Diablo 3 Season 25 will celebrate 25 years of Diablo by empowering us with Soul Shards from the Lords of Hell

You want to use the powers of Hell itself against the Demons of Sanctuary, right? Good, because Season 25 of Diablo 3 is going to let you do just that, as we pay homage the 25th Anniversary of the Diablo franchise by stealing the power of the Evils to use against them, in the form of Soul Shards, a new type of Legendary gem only available during Season 25.

It’s an intriguing theme. Hearkening back a bit to Diablo 2 and the socketable skulls, Season 25 will have Soul Shards you can socket into your gear that are literally pieces of the seven Evils, with three for the Prime Evils and four for the Lesser Evils. Prime Evil Soul Shards will be for helms, while Lesser Evil Soul Shards will be for weapons. You can only use two shards: one Prime in the helm and one Lesser in the weapon, but you can mix and match any Prime with any Lesser. You can also upgrade the Soul Shards by using a new reagent that will be dropping in Season 25, the Hellforge Ember.

Both the Soul Shards and the Hellforge Embers can drop anywhere in Sanctuary, but the Shards will have a higher drop chance from bosses. And please remember — these are the Seasonal items that will only be available during Season 25. You will not be able to hold on to them after the Season is over — your character will lose them once it ends and you log on to them in non-Seasonal play, so you won’t have access to these powers forever.

But there are still a lot of things we don’t know about these Soul Shards — the Diablo 3 patch 2.7.2 PTR will be going live later this week and we should have a few more answers then. But in the meantime we can speculate.

We still have a lot of questions about Season 25

We know that each of the Shards grants powers based on the Lord of Hell it’s drawn from. We don’t know specifically what they do, but each of the Evils has a pretty specific theme. We can assume a Baal Shard would be destructive in some way, a Mephisto Shard would somehow harness the power of hatred, and a Diablo Shard would allow you to wield terror itself in some fashion. The Lessser Evils are similar: Azmodan embodies sin, Belial embodies deceit, Duriel embodies pain, and Andariel embodies anguish. Those are some fairly broad categories, though — we’ll likely find out on Thursday when the PTR goes live what we’re dealing with in terms of what the Shards actually do.

Also you can apparently still salvage the Shards and use them in Kanai’s Cube — the PTR notes specifically mention Caldesann’s Despair, which implies that the Shards count as Legendary gems for the purpose of upgrading Ancient gear.

How is this going to compare to previous Seasons? Well, it’s along the same lines as Season 24’s Ethereal Weapons, giving you a buff item that won’t be available in other Seasons or non-Season play that will likely change up the game by altering how you equip yourself. It might be an easier thing to balance, but I will admit, it lacks the charm of more Treasure Goblins. But that one’s always going to be my favorite. Compared to previous Seasons, I’d put it on par with Season 24 and Season 20. Depending, of course, on just what the buffs the various Soul Shards provide actually are and how much they change gameplay, things we still don’t know yet.

But we’ll find out more on Thursday, November 4 when patch 2.7.2 goes live on the PTR, so stay tuned.