Waiting for Season 24? Here are a few things to do between Diablo 3 Seasons

If you play Diablo 3 as primarily a Seasonal player, you may not really think very much about the game between Seasons. You spend most of your time leveling your next character to 70 and going through the Season journey over again, after all. You may view the period of time between Seasons as a bit of an off-period. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that — taking some time off to play other games, read a book, or catch up on all those episodes of whatever your latest streaming obsession is a good idea.

Season 24 starts on July 23, so you have a bit of downtime to deal with before you can start collecting Season-specific Ethereal gear. But if you’re feeling like you want more Diablo during that lull between Seasons, you can absolutely play the game. In fact, Diablo 3 has a plethora of options for you, the usually Seasonal player, if you’re interested in tooling around Sanctuary between Seasons.

Get prepped for the next Season

For starters, the character you’ve been playing this Season was just converted to a non-Season character. All of their stuff from the Season bank has been mailed to you on your normal characters, and even if you have a fully expanded bank on your regular characters you’ll likely have to go through your mail and scrutinize the legendaries, item sets, legendary gems and so on that you collected during the Season. There will be duplicate items you’ll need to decide what to do with, whether they’re to be kept, salvaged, or even just vendored for gold. I often find myself with a lot of gems to figure out after a Season, which may mean many trips to Covetous Shen or to Kanai’s Cube for certain Legendary Gems.

If you’re planning on using the Rebirth system, it’s really helpful to get your character’s bags cleaned out now so you don’t have to deal with it later. Strip them of all their gear because Rebirth punts them back down to level 1 and you don’t want to have to deal with more mail later.

Enjoy all the power of your new Paragon levels

Remember, not only does your previously Seasonal character get all the gear and items they accumulated during the Season added permanently to your non-Season haul, but every point of Paragon experience you earned during a Season was added to your non-Seasonal Paragon XP, meaning that if you’ve been playing primarily Seasonally you could very well have a lot of unspent Paragon levels on your non-Seasonal characters.

This can add up to a surprising amount of power after a while, climbing the Paragon ranks every Season really adds up when the Season ends. Keep in mind that each Paragon level requires more XP as you level up, if you gained 400 Paragon levels during a Season you won’t get 400 new Paragon levels on your non-Season characters — you’ll get the experience you earned, but it won’t add levels one for one.

Still, for the week or two between Seasons, you could take your character out for a spin with all that additional Paragon and see what it’s like. All the content you played in your Season journey is still available — from Story to Adventure Mode, Challenge Rifts, Nephalem and Greater Rifts — it’s all open to you.

You really can just keep playing if you’re having fun, there’s no reason to stop just because the Season is over.

Take some other games for a spin

Let’s assume you want a Diablo like experience, but you’re interested in taking a break from Diablo 3 until the next Season pops up. That’s reasonable. And there are a lot of options, like Torchlight (Torchlight 3 launched during Season 21), Minecraft Dungeons, Path of Exile, or Wolcen… you get the point. With all the ARPG options out there, you can find a game that’s very similar to Diablo, but different enough for a change of pace. Some invoke earlier games in the series like Diablo 2 or even the original flavor Diablo, and others take the design philosophy of ARPG gameplay in whole new directions.

We have a whole article full of action RPG contenders for you to read, and there are more coming out all the time — just recently Darksiders Genesis brought the ARPG feel to the Darksiders franchise, for example. And of course, you don’t have to play an ARPG at all — Assassin’s Creed Valhalla just launched, and there’s always Animal Crossing if you’re looking for something lighter.

So yeah, these are some options for what to do while you’re waiting for Season 22. If nothing else, you could take a nap. Lately I have grown to love naps.

Updated 07/19/2021