For Diablo 4, regularly updating seasons is not only to give you a fresher gaming experience, but also to take the opportunity to make the game better by optimizing various aspects of the game mechanics.
Usually about halfway through the current season, the developers of Diablo 4 will hold a campfire chat to summarize the current season progress and give you a preview of the main content of the next season. However, this time the preview of Season 9 seems to come earlier than ever before.
At 11 am on May 22, the official held the latest campfire chat, which was less than a month after the launch of Season 8. Based on this, we will introduce you to the main information announced in this live broadcast to pave the way for your Season 9 experience.
Current Diablo 4 Performance
Although the simultaneous launch of Vessel of Hatred and Season 6 last year amazed you with its rich content and high playability, the new seasons after that have been criticized by players for being too homogeneous, including the ongoing Season 8.
Take this season as an example. The biggest features of boss power and the return of Belial are indeed attractive, but the boss power mechanism itself is actually a variant of the old season power, without substantial innovation, and Belial boss battle does not bring any special mechanism.
And Apparition Incursions event, another major content of the eighth season, actually just forces you to repeat the same battle over and over again, and complete the upgrade and Diablo 4 gold farming by obtaining magic boss power - although this is important, the boring battle is indeed unbearable.
Therefore, it can be seen from the campfire chat that the development team seems to intend to change this situation starting from Season 9, and strive to ensure that you have the opportunity to carry out various activities in the future Diablo 4, rather than being trapped in a specific activity.
What Will PTR 2.3.0 Include?
In Diablo 4, most PTRs are small “new seasons” that allow you to experience the gameplay of the next season in advance in the form of testing, and make corrections and adjustments in time based on your feedback and other players’ feedback, so that the new season will be more perfect when it is officially launched.
The core of this PTR 2.3.0 is Season 9, Sins of the Horadrim. PTR will be officially launched on May 27 and will last until June 3 (about a week like in the past), during which you can experience the new content that is now basically confirmed to appear in Season 9.
Comprehensive Upgrade Of Nightmare Dungeon
As an important source of your gold, XP and basic gear farming in Diablo 4, Nightmare Dungeon is a very important game mechanic. It has been running since the game was launched in 2023, and now it is time to make it better.
First, the dungeon itself will add an advanced mode called Escalating Nightmares, which allows you to challenge three nightmare dungeons in a row, and each dungeon will add new affixes that can increase both difficulty and rewards.
When you complete all the challenges brought by these three dungeons, you will usher in a final boss battle, but the premise is that you have obtained Strongrooms in challenges that require Torment 1 and above, and collected enough Escalating Nightmare Sigil from them to unlock the boss battle.
You may wonder what Strongrooms are, in fact, it comes from another update to Nightmare Dungeons. Season 9 will add a new micro-dungeon called Horadric Strongrooms to Nightmare Dungeons, and the entrance is hidden in Nightmare Dungeon.
Find the entrance and enter, and you can start collecting Horadric ‘attunement’ by killing enemies. This item can increase the number of rewards you get after killing the boss in this dungeon and unlocking its Strongroom.
New Boss Astaroth
This boss, like Belial from Season 8, is a return of an existing Diablo villain (old boss). The value of Astaroth is that when he appeared in the game in the past, his encounters were among the most interesting of all bosses.
In order to avoid the misunderstanding of “old wine in new bottles”, the developers said in the chat that they would not let Astaroth simply integrate into the existing boss ladder directly, but would try to find ways to integrate bosses in different ways to make the main content of the final boss battle more innovative.
Seasonal Power Horadric Spells
Well, Diablo 4 does not seem to intend to abandon the representative mechanism of seasonal power just because of the dissatisfaction of players. To be honest, what you are tired of is not the mechanism itself, but the fact that different powers in different seasons always play the same form in the end in actual battles.
For this reason, the development team said that compared to the boss power or witch power that can be used directly after unlocking, Season 9 Horadric Spells will allow you to customize this power yourself and create your own Horadric Spell in a form similar to build.
Since neither PTR nor Season 9 has been launched yet, it is still impossible to judge the practicality of this mechanism. However, at least from the design concept, it is indeed more creative than the existing seasonal power and worth looking forward to.
In addition to the above three core contents, it is expected that Season 9 will continue to optimize each class on the basis of bringing new content, so that they can ensure it maintains balanced class strength while fitting in with the theme of the new season.
If you are interested in the changes in Season 9, please experience and evaluate it immediately when PTR 2.3.0 is launched. I wish you a happy game!
