Blizzard is finally turning things around for Diablo 4 with massive overhaul

Diablo 4's third season has been disappointing but the developers have been making it quite clear for months that Season 4 is the one to watch out for, with a bunch of overhauls planned to reinvigorate the game in time for its 1-year anniversary. Last night during a new Campfire Chat, much of this was finally revealed, with developers going into greater detail on new loot and power changes.

Diablo 4 Associate Game Director, Joe Piepiora, gave the rundown on new itemisation and loot changes. The development team has been working on this overhaul for months, with plans to completely change how affixes function, as well as gear crafting.

In its current state, Diablo 4's loot grind is too much and most of the loot tends to be low quality, filling up player's limited inventory space with garbage destined to be dismantled or sold. With Season 4, loot drops will focus more on quality over quantity, and many of the items are being reworked. The developers have also spent some time weeding out useless affixes that nobody likes, designing a smaller pool of more impactful and player-relevant affixes for loot drops to pull from. This will make the process of sorting through gear a simpler process and finding more impactful gear upgrades should be less of a chore.

World Tier 3 players will now only get sacred items and those moving up to World Tier 4 will only see Ancestral items dropping, further cutting down on the amount of junk loot players should encounter. To speed things up in end-game, legendary item drops from killing monsters at level 95 or higher will be guaranteed to have 925 item power.

Improving on the community focus of Diablo 4, players will now also be able to trade legendary items and uniques. This does mean that a black market is likely to form, but it also means less frustrating experiences for friends playing together. There have been many times where I've had items drop that my friends are searching for and vice-versa, with no way to trade. Now, this scenario can be put in the past.

The Codex of Power is also getting an overhaul. From now on, your codex of power will automatically update over time. If you salvage a piece of legendary gear with a more powerful version of an effect from the codex of power, you'll now have access to that more powerful stat roll permanently. This also means less time spent at The Occultist breaking down gear to save powerful affixes in your inventory. Once you have the highest possible rank of a power, the entry in the codex will turn gold.

As for crafting, a new Tempering system is arriving in Season 4 and will allow players to add new affixes to items. In the end-game, Masterworking will be available, allowing you to upgrade your items further by up to 12 ranks, with every four ranks bringing a massive boost to the affixes on an item.

Naturally, there will also be more class changes coming, but we'll be hearing more about those changes closer to the launch of Season 4. Unfortunately, the season will not be starting in mid April has previously planned. To allow extra time for testing, some of which will be public through the PTR, Season 4 will now debut in May.

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KitGuru Says: The Campfire stream yesterday was a big success, with many of the changes players have been asking for being directly shown and commented on. We'll get a public preview of these changes in a couple of weeks, when the first Diablo 4 PTR test goes live.

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