seasonal rewards, but the merger will clearly streamline these seasonal systems.
What's New Content?
New content expected to be exclusively part of Season 11 will primarily focus on the multi-level dungeon, The Tower, and the new world boss, Azmodan.
The Tower requires you to kill enough enemies within 10 minutes to summon a random boss. Defeating the boss ends the dungeon and stops the timer.
Notably, the leaderboard feature, previously removed from Diablo 4, returns with the release of The Tower. All your Tower dungeon battles will be ranked by class and number of players.
The development team stated that The Tower in Season 11 is more of a pilot, and they will continue to refine and expand the dungeon content based on actual player feedback.
Return Of Capstone Dungeons
In addition to the leaderboard system, Capstone dungeons will also return to Diablo 4 in 2.5.0 PTR. There are five returning dungeons, each with a different recommended challenge level and difficulty, allowing you to choose one based on your ability.
Above is a preview of 2.5.0 PTR highlights. Use this information to prepare for PTR over the next four days!
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