Diablo 3 Season 29: Visions of Enmity shakes up Paragon, introduces a solo play mode, and spawns Diabolical Fissures all over Sanctuary

From August 15 to August 29, you’ll be able to help playtest Diablo 3 Season 29, the Visions of Enmity, and it has quite a few surprises in store for us, including a completely solo play mode called Solo Self Found, and the collapsing fissures of reality that make up the Season Theme. Season 29’s patch cycle will also feature an overhaul to the Paragon system that will be up for testing on the PTR but currently stands at a total of 800 Paragon.

So let’s take a look at the Diablo 3 PTR 2.7.6 preview and what’s coming to the game.

What are the Visions of Enmity?

The Season 29 Theme, the Visions of Enmity, are pocket dimensions similar to Nephalem Rifts but occurring in the world of the game. Starting at level 1, killing the Demonic creatures infesting Sanctuary has a chance to spawn a Diabolical Fissure. These portals are used to travel to a Vision of Enmity, a nightmare realm packed with even more powerful monsters to hunt down. And in a kind of Matryoshka doll of evil, killing demons in the Vision of Enmity can spawn another Diabolical Fissure inside the Vision, meaning you can go into another Vision while you’re currently inside one.

There are also three new affixes that can affect the monsters inside a Vision of Enmity, making them a step more difficult than the rest of the world.

• Enervating: Creates an area of effect around the monster that reduces the player’s Movement Speed by 65% and Cooldown Reduction by 50% if the player is in the vicinity of the monster.
• Necrotic: The player’s healing is reduced by 65%. Monsters have a damage-over-time effect that deals 180% of the player’s max health over 30 seconds. This effect is removed if the player is healed above 95%.
• Resource Leech: Hitting a player removes 65% of their maximum resource.

A new ceiling for Paragon levels in Diablo 3

While the Season Theme is up for testing, another very interesting development on the 2.7.6 PTR is a radical redesign of the Diablo 3 Paragon system. At present, you can put 50 points on each stat in a category and there’s no upper Paragon limit, as there are two Paragon stats that are theoretically infinite and allow you to gain pure offensive or defensive stats — for example, a Barbarian can get Strength.

But on the PTR, a new Paragon Ceiling of 800 total Paragon points exists, and you can now assign up to 200 Paragon points in any one attribute on each of the four categories, while also only being able to assign 200 to the category as a whole. So if you want to, you could spend 50 each in Attack Speed, Cooldown Reduction, Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage in the Utility category — or you could spend 175 points on Cooldown Reduction, 10 points on Attack Speed, and 15 points in Critical Hit Chance. Or you could just dump 200 points into Attack Speed. Whatever choice you make, you can only spend 200 in each category — Core, Defense, Offense, and Utility — meaning that instead of just maxing every attribute in each category as you go, you choose where your points go and therefore tailor your approach.

This is in part due to the devs’ stated goal to make Paragon less powerful than player skill and gear. At present, Paragon eventually overrides everything once you have enough of it, and they want to take the opportunity to rein that in. If you’re curious about the Paragon Ceiling, it’s not set in stone at 800 points — it seemed like a place to start and the devs are looking for feedback on how it feels to play.

What is Solo Self Found mode and how does it change gameplay?

Finally, we have the Solo Self Found mode, a completely single player version of Diablo 3 without any multiplayer options. It’s possible to play a Solo Self Found character in Hardcore or not, but it’s a specific Seasonal mode with its own leaderboards that is designed to provide a more challenging experience for players who are interested in tackling all the challenges of Diablo 3 without other players assisting them in any way. You can’t be in a party in Solo Self Found games, and can’t even start the mode if you’re in a party. Like in previous Seasons, you can Rebirth a character and start a Solo Self Found Seasonal playthrough with them. The post specifically mentions Demon Hunters but the other buttons aren’t greyed out so I assume you can actually do the mode on any class.

There are more changes — various Class Balance changes, alterations to various aspects of the game based on community feedback for example — and of course, if you want to hop on to the PTR you can ask your Battle.net client to download the 2.7.6 PTR and hop on to help test it all out. I think that’s a pretty substantial suite of new and altered aspects to the game all told, and I’m very curious to see if any future patches for Diablo 3 maintain this level of activity.