News Tag: Diablo 4 Season 9

In any season of Diablo 4, the main task of players is always to quickly level up a new season character to obtain higher-level and quality items and enter the endgame as soon as possible to complete more challenging battles.

Diablo 4 Season 9, Sins of the Horadrim, due to hit the game on July 1, will also introduce big changes to Nightmare Dungeons, new seasonal mechanics, and more lucrative World Tiers that can be unlocked by players who reach the level cap of 60.

With this in mind, this guide will categorize existing classes and corresponding builds into 3 tiers: S/A/B, based on multiple aspects, including initial strength, survivability, area of ​​effect ability, ease of use, and reliance on gear. You can make the right choice depending on your exploration needs and gaming style.

S Tier

1. Necromancer

In the first few seasons of Diablo 4, the power of leveling up Necromancer, who could summon minions to fight, was obvious to everyone, and the developers have not weakened it on a large scale in this new season, so it can still be the best class to quickly pass through the leveling stage.

Among the builds you can choose for Necromancer, the build with Bone Splinters and Corpse Explosion as the core can make you dominate the combat and exploration in the early game.

After reaching the middle and late game, you can use the skills that can summon skeletons to allow you to continuously cast damage to the enemy in a safe combat environment, or use Blood Surge and Blight to obtain better range damage and endurance.

It’s worth noting that the above builds require less gear of higher rarity and quality, so the loot and Diablo 4 Gold you farm from regular exploration should be enough to reach the level cap pretty easily.

Recommended Builds

• Minion Summoner Necromancer: Your minions will help you take the bulk of the enemy’s attacks, while you can just use those corpses for a super effective explosion damage from a distance, which makes it very safe and powerful to finish most fights, perfect for casual players.
• Blood Surge Necromancer: You only need to activate a skill during combat, and you have amazing area damage. On top of that, you have the ability to heal yourself to stay alive.

2. Spiritborn (only in Vessel of Hatred DLC)

Although Diablo 4 has been very aggressive against Spiritborn for two seasons, it still has some excellent leveling builds in Season 9. For example, the high burst damage, long range, and high mobility of builds focusing on Quill Volley or Stinger skills are very suitable for farming a lot of experience points for fast leveling.

Not only that, the skills possessed by Spiritborn are very adaptable, and they can provide you with strong crowd control and survivability after you unlock the first core skill. In addition, the unique Spirit Guardian buff will give you a passive skill, and you only need to invest a small amount of to have a very comprehensive build.

Recommended Builds

• Quill Volley Spiritborn: It can easily clear all enemies and pick up a lot of loot with its super high firing rate barrage. It also has excellent mobility and expansion capabilities.
• Stinger Spiritborn: It lets you dish out deadly damage to enemies at range, especially if you choose the right Spirit Guardian buff for it.

3. Rogue

With high lethality, high attack speed, and high mobility, Rogue has high leveling potential in Diablo 4 Season 9 as well. Not only that, Rogue has many build options to meet the needs of different players.

For example, Twisting Blades and Flurry are more suitable for challenging some single enemies; Barrage is very effective in long-range against some group enemies; and players with prime requirements for mobility can choose Dash and Shadow Step as the core of the build.

However, since its skill rotation requires players to have high dynamic capture ability and temporary adaptability, it is slightly inferior to the first two classes.

Recommended Builds

• Dance Of Knives Rogue: It allows you to use the synergy of Poison and Shadow to kill monsters easily and quickly, so that you can pick up more experience points in a short time.
• Barrage Rogue: It has a very wide range of damage and reliable damage ability, and is one of the best long-range builds you can choose.

A Tier

1. Barbarian

While Barbarian isn’t as fast at leveling as S tier options, it can still give you an edge in certain combat situations. For example, Upheaval lets you deal massive area damage and has powerful synergies with Warcry skills like Rallying Cry.

Not only that, a Barbarian build focused on Double Swing and Hammer of the Ancients gives you very impressive survivability and damage against some single-target bosses. In addition, you can add Weapon Expertise to it to make it even more powerful.

Recommended Build

• Upheaval Barbarian: Each of your attacks has super high crit potential and super wide-area damage, making it a splendid choice for melee players.

2. Sorcerer

Although both are spell-casting classes, Sorcerer’s fast leveling ability is far inferior to Necromancer’s. This is because you are often limited by the mana shortage when using this type of character.

So if you want to rely on Sorcerer builds that can cast different elemental damage to level up, you may need to spend more Diablo 4 Gold on it to keep your mana in a stable and safe range.

Such a build equipped with skills such as Chain Lightning or Fireball can provide you with continuous damage and area control capabilities, which is important for farming a lot of loot and experience in the early and mid-term.

Recommended Builds

• Chain Lightning Sorcerer: With its high maximum damage potential and ability to auto-target enemies, it’s a great pick for players new to Diablo 4.
• Incinerate Sorcerer: It can clear groups of enemies with high fire damage, making it great for use in dungeons, Infernal Hordes, and Helltides.
• Firewall Sorcerer: In addition to its high damage potential, it can also make enemies with high mobility easier to defeat in controlled areas.

B Tier - Druid

The last and least suitable class for fast leveling is Druid. Although its Pulverize and Shred skills have strong damage capabilities, these skills have extremely long cooldowns and very complicated upgrade paths in the early game.

And the companion skill Landslide can only play enough fast clearing potential with Earth skills, but it requires you to unlock Legendary Aspects, which are very difficult to farm, before you can use it. So this also leads to it not having an optimal leveling build in Diablo 4 Season 9.

These are the best classes and builds for fast leveling in Diablo 4 Season 9 Sins of the Horadrim. We will continue to monitor the best builds for passive skills, gear, and the latest Horadric spells, and will announce them when the new season begins. We wish you all a great game!

Dissatisfaction with the content of Diablo 4 has actually been present in the game community since Season 6, and the second DLC release postponed to 2026 will make you want to see more changes in the theme game.

According to 2.3.0 PTR and other information, Season 9 will meet you on July 1st and will bring new seasonal powers, dungeons and bosses. Although these contents are new, the mechanisms they rely on are actually the same old ones.

This will inevitably make you pay attention to the game mechanisms other than the playable content. After all, their optimization can also improve your Diablo 4 experience from another aspect, such as the auction house that some people have wanted to experience since Season 8.

What Is The Auction House?

In fact, most ARPGs have similar functions. For Diablo 4, if it has this function, its role should mainly provide you with a channel to sell excess items to earn Diablo 4 gold, or to exchange unique items that you find difficult to farm with other players.

Why Do You Want To Add This Feature In S9?

The auction house was added to Diablo 2 and 3 in the same series. It has to be said that this provided a lot of convenience for players at the beginning.

Because for low- and medium-level players, earning gold is much easier than farming high-level items, but these items are essential for challenging the endgame, and the auction house can make it easier for them to get the items they want.

Since Season 7, Diablo 4’s loot drop rate has been criticized. You will find that the drop rate of many key items is always very low. Although the development team has made adjustments later, it is hard not to feel that it is just a superficial effort.

Therefore, if the new playable content can no longer arouse more interest, if Season 9 adds an auction house, it will definitely make it easier for you to complete the new season challenge and re-stimulate your motivation and interest in playing Diablo 4.

Why Do Some People Oppose It?

Although no game feature can satisfy everyone, the fact that the auction house was eventually removed from Diablo 2 and 3 shows that its problems can no longer be solved by simply fixing it.

After the initial craze, you will soon find that this convenience will cause more serious problems. Players will become more and more dependent on the auction house and lazy to farm items on their own, resulting in the normal gameplay being ignored and the participation of the game will decline.

More importantly, the auction house in Diablo series allows RMT. This not only promotes the proliferation of transactions and greatly undermines the balance of the game, but also leads to more security issues unrelated to the game, such as fraud or reselling.

In addition, the lack of content and aggressive monetization practices shown by Diablo 4 during Season 8 Berserk collaboration will also disappoint you, so that it is difficult to expect improvements in the game in terms of “trading”.

Based on this “lesson”, it is normal that some players do not want Diablo 4 Season 9 to change through the auction house. But this problem is not incurable.

How To Make Auction House Better?

If the auction house in the same series is a lesson of failure, then Diablo 4 can also try to learn similar functions of other successful ARPG operations. After all, no one stipulates that all Diablo games must adopt the same set of mechanisms.

Take Last Epoch as an example. The game launched Season 2 in April this year and competed fiercely with Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2 in a short period of time.

First of all, the transactions of Last Epoch auction house are completely based on gold in the game. In this way, on the one hand, it can minimize malicious transactions (after all, the value of game gold itself is not very high), and on the other hand, gold farming is also based on game content, so as not to cause the game itself to be ignored.

In addition, no matter what items you exchange with others in Last Epoch auction house, you can only trade once. Although this seems a bit rigid, it can also effectively prevent resale.

Therefore, if Diablo 4 will not make major innovations or changes to the game mechanism in the next few seasons, it can completely learn from the successful experience of other games and transform the auction house and add it to the game.

Auction House In D4S9

Based on the new seasonal content of this season and the new dungeons Nightmare Dungeon Escalation and Horadric Strongrooms, several important items have also been derived, such as various Horadric Jewels and Escalation Sigil that are essential for opening dungeons.

Therefore, if Season 9 wants to add the auction house function later, these key items can be used as goods, allowing you to exchange the items by special seasonal currencies, which can be obtained by consuming Diablo 4 gold.

In this way, a trading chain based entirely on the game itself can be formed in the game, making it as convenient as possible for you to experience the new season without affecting the game participation.

In short, no matter what the previous Diablo auction house was like, it can be improved through transformation and play a reliable role in Diablo 4, rather than completely denying it because of past mistakes.

Even the most experienced Diablo 4 players can hardly guarantee that they will not make any mistakes in the game since the first season - of course, this refers to mistakes that can be ignored, not the kind of behavior that is so obvious that it will ruin everything.

In a few weeks, Diablo 4 will officially launch Season 9 on July 1, which also marks the end of Season 8 and the two-year anniversary event. It’s too late to save your mediocre Season 8 from now, but for Season 9, everything has not yet begun.

Based on this, we will point out several wrong decisions that you may still make even in Season 9 to avoid wasting the gameplay value of the new gameplay provided by the new season.

Improper Difficulty Selection

As you know, Diablo 4 has a clearly graded difficulty system, including Standard difficulty and Torment difficulty. Both difficulties have 4 levels and different unlocking conditions. They are:

Standard Difficulty

• Normal: Unlocked by Default
• Hard: Unlocked by Default
• Expert: Complete the Prologue
• Penitent: Reach Level 50

Torment Difficulty

• Torment I: Complete Pit Tier 20 (-250 Armor and -25% All Resist)
• Torment II: Complete Pit Tier 35 (-500 Armor and -50% All Resist)
• Torment III: Complete Pit Tier 50 (-750 Armor and -75% All Resist)
• Torment IV: Complete Pit Tier 65 (-1000 Armor and -100% All Resist)

Not only do the difficulty levels increase in challenge in the order above, but the amount, chance, and rarity of Diablo 4 gold, XP, and gear you can get after completing battles of the corresponding difficulty will also increase.

As a result, you may rush to challenge the new difficulty level just after unlocking it because you are eager to accumulate loot. This may lead to two results:

• 1. The strength does not match the difficulty level and is killed by the enemy, resulting in losses.
• 2. The victory is achieved, but it takes too much time, and the overall efficiency is not as good as completing the level with lower difficulty.

Or there is another possibility, that is, you are too cautious after considering the above situation, and stay in the low difficulty for too long, which delays the character growth process and the opportunity to earn rare items faster.

Therefore, you need to arrange the timing of entering the next difficulty reasonably on the premise of fully understanding your own abilities and the conditions of each difficulty level.

Usually, you will reach level 50 after completing the campaign. At this time, don’t rush to enter Penitent, but fully farm all available resources at Expert difficulty to complete Penitent more safely, and this strategy also applies to the subsequent Torment difficulty.

Lack Of Flexibility In Skill Selection & Rotation

Admittedly, when dealing with those small soldiers or low-level bosses, you can directly turn on automatic combat or press a few keys corresponding to common skills to quickly complete the battle. But it’s hard to say whether this will make you dependent.

For example, Sorcerer may ignore Ice Armor because of Fireball, and overcasting Rapid Fire will cause Rogue to miss the combat effect of Rain of Vengeance - no single skill is always reliable.

In addition, automatic combat is not completely intelligent. At least from the perspective of boss mechanism, especially those high-level bosses, they require you to develop more flexible skill selection and rotation strategies on your own, and improvise in battle to be defeated.

In fact, flexible combat strategies can not only help you win faster and more safely, but also save lives and resources so that you can gain an advantage in long battles.

Improper Exploration Progress Of The Pit

The principle of this misunderstanding is actually the same as the difficulty selection. As a special Diablo 4 endgame dungeon, The Pit has a total of 150 levels, and the difficulty and loot quality are gradually increasing.

If you are a player who makes mistakes in choosing the game difficulty and no one corrects you, then you are likely to make the same mistakes when exploring The Pit.

In addition, based on properly arranging the exploration route of The Pit, to improve the efficiency of clearing, you can focus on concentrated enemy clusters and use glyph bonuses to increase combat speed or item drop probability.

Blindly Equip Rare Gear

Although in general, the higher the level or rarity of gear, the better, you cannot stack rare gear on your character indiscriminately. Each gear has its own characteristics, suitable for different classes, builds and combat styles, and some have significant resistance to specific bosses.

Therefore, the choice and equipment of gear requires you to make reasonable arrangements after fully considering the above factors. Sometimes it is more important to suit you than whether the gear is rare.

Ignore The Plot And Cutscenes

Perhaps you will choose to skip all narrative plots and Cutscenes when completing the prologue or campaign of Diablo 4 because you are eager to farm gold and XP, but to be honest, this has almost no benefit except saving time.

For any MMORPG with a complete story, the details and foreshadowing in the plot development are actually likely to have certain inspirations for you to complete the difficult content, which can improve your efficiency in completing related battles.

From a literary and aesthetic point of view, these plots also echo the aesthetic style of the game. Watching them will allow you to more personally experience the formation of the background and the changes in the character’s personality in Diablo 4, and even the stories of various regions.

Of course, it does not mean that avoiding the above misunderstandings will make your Diablo 4 Season 9 journey smooth, but it will definitely be better than not knowing this information! In any case, your core task after entering the new season is always to strengthen your character.

Although 2.3.0 PTR has ended, it is certain that all the new content that will be launched in Diablo 4 Season 9 must include two new dungeons, namely Escalating Nightmares and Horadric Strongrooms.

Among them, Escalating Nightmares can be regarded as an upgraded version of Nightmare Dungeon, one of the inherent Diablo 4 dungeons, while Horadric Strongrooms is a seasonal dungeon launched specifically for Season 9, just like S7’s Rootholds.

However, although these two new dungeons do not completely belong to the same system, they can not only all bring you a lot of Diablo 4 gold to farm, but also have connections with each other. Next, we will introduce them to you one by one.

What Are Escalating Nightmares?

As a new endgame event, this new dungeon actually connects 3 separate traditional Nightmare Dungeons in series, providing you with the opportunity to get more rewards by expanding the difficulty and scope of exploration.

How To Enter?

To enter Escalating Nightmares, you first need to obtain Escalation Sigils that unlock the first dungeon, and the second two dungeons require you to carry the affix of the previous dungeon to enter.

After you obtain Escalation Sigils, it will tell you which Escalating Nightmares dungeon you should enter first, and show you all the negative and positive affixes you will encounter.

Because just like the normal Nightmare Dungeons, all three dungeons in Escalating Nightmares have their own positive and negative dungeon affixes, and the affixes you have will stack as you progress through the clearing process.

Later, when you defeat the final boss to complete the current dungeon, a special pillar will appear on the screen, which will teleport you to the next dungeon in Escalating Nightmares.

How To Complete?

As you know, Escalating Nightmares is actually a combined advanced version of the regular nightmare dungeons, so the specific gameplay differences are not very big.

In general, you will still trigger random events or encounter various bosses in Escalating Nightmares, and defeating them will get rewards, including gear of varying quality, gold, and Obols.

How To Get Escalation Sigils?

As the key item to unlock Escalating Nightmares, the acquisition of Escalation Sigils is actually related to another new dungeon in Season 9, Horadric Strongrooms.

In fact, this is why we say that there is a connection between Escalating Nightmares and Horadric Strongrooms. You can only get this item by completing Strongrooms in Torment difficulty and opening Horadric caches.

What Is Horadric Strongroom?

As a Season 9 limited dungeon, Horadric Strongrooms is actually a small treasure room hidden in Escalating Nightmares and ordinary nightmare dungeons, bringing you new rewards and fun with additional adventures.

How To Enter?

Since the entrances to Strongrooms are randomly hidden in Escalating Nightmares and normal Nightmares, and Strongrooms must be completed to open the former, the first thing you need to do is to collect Nightmare Sigils to enter Nightmare Dungeon.

You can then utilize Wayfinder to look out for unique sounds and flashes while exploring Nightmare Dungeon, and where they are located will be Horadric Gateways.

Although the appearance of gateways is random, you can increase the probability of them appearing in other ways, including:

• Choosing a higher difficulty: The higher the difficulty of your game, the greater the chance of encountering a gateway.
• Clearing the entire dungeon: You will always encounter several gateways after searching the entire Nightmare Dungeon.
• Upgrading Wayfinder: This can be done with Season 9 exclusive currency Horadric Phials. After upgrading, Wayfinder will locate the gateway faster and more accurately.
• Farm Nightmare Sigils with the “guaranteed Horadric Strongroom” affix: This affix guarantees that Strongrooms will appear in the corresponding location.

How To Play?

After activating the gateway, you will encounter a wave of ambushed enemies. Kill them to open the gateway and enter the dungeon. Next, you need to activate Horadric Artifact Pillar and kill the enemies that appear to complete the initial ritual. Then continue to interact with the pillar to change the conditions of the final rituals.

Next, please kill new enemies according to the requirements of these conditions to summon the final boss of the current Horadric Strongroom. After killing it and confirming that all enemies in the dungeon have been cleared, the new gateway will take you back to where you were before entering Strongroom.

It is worth noting that the higher the game difficulty when entering Strongroom, the more artifact pillars you need to choose. Some of these pillars will provide buffs, while others will increase rewards and bring additional dangers due to the corruption caused by the boss Astaroth.

What Rewards Are There?

After completing Horadric Strongrooms, the first thing you get is Horadric Attunement and a cache. You can think of the former as a kind of points, because the number of rewards you get after opening the cache depends on your Attunement.

In addition to regular rewards and Escalation Sigils, if your Attunement count exceeds 2000, you may also get a rare elixir through cache.

The above is the connection between the two new dungeons in Season 9 and their respective gameplay. I hope it will be helpful for your future battles in the new season!

Unknowingly, Diablo 4 has accompanied you for two years through 8 seasons. Although it has not always performed well, at least it has brought you a good Sanctuary adventure time. Now the second anniversary will come with Season 9.

Diablo 4 officially launched on June 5, 2023, and the currently confirmed release time of Season 9 is July 1 this year (PTR will end on June 3). Therefore, the two-year anniversary celebration event should actually be held at the end of Season 8.

But to be honest, as the opening work of the third year, even if the ninth season cannot participate in the two-year anniversary celebration itself, it should launch more innovative gameplay besides the content shown in the PTR before the official launch to show that the game itself still has development potential.

Based on this, we will introduce you to the events that may be held on the second anniversary, and what additional content we hope Season 9 can bring.

Known 2nd Anniversary Celebration Content

In June 2024, to commemorate the first anniversary of the game, from June 6 to June 20, Diablo 4 brought a series of celebration events including Treasure Goblin, Mother’s Blessing and more. You can get free cosmetic props and Diablo 4 gold and XP bonus opportunities by playing these content.

Although the celebration method this year has not been fully announced and may change, one thing remains unchanged, that is, everything should be based on providing rewards for you! And this year’s reward method is likely to be Reliquary.

It is expected that this celebration event will provide you with a free Reliquary, which may be a combination of a large amount of gold, new cosmetics, new theme rewards, etc. - after all, the anniversary reward cannot be set too single and simple.

What Is Reliquary?

This mechanism is a new form of battle pass launched in Season 8, divided into battle pass Reliquaries and event Reliquaries. The former is related to the daily progress of the game, while the latter is set for special events, such as the upcoming two-year anniversary celebration.

Compared with the previous battle pass, the biggest advantage of Reliquary is that you can decide the priority of obtaining rewards according to your own wishes, rather than in a fixed order. In this way, you can arrange the game progress exploration by yourself.

To be honest, although the mechanism itself is very good, it was complained by players for being too scarce when it was applied in Season 8. It seems that Diablo 4 completely regards it as a profit tool rather than a welfare mechanism.

Based on this, Reliquary provided through the anniversary celebration this time should be the product of the game after learning lessons, so both the quantity and quality of rewards should be better.

What Other Celebration Events Should Be Brought?

Rewards are one aspect, and the way to provide rewards is actually very important! It is fun to get free rewards directly, but it will be more fulfilling to earn rewards through your own efforts. Therefore, in addition to Reliquary, adding new tasks and gameplay should also be good.

To this end, the game can learn from last year’s practice and re-launch the classic Diablo 4 event Treasure Goblin, and get corresponding rewards by hunting these special creatures. In fact, this event was also held in March this year, and the response was still good.

In the past two seasons, Diablo 4 has been considered lacking innovation. Even the highly anticipated Berserk cooperation event was ultimately just another inducement to consumption. Therefore, the game can completely utilize this celebration to combine rewards with new gameplay to change its reputation.

How Should Season 9 Perform?

Although the two-year anniversary celebration should end before the launch of the season, it would be a bit ridiculous if the celebration performed better than the new season.

According to 2.3.0 PTR, the known highlights of Season 9 include the new boss Astaroth, the new power Horadric Spells (and a series of related mechanisms), as well as the update of the nightmare dungeon and the addition of Horadric Strongrooms dungeon.

Among them, the new Escalating Nightmares, as a new endgame dungeon, is actually a chain dungeon consisting of three nightmare dungeons. Each individual dungeon has stackable affixes, and the difficulty of the dungeon will increase as you explore deeper.

New Skill Effects Worth Keeping

Season 9 seasonal power Horadric Spells actually allow you to combine Catalysts, Infusions, and Arcana, three abilities that each have multiple types of power, to craft the combat power that best suits you.

No matter what specific power is utilized, the ultimate goal is to kill or weaken the enemy, but in 2.3.0 PTR, you will find that if you utilize Propulsion as a Catalyst, the large-scale explosion effect it produces can be combined with Floaty Bobble Arcana to form a special teleportation effect in the arena.

On this basis, if you further combine it with Bloody Charm Arcana, you can also kill enemies with less than 20% health in the explosion and reset the skill. In other words, as long as there are enemies nearby that will be killed by the explosion, you can achieve permanent teleportation in this way!

In order to accumulate key resources such as gold and XP, you need to actively farm various dungeons after the start of Season 9, and the teleportation effect provided by this series of Horadric Spells will greatly improve your combat efficiency because your speed and accuracy have been improved.

Although Diablo 4 is always used to cancel or weaken such accidental events in the PTR in the official season, this function is completely worth retaining. Because it does not destroy the game balance too much, and also provides game fun for players.

In short, whether it is a new season or a new celebration, it is worth looking forward to. Fortunately, they are not far away!

2.3.0 PTR is in full swing! You can use it to experience and test all the new content you want to experience in the future Diablo 4 Season 9, including finding and utilizing more different builds for each class.

Normally, the strength of all Diablo 4 classes should not differ much to ensure the balance of the game, but due to changes in the mechanism, it is not ruled out that some classes are more suitable for utilizing the new power of the current season-then these classes become the first choice to experience the new season.

Judging from the performance in the current PTR, although Horadric Spells are not exactly the same as the witchcraft power of Season 7, all of them seem to be very suitable for Sorcerer. Going further, you will find that this kind of “mysterious” seasonal power is very compatible with Hydra skills of Sorcerer.

Based on this, we will introduce you how to craft Hydra-centric S9 builds so that you can complete more battles as a Sorcerer as soon as possible in the PTR and the official ninth season.

Hydra Skill Overview

To understand how Hydra builds work, you must first understand the key skill Hydra. In Sorcerer’s entire skill tree, Hydra is an active skill and part of the conjuration cluster. It can be upgraded to a maximum of 5 levels to deal more damage.

More specifically, this skill allows you to summon a three-headed Hydra in combat, which will damage enemies within range by breathing fire for the next 12 seconds. This attack feature makes this skill can help you to get more Diablo 4 gold drops in small dungeons at one time, but you can only summon one Hydra at a time.

In addition to upgrading, Hydra can also be further enhanced like most active skills. Its enhanced versions include:

• Enhanced Hydra
• Invoked Hydra
• Summoned Hydra

How Should Hydra Builds Be Crafted?

Usually, the first step in crafting new builds is to determine the other available skills besides the core skills. As you can see, in addition to the summoning characteristics, Hydra essentially outputs fire damage, so other active skills that match it are also mainly of this type.

Skill Selection

As one of the important active skills, Fire Bolt will automatically fire flaming arrows in battle to cause burning damage to the enemy. With Hydra, you will set off a fire war in Season 9! In addition, you can continue to stack Lightning Spear to output lightning damage at the same time.

On this basis, the passive skill selection recommends Devastation, which can provide you with damage reduction and barrier effects, allowing you to output stable damage while ensuring that your own health is less damaged.

The combination of the above skills will eventually bring you a lot of barrier and buff effects, as well as 60% summon damage, 60% movement speed and 120% mana recovery bonus - this is enough to solve most Diablo 4 Season 9 battles.

If you still have spare energy, you can continue to add Ice Shards to the build. Although it brings another type of damage, it can also effectively weaken the enemy and provide additional attack speed, allowing you to complete the battle faster.

Gear Selection

Good and appropriate gear can amplify the effect of your skills while ensuring your survivability. For Hydra builds, the preferred helm is Harlequin Crest or Heir of Perdition, which can bring you considerable damage bonus.

Since you can directly obtain all Mythic Uniques in the PTR to facilitate your testing of various gear and the effects of new powers, in order to maximize the strength of Hydra builds, you can give priority to gear that can increase your resource generation and resistance, movement speed, and defensive attributes.

In this way, after sufficient testing through the PTR, you can conduct unique item farming more targetedly when entering Season 9, to get ahead in the new season with higher efficiency.

What Needs To Be Added To Season 9 Hydra Builds?

In addition to other skills, Hydra can also work with new power Horadric Spells to further improve the efficiency of related builds, and the short cooldown of Hydra will play an important role.

Among all Horadric Spells, Reactive Ooze can provide you with reliable resource generation, allowing you to gain 5% of your maximum resource generation per second for the next 10 seconds, Frigid Heart can cause freeze damage to enemies, and then run Volatile Crystal to make your Catalyst Horadric Spells deal more damage.

It is worth noting that after completing Horadric Spells matching, you can also earn Horadric Jewels to attach to these seasonal powers to provide them with richer effects. However, please note that not all Horadric Jewels have positive effects.

But if you want to get these jewels, you need to obtain Horadric Tomes in Horadric Strongrooms in Torment 1+ difficulties in advance (teaching you how to make Horadric Jewels) and farm enough materials to craft them.

The above are the main ideas for craft Hydra builds in 2.3.0 PTR and later Season 9. I hope it helps improve your Diablo 4 experience!

Although the operation methods are similar, the names and specific functions of the seasonal powers of each Diablo 4 season are different. In order to quickly master them at the beginning of the new season, it is best to understand them in advance.

In fact, for several seasons, Diablo 4 has been criticized for being too homogeneous in seasonal power and lacking real innovation, so that the specific game experience has also declined. Therefore, Season 9 seems to intend to make changes to this.

According to the campfire chat held on May 22, it can be known that 2.3.0 PTR will be launched on May 27 to show you some of the main contents of Season 9 in the form of testing. Next, we will show you the relevant content of Season 9 seasonal power based on this.

What Are Horadric Spells?

You can call Season 9 seasonal power Horadric power like Season 7 witchcraft power or Season 8 boss power, but this power actually works by fusing three elements to allow you to output more spells.

The three elements are Catalysts, Infusions, and Arcana, each of which has its own purpose and contains multiple specific content with different powers, which we will introduce one by one.

1. Catalysts

Catalysts are the basis and main source of damage for your final customized Horadric Spells, and need to be activated through specific action bar skills - different skills correspond to different Horadric Spells slots.

This component can be upgraded, with level 20 being the highest level, and they will gain additional bonuses when you upgrade your Catalysts to level 10. All 5 Catalysts and their functions are as follows:

• Astral Pillar - Astral Magic: Form an aether pillar that taunts enemies for 3 seconds, after which a piercing wave emerges from it to deal substantial damage to enemies until you create another aether pillar or get far enough away from them.
• Celestial Surge - Astral Magic: Awaken an Oracular Rune that creates a special area, and all nearby enemies are pulled into the area. A torrent of stars will then strike the area 20 times at random, dealing damage each time.
• Cosmic Anomaly - Astral Magic: Manifest up to 5 anomalies that emit particles that damage enemies over 4 seconds.
• Disintegrate - Arcane Magic: Form an arcane conductor and fire a continuous beam between you and it, dealing steady lightning damage over 8 seconds.
• Propulsion - Arcane Magic: Creates a blast of mana that deals damage and knocks back all enemies. Enemies hit by the collision will also take another hit.

2. Infusions

Catalysts are already quite helpful, but if you want to further improve your Diablo 4 gold farming efficiency with Horadric Spells in Season 9, you’ll need to continue to fuse the power of Infusions.

Infusions provide additional power and magic to existing Catalysts, and determine their damage type. Unlike Catalysts, Infusions gain a bonus when they reach level 5, allowing your Catalyst to remove special effects possessed by the enemy.

• Corrosive Vapor - Poison or Poisoning damage
• Glacial Nimbus - Cold or Frostbiting damage
• Nebulous Extract - Shadow or Corrupting damage
• Smoldering Ember - Fire or Burning damage
• Thunderous Particle - Lightning or Sparking damage

3. Arcana

You can think of Arcana as a positive modifier that further improves Catalysts, including magic, rare, and legendary levels (I don’t know if it reminds you of boss power). Arcana can make your Horadric Spells more powerful by synergizing with Horadric Jewels that will be introduced to you later.

Magic Arcana:

• Bottled Wind
• Invigorating Helix
• Jagged Bramble
• Luminous Gem
• Murky Essence
• Reactive Ooze
• Shifting Powder
• Tendrilous Bundle
• Tranquil Stone
• Volatile Crystal

Rare Arcana:

• Fractured Core
• Gleaming Conduit
• Potent Alloy
• Sapping Crux
• Siphoning Gizmo

Legendary Arcana:

• Bloody Charm: Grants your Catalysts a special execution against non-boss enemies at or below 10% health, +2% per level.
• Floaty Bobble: Grants Catalysts a flickering effect that allows you to be unhindered for 2.0 seconds, +0.4 seconds per level.
• Frigid Heart: Grants Catalysts a freeze effect that lasts 3.0 seconds, +0.4 seconds per level.
• Nightmare Orb: Grants Catalysts a fear effect that lasts 4.0 seconds, +0.4 seconds per level.
• Pressurized Steam: Grants Catalysts a stun effect that lasts 1.0 seconds, +0.4 seconds per level.

What Are Horadric Jewels?

As we have already mentioned, Horadric Jewels can bring you more additional effects by combining with Arcana. However, first, these effects may contain negative effects; second, they cannot be farmed through combat and can only be crafted at Wayfinders.

Before crafting, you need to complete Horadric Strongrooms at Torment 1 and above to obtain Horadric Tomes, which can teach you how to craft Horadric Jewels.

In addition, crafting Horadric Jewels also requires Horadric Phials and gem fragments, and after crafting, they can only be embedded in jewelry. All craftable Horadric Jewels are expected to include:

• Seal of Control
• Seal of Power
• Seal of Denial
• Horadric Crest
• Reverie Horn
• Scornful Light
• Tyrant Bane
• Liminal Echo
• Idol From Below
• Myriad Stone
• Spark of Creation
• Luminate Eye
• Brilliant Sigil
• Elemental Brand
• The Starflux

As a source of Horadric Tomes, Horadric Strongrooms is a seasonal dungeon that will be added to the game in Season 9, similar to Rootholds in Season 7, and its random entrance can be found in the nightmare dungeon. Besides Horadric Tomes, it should also drop gold, XP, and more rewards.

The above is all the information introduced to you this time. You can fully test them in 2.3.0 PTR under the guidance to welcome the subsequent Season 9. I wish you a happy game!