Diablo 3 PTR features Season of Nightmares and new Torment levels, plus more

Patch 2.6.5 will hit the PTR for a week starting on Friday, April 5th. And in that time, we’re going to be getting a lot of changes — including the Season of Nightmares, the upcoming Season 17 for players who enjoy the game’s Seasonal Play. But that’s not all — we’re looking at a host of changes and quality of life adds, including three new Torment levels and an additional 5 stash tabs.

Season 17 will be taking a cue from Season 16’s Season of Grandeur with the Season of Nightmates, which takes the set bonus from the Legacy of Nightmares set — Player’s damage dealt is increased by 750% and damage taken is reduced by 4% for every Ancient Item they have equipped while having no Set Bonuses Active — and applies it to all characters. One assumes that like Season 16, only Seasonal characters will get this bonus applied to them, but it really changes the way you play your characters — the more Ancient Legendaries you have, the more rewarded you’ll be for eschewing your set bonus to war them.

The Season of Nightmares, now with more Torment

It’s a pretty substantial bonus all told — a 750% damage buff and a 4% damage reduction per ancient legendary you have equipped, as long as you don’t have any set bonuses from those items. So you could wear that Ancient Legendary pair of pants from your favorite set, as long as you don’t have enough pieces of that set to give you a set bonus. This really changes some class strategies around — at what point do you have enough Ancient Legendary items to divest yourself of that Wrath of the Wastes set, with its 10,000% bonus Whirlwind Damage, for example?

But that’s not all that’s coming on the 2.6.5 PTR. There are now three new Torment difficulty levels, with Torment 14, Torment 15 and Torment 16 providing even more of a challenge for higher Paragon level players and giving lower level characters more to strive for in the future. Puzzle Rings have long been able to be used in a Kanai’s Cube to send players to the realm of Greed to go on a smash and grab loot spree, but a different result awaits players who use an Ancient or Primal Puzzle Ring in the cube, while there will also be up to five new Stash tabs for all players so those of us who are perennially short on stash space will find some relief.

If you’re interested in helping test out the changes, you can copy one character per region onto the PTR servers in order to make sure that you’ve got a character at max level to test out the changes. After all, if you want to hit Torment 16 you’re going to want your best geared, highest Paragon leveled Wizard or Crusader available to see how it shakes out. For a complete list of bug fixes, quality of life changes, and so on head over to Blizzard’s official Patch 2.6.5 preview post.