The biggest quality of life changes coming to Diablo 4 with the Season of Blood (so far)

Diablo 4‘s launch on June 6 introduced an entirely new version of Sanctuary, but no video game is perfect on launch, and on October 17 Season 2 will bring significant quality of life improvements for players on both for Eternal and Seasonal realms. During the two-hour Developer Livestream on October 4, Blizzard revealed a slew of changes coming alongside the game’s second Season that will streamline systems and let us focus on killing demons.

These are all of the planned improvements coming with Diablo 4 Season 2: Season of Blood, kicking off with our favorite coming change.

Persistent Renown rewards for Seasonal characters

Persistent global Renown will grant rewards — Paragon and skill points, potion charges, and Obol capacity upgrades — to your new Seasonal characters once unlocked with an Eternal or (previous) Seasonal character. At first glance, this may not seem particularly huge; after all, we had the chance to start Season 1 with the first two Renown tiers unlocked as long as we had previously discovered all Altars of Lilith and areas of the map.

But truly, those remaining three tiers are a slog, requiring 1500 more Renown points for each of the five region’s Renown tracks. Yes, you can knock out tier 3 with Strongholds and waypoints, and Blizzard increased the Renown rewards for side quests and dungeons, but you can’t complete tiers 4 and 5 solely with dungeon runs (which are integral to the level 50+ gameplay loop). That means doing side quests, some of which are not the most obvious to find. I think the D4 implementation of Renown is pretty clever, but I would rather not open the tiers with the same activities in perpetuity.

Persistent Renown is awesome but has one relatively minor caveat: while account-wide rewards are unlocked, Renown tiers that reward extra experience and gold must be earned on the character to claim them. Overall this is a huge win, opening up more time for endgame play.

More (and better) endgame activities for 50+ leveling

Nightmare dungeon-farmers, rejoice! You no longer face a double loading screen because your sigils will teleport you directly into the dungeon instance instead of outside the dungeon. This pretty much speaks for itself — while the loading screens are not insanely slow, having one after the other is frankly annoying. Nightmare dungeon layouts are also getting a second round of streamlining to reduce backtracking so they’re faster to run, and the Paragon Glyph experience reward will increase so it’s less of a grind to level them. Plus, sigils from Whisper Caches will always be within 5 levels of the highest Nightmare Dungeon tier you’ve completed, hopefully resulting in more useful sigils and fewer scrapped sigils.

Two main world events will be available more regularly, with extended warning timers. Legion Events spawn every 25 minutes instead of 30, with 10 minute warnings instead of 5. World Boss fights will occur every 3.5 hours (almost a 50% reduction from the previous six hours), and their event warnings will show up on the map an hour beforehand (up from 30 minutes) with a message broadcast to all players 15 minutes before spawn time.

Leveling will be (roughly) 40% faster with multiplicative bonuses from Elixirs, Season Blessings, and Incense (which now also boosts XP). Monsters in World Tiers 3 and 4 will match your current level at a minimum in those tiers (specifically, after levels 55 and 75, respectively), so the time you do spend between 50 and 100 should fly by! (Comparably.)

The activity rewards for endgame content are also increasing:

• Helltide chests will get more specific map icons to differentiate chest types, and they’ll provide rewards of +20 Item Power value.
• Normal Whisper caches from Tree turn-ins will reward items that are +10 Item Power, or +20 Item Power for upgraded (Greater) caches; both of which will also adhere to the item slot advertised on the cache.
• Participating in Hillsides, Whisper Events, and Whisper turnins will reward additional gold and experience.

Finally, we have five new uber-style bosses to provide a new challenge on both Eternal and Seasonal realms as well as shots at Unique loot and special cosmetics. Their challenges are not for faint-of-heart adventures; you have many Tier 3 and 4 hurdles to conquer for a shot at Uber Duriel, because it will take a considerable amount of materials to summon him. (And whether you defeat these uber bosses or not, your summoning materials will be used.)

Be sure to read up on these foes and see if you’re ready to tackle the Burning Hells’ reinforcements or will be ground to dust under their heels.

Even more changes in the Season of Blood patch

There are 10+ pages of blog post detailing all the improvements coming with the game’s next patch, some of which are small but still interesting. While these changes aren’t as noteworthy as what we’ve listed above, we’ve encapsulated those in a handy TL;DR.

Here are the rest of the quality of life changes in the patch:

• Disconnects now automatically use a Scroll of Escape on Hardcore.
• Gems and normal item drops on Tier 3 and 4 are now crafting materials.
• Tuning to the following Nightmare Dungeon Afflictions should make them easier to manage, so you don’t immediately scrap your sigils: Backstabbers, Critical Resist, Death Pulse, Lightning Storm, and Drifting Shade.
• Coveted items can be marked as Favorite to prevent them from accidental sale or salvage (the opposite of marking as Junk).
• Minions and Companions no longer target invulnerable enemies.
• Enhanced mount responsiveness.
• Improved navigation: you’ll start the Season with 10 Waypoints (as long as you’ve previously unlocked them).
• Stashes, stashes, and more stashes: you’ll find additional stashes near important vendors in all capital cities, and at every small town with a Waypoint. Vendors will also be more conveniently located to Waypoints.

Phew! We still have information coming about a glow-up to the status effect systems. The changes are involved enough that Blizzard is hosting a follow-up Campfire Chat to deep-dive these reworks on October 10. So far, these are sweeping improvements, and they’re all coming to you with the major patch for Season 2. October 17 won’t come soon enough!

Originally published October 4, 2023; updated October 9, 2023