To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Diablo II, Blizzard has released a limited-edition Lord of Terror Bust. It measures at 9" wide by 7-1/8" deep by 10-12" tall. You can find the bust on the official Blizzard gear store here!
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Diablo II, Blizzard has released a retrospective with comments from Blizzard employees who've grown up developing, playing, and hanging out in the world of sanctuary!
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)
"Oh, I'd fought sleep for days at a time... For when I dreamt, the memories would return. Memories of the Monastery, and the Evil which had claimed it! Dreams, memories... I couldn't tell the difference anymore." - Marius
Crafting a classic
When we set out to create Diablo® II over twenty years ago, the goals were seemingly simple: fix the biggest issues in Diablo® and expand upon the original game’s formula. And while its developers didn’t set out specifically to turn the action RPG genre on its head or influence game design for an entire generation after it, Diablo II ended up doing just that anyway.
The development team wanted Diablo II to be bigger, better, faster, and stronger than its predecessor. A story divided in distinct acts with massive, explorable outdoor zones replaced the claustrophobic Tristram cathedral. Five new character classes like the whirling Barbarian and pious Paladin (with two more added in the Lord of Destruction® expansion, the Assassin and the Druid) expanded far beyond the basic Warrior, Rogue and Sorcerer archetypes from the first game. These new classes, in addition to featuring greater gender and ethnical diversity, each feature 30 unique skills to choose from instead of the single shared spellbook from Diablo. Certain abilities like the spin-to-win Whirlwind, the Paladin’s beneficial auras, and the Necromancer’s summoned minions would become staples in many of our games after. Finally, more powerful items, with bigger stat variety than ever, allowed everyone to truly express themselves through their choices in character class, gear, stats, and skills.
Many of us here at Blizzard have fond memories of playing Diablo II. To us it represents childhood memories, friendships created, endless entertainment, and it inspired many of us to join the video game industry as we grew up. Read some of our favorite tales from the office.
Rod Fergusson – Head of Franchise, Diablo
What Diablo II means to me is the connection I have with my brother. He’s nine years older, so growing up I often felt like an only child, especially after he left home for university when I was eight. Over the years since, one of the ways that he and I have stayed connected was through video games. After all, he was the first person to introduce them to me.
Flash forward to 2001 and we’re living 1400 miles apart – he’s in Winnipeg, Manitoba and I’m in Seattle, Washington. To stay connected, we’ve decided that every year I’m going to take a long weekend and fly to his place and play video games all day, every day for four days. That year, the plan was Diablo II.
The day that I arrive, June 21, 2001 is the day that the Lord of Destruction expansion was released and so we stopped at the store on the way home from the airport to pick up two copies. For the next four days straight, we did nothing but play Diablo II co-op. After many hours, much caffeine and very little sleep, we actually finished the main game AND the expansion!
That bonding experience was so meaningful to my brother and I that we still talk about it to this day. In fact, when I told him about my taking the job as the Head of the Diablo franchise at Blizzard, he texted me the following – “The Diablo II expansion Lord of Destruction came out on June 21, 2001. On some level that feels like a long time ago but also feels like we just did it. One of my better brother memories.”
Lance Kimberlin – Product Manager, Battle.net & Online Products
After the first time I heard (and jumped from) "Ah...Fresh meat!" I was in love with Diablo. I put Diablo II on hold at Babbage’s in 1999 and waited for what seemed like forever to finally receive my copy—Collector’s Edition #23097 of 70000. I still have the box, the disks, and the epic Diablo action figure. How many hours I spent in game? Uh . . . we’d rather not talk about it.
Jesse McCree - Lead Game Designer, Diablo IV
I love Diablo II because it's super fun! It came out early in my career and was one of the games that helped me grow as a game designer by leading me to understand the importance of simple but well executed game loops and controls. More than anything, I love the tone and world of Diablo II. It's still an inspiration as a Lead Game Designer for Diablo IV!
Lily Gardner – Associate Game Producer, Diablo IV
Putting what Diablo II means to me in concise words that don't amount to a novel may be somewhat difficult, but considering the impact it's had on both my love of games and my career within the games industry (especially here at Blizzard), it would be a shame not to try!
In my younger years, I certainly was no stranger to games. I grew up watching my dad play games and code on his PC, and eventually transitioned into playing games of my own—from a Sailor Moon puzzle game to The Sims, and more. However, my first introduction to Blizzard was through Diablo II and Lord of Destruction.
When I look back on the summer before I turned 12, I think of all the memories I made playing as an Assassin—this fierce, female whirlwind of strength and prowess—and exploring spider caverns, marveling at the level of blood and gore, and cursing my lack of foresight and forgetting to stock up on Town Portal scrolls. I also remember cackling endlessly about a certain secret level. . . .
Much of that fondness for all things dark and demonic, as well as engrossing myself in a game for weeks on end, hasn't faded, and I attribute much of that to Diablo II. Without my experiences in Sanctuary, I may not have ever had the desire to work at Blizzard, or in games, or my somewhat gothic sense of taste may not have ever developed.
So, thank you to Diablo II and all of the talented, incredible people who made it a reality!
Diabolical influence
Over the years, elements of Diablo II’s design would find their way into several other Blizzard games, whether because they solved a specific need for that game, or simply because they were just fun to bring over. Warcraft® III included random item drops selected from specific loot tables, and hero units who had experience levels and skill points to be distributed, allowing those heroes to be built to suit the player’s strategy.
Later in World of Warcraft®, Diablo II’s iconic skill tree system would influence the talent system from the original release all the way through the Cataclysm™ expansion. Diablo II’s influence is palpable in everything from the three different skill trees per character class to the point distribution system, which allowed players to customize their characters and rewarded them for investing points in certain skills by unlocking more powerful abilities.
Some of Diablo II’s most powerful enemies—Champions and Elites—terrorize the battlefield by challenging the heroes with an unpredictable array of randomized powers. The notion of adding random enemy power increases as a way to further challenge and reward players lives on today in World of Warcraft’s Mythic Keystone Dungeon affixes, Starcraft® II Co-op Commanders, and of course in Diablo® III.
The secret to immortality
Today, Diablo II remains popular, and the very dedicated players enjoying it in 2020 continue to find new ways to make it their own. While some prefer the dramatic changes that only the modding scene can provide, others simply choose to creatively engage in Diablo II with self-imposed restrictions. Some variants include:
Naked Fury:
No gear is allowed in a naked run. No one can pick up any items other than potions. Players agree to rely only on their class skills and teamwork to prevail. Each class brings unique utility that helps the group succeed where a single player would fail. Naked runs usually go up to the completion of the Pandemonium event and the conquering of the “Uber” bosses—all while wearing no items at all!
Ironman tournament:
Ironman is simple in concept. Eight players start new Hardcore characters. Everyone plays together until level 9 while only using items they find—no previously found gear allowed. At that point, the team goes back to town, goes hostile on each other, and then duels to the death. Last one standing is the winner.
Speedruns:
Different classes and modes (Hardcore or not) in addition to the randomly generated maps and items make Diablo II very exciting to speedrun. World records for fastest completions are broken frequently, as emergent strategies (and a little luck) keep firm records from going unchallenged for long.
The Holy Grail:
The goal of the Holy Grail quest is to single-handedly collect every set and unique item in the game (meaning you must see the item drop, no trading allowed!). Since this is mostly a single-player challenge, some players like to use spreadsheets or apps to keep track of already dropped items, while others use mods that add infinite stash capabilities to the game in order to keep every item in their impressive collections.
Evil lives on
As we look back on twenty years of Diablo II, we see how the lessons we learned from the game have shaped the last two decades at Blizzard, and we expect it to continue to shape how we make new games (especially Diablo games) in the future.
No matter where you were when it all started, or when you decided it was time to play Diablo II—we’re glad to be able to share these memories with you. Here’s to twenty more years in Sanctuary, where brave souls continue to fight to rid the world of Terror, Hatred, and Destruction—while traversing eerie, dark places, and collecting the shiniest loot. Cheers!
Today marks the 20th anniversary of Diablo II, and Diablo III players will be able to celebrate with a new in game event! Players who log into Diablo III on PC and Console right now will be rewarded with a free pair of Prime Evil Wings, which you can see in the screenshots below.
Community Manager PezRadar took to the Diablo Subreddit earlier this week to shut down rumors of a Diablo II remaster announcement. In his post, he also teased the upcoming Diablo II anniversary event in Diablo III.
Originally Posted by PezRadar (Official Post)
Hey all -We don't usually comment on rumors, but before this hype train goes off the rails we wanted to clarify that there are no upcoming Diablo announcements in June. The minions of hell are hard at work getting ready for the start of the next Diablo III Season, bringing you the next Diablo IV quarterly update (very) soon™, and we have some fun activities planned around the upcoming 20th anniversary of Diablo II.
The Diablo IV quarterly development update for June is now live and provides an in-depth look at recent a playtest that the dev team had in the Dry Steppes zone. It touches on a very wide range of topics and all the things the team looks at while playtesting the game.
Originally Posted by Luis Barriga (Official Post)
Introduction
Team Playtest
A Word About Blockout
Storytelling
Open World
Multiplayer
Items and Progression
Other Thoughts
To the Diablo Community,
Hello, and welcome to our latest Diablo IV quarterly update! We are excited to share some of the progress we’ve made on the game today.
As is the case with many other game and technology companies at the time of writing this, the Diablo IV team has fully transitioned to working from home. While the transition has introduced challenges, we feel very fortunate to be able to keep momentum going strong on the development of Diablo IV.
TEAM PLAYTEST
As with many other games, we organize the development of Diablo IV around team milestones. Often, these culminate with a build which we to play together and talk about as a team. For example, the milestones leading up to BlizzCon 2019 culminated in a team playtest of the demo that helped us unveil the game during the show. Besides getting an early look at what other team members had accomplished, this also allowed us to stress test the demo, catch additional bugs, and make improvements before the show.
For our most recent milestone, we focused on blocking in all the elements in a region known as the Dry Steppes, complete with campaign content, open world elements, itemization, a PvP subzone, dungeons, and a cinematic to cap the completion of the region’s narrative. Our goal was to then have the team play the game from home over the course of two full days, and then spend some time analyzing data and discussing our reactions.
Of course, we play the game all the time, but we’re often examining individual features or areas. Taking the time to play the same build together as a team over multiple days gives us a different perspective. It lets us see how all the current features harmonize over a longer playtime. We had this as a goal before we knew we were going to move to a work from home environment, but as it turned out, it ended up being a really good way to reconnect as a team. Similarly, we hope that chatting about this playtest and sharing some screenshots with you will provide context for future blog updates (or pique your curiosity about future topics).
It’s worth noting that the playtest also didn’t represent the entirety of our progress. Other regions of the game are underway. The Dry Steppes is just the region where we made a concerted push to create a complete and cohesive experience that we could draw observations from. Let us know if you liked this approach to the blog (or if you didn’t) and we can adjust future updates accordingly. As always, your feedback is highly appreciated.
A WORD ABOUT BLOCKOUT
Blocking out or “grayboxing” levels allows us to play areas where the art isn’t finished.As part of development, visuals are often kept in rough form so the game team can cheaply test ideas and iterate on them. If something isn’t fun, it’s much cheaper to change or discard a “blockout” asset than a final one.
When we share models or screenshots with you, they are often quite far along to adequately convey our vision for the game. We don’t typically show blockout assets as they don’t really do justice to the engine or the artistry of the folks on the team, but as part of showing the “behind the scenes” of how we make the game, we thought you’d appreciate seeing the transition of blockout assets into more polished ones.
Some of the assets shown in this blog might not be final, so please bear that in mind as you check the screenshots below.
A classic demon from concept, to blockout, to in-game art
STORYTELLING
A couple of things have evolved with how we deliver story in Diablo IV. First, we have conversations. In D3 we relied on UI panes with a character’s name and portrait. We’re experimenting with a mix of tool-generated and manually choreographed cameras to tackle conversations. For simple interactions with NPCs we bring the camera in closer to the characters (while still maintaining an overall isometric feel) and use a library of animations to deliver the general gist of the conversations. For more complex conversations, we take a similar camera approach but here the character’s movements and animations are more deliberately hand-crafted. This lets us deliver story moments that are complex while keeping you in the world as much as possible. Here’s a shot from one such interaction.
A more zoomed in overhead camera helps us deliver simple story beats.The second storytelling method we are developing is real-time cutscenes (or RTCs). Here we grab your camera and treat the storytelling more like a movie, so we’re reserving this technique for the most important story moments. Having these be real-time has great advantages—we can show your character with their currently equipped armor as part of the scene, for example. But we can also display them at your current resolution and with your currently enabled graphics settings, so they end up feeling more seamless and like a part of the game.
We showed you some early work on real time in-game cinematics during the BlizzCon demo. Our cinematics and engine teams have made a lot of improvements since then, so we were excited to see a fully produced cinematic serve as the climax to the Dry Steppes experience, and the team was not disappointed. Here’s a screengrab that the story and cinematics folks have given us the go ahead to share with you as it shouldn’t spoil the details of what’s to come.
In-game cinematics in Diablo IV set a properly dark mood
OPEN WORLD
One of the main new features we are bringing to the Diablo series is the open world of Sanctuary. So, while you can concentrate on the story campaign and work through that, we have a variety of open world systems and pieces of content that you are also discovering along the way. If you want to take a break from the main campaign and go exploring, crafting, or PvPing, you are free to do so.
During the playtest, we saw this variability in action quite a bit. On an average playthrough, team members took several hours to complete the campaign content for the region, but those who focused only on the story finished the arc in less than half the average time (and were, of course able to do side content after that). We think the ability to approach the game with a different mix of story and side content tailored to your own appetite will make playing (and re-playing) the campaign more enjoyable than it has been in previous ARPGs.
Playtests like this one allow us to collect and aggregate data to help guide our design.
This distribution heatmap indicates areas in the Dry Steppes that saw the most traffic.While we have many open world activities, such as crafting, events, world PvP, and side quests, perhaps the most popular open world feature was Camps. These are locations of importance that have been overrun by enemies, which once cleansed turn into friendly outposts with NPCs and a waypoint location. While there is a backstory to each camp, most of the storytelling is visual and quests don’t directly send you to them. For example, one of the camps in the zone was a town afflicted by a curse that turned villagers into piles of salt. Another was a crypt, haunted by a spirit that possesses the bodies of various undead—jumping from skeleton to skeleton until you defeat him.
We really dug the impact of seeing the world change as you reclaim a small piece of Sanctuary and bring hope back to its common folk. We look forward to the Open World designers showing you more about this feature in the future!
Camps start out as hostile and turn into small hubs with a waypoint and vendors after being completedFinally, mounts were another thing you could obtain during the playthrough. We really liked how the open world interacts with mounts—you could get to your objectives more quickly without trivializing travel or combat. Itemization for mounts also opened up a new axis of progression.
One of my favorite things about mounts was customizing it by attaching a trophy to the saddle to signal to other players an obscure challenge in the zone that I had completed. Of course, there is more work to be done on mounts. For example, on navigation and tuning, it is currently too easy to get stuck on stray pieces of collision or to get dismounted by a random enemy projectile. These are all things that are just going to get better the more we play and tune the feature.
MULTIPLAYER
Fine tuning the right approach to multiplayer in Diablo IV has been challenging. Our goal has always been to incorporate elements from shared world games without the game ever feeling like it’s veering into massively multiplayer territory. To be clear, this is a philosophy rather than a tech limitation. We find that the game stops feeling like Diablo and the world feels less dangerous when you see other players too often or in too high numbers.
Towns become social hubs where you can run into other players once key segments in the story are completedI’ll break down our experiences during the playtest with some examples. Dungeons and key story moments are always private—just the player and their party. Once story moments are complete and towns turned into social hubs, you’d run into a few people in town. While on the road, you’d sometimes run into a player here and there. And then finally, if you went to a location where a world event was happening, you would see a larger congregation of players trying to defend against an attack by a cannibal horde or trying to take down Ashava, the demonic world boss we showed at BlizzCon.
It’s worth calling out that while some coordination is helpful during these events, you are never forced to join a party. Solo players can walk in, help complete the event, and claim a reward. We think this seamless approach to multiplayer is working well and look forward to sharing more about this approach with you. In our tests so far, the world feels alive and dynamic without compromising the feel of Diablo. And for players that do want to party up against the minions of Hell, we have new tools available to find a group, whether by activity or proximity in the game world.
The World Boss Ashava shown during Blizzcon 2019 in Scosglen can spawn in the Dry Steppes as well
ITEMS AND PROGRESSION
One of the things that was very useful about our two-day playtest was that we could get better feedback on progression as there was a sense of permanence. Gear and skill choices you make on day one have an impact on day two (though some people chose to roll alts as we had multiple classes to test). A friend of mine used to say that Diablo is the game that you keep playing inside your head and Diablo IV is no different. In addition to the official play time allotted to the team during the playtest, I could feel the game lingering in my mind, thinking about the items that could possibly drop for my build, and talents I could finally unlock to get me those key skill interactions.
You might have already read the developer blog by David Kim shortly after last BlizzCon. In it, he describes new affixes and itemization philosophies. We’ll have a beefier update on items later in the year, but in the meantime, here are some items that dropped during the playtest to whet your appetite!
Various items from the playtest utilizing the new attribute system. Note that the item icons are not final art
OTHER THOUGHTS
The overall feedback from the team was that even at these early stages, Diablo IV is very fun to play. The classes especially are going down a promising path that we’re excited about. We’re taking cues from what makes the Barbarian’s Arsenal system or the Druid’s shapeshifting feel special and looking for ways to apply similar innovations to all classes (more on this in a future update).
The playtest was also a really good way to put our tech through its paces. Since we played at home, we got to test the game on a lot of different setups—from graphics cards, to screen aspect ratios, to network speeds. We also had the opportunity to exercise our client-server technology, including deploying builds with fixes to bugs during the playtest.
Of course, we still have a lot of work ahead of us and to be clear, we are not at an Alpha or Beta stage yet. We don’t typically discuss our early milestones publicly during the course of development, but we think it’s especially important to continue to share our progress during a year without a BlizzCon. Also, this was an important milestone for the team as we feel it corroborated that we have all the key ingredients for a great Diablo IV (of course, we’ll continue to seek feedback and iterate as we drive to completion).
We hope you’ve enjoyed this update and, as always, we welcome you to share your thoughts on the platform of your choice—whether it’s our own forums, other sites, or social media, we read and appreciate your comments and feedback. We were happy to see lots of great discussion after our last blog (which seeded a bunch of conversations on our end as well).
We are also excited to see the range of topics you want to hear about. Based on your response so far, we think talent trees are by far what you’re the most eager to discuss, so we’ll make sure to queue that up for our very next blog. Items continue to be a popular topic and there was also a lot of interest in music. We are shooting to have more updates around those topics later in the year. Let us know how that sounds.
Thank you for taking the time to read this update. We can’t wait to share more of Sanctuary with you!
Development is well underway outside the Dry Steppes. More of Sanctuary awaits in coming updates!
-Luis Barriga-
Game Director, Diablo IV Team
UPDATE: Patch 2.6.9 is now live in all regions!
Blizzard have officially announced the start date of Season 21 to be July 3rd, and plan to release patch 2.6.9 on June 23rd! In addition to this, we got a look at the new Stupendous Contraption pet and Industrial Portrait frame rewards for players who complete their seasonal journey!
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment (Official Post)
Season 21 will begin July 3, shortly after our next Diablo III patch. Read on to learn more about the brand-new Season buff, new class sets, and a handful of item and skill adjustments coming in Patch 2.6.9! We are expecting Patch 2.6.9 to be released on June 23.
Table of Contents
- Season Theme
- Season Cosmetic Rewards
- Season Journey Rewards
- Seasonal Conquests
- Haedrig's Gifts
- Patch Notes
New Season Theme
Wait, Nephalem. Do you sense that? Though the air remains tainted with a demonic brimstone stench, the world around you crackles with chaotic elemental energy. You have been deemed worthy, and the primal forces of Sanctuary manifest to aid you in the fight against the swelling darkness.
With you as the champion of the elements, the burning hells will face the Trials of Tempests!
- During Season 21, your character will occasionally (every 90 seconds) channel an elemental power which unleashes into the environment for a limited time:
- Rain meteors from the skies around you.
- Breathe lightning.
- Summon a wall of flame.
- Release twisters of pure energy.
- Crush your foes under the weight of rolling snowballs.
Seasonal Cosmetic Rewards
Beginning with Season 17, we began re-introducing previous Seasonal rewards to make them available to players who may have missed them the first time around. For Season 21, this means awards originally available from Season 9 are returning to the Season Journey.
However, we know it’s nice to have something new to aim for if you’ve participated in previous Seasons. We’re continuing to provide new End of Journey rewards as introduced in Season 17, with two new cosmetic rewards for those who complete the entirety of the Season journey. Prove your worth in the Trial of Tempests to earn the Stupendous Contraption pet and the Industrial Portrait Frame.
In addition to the Chest and Gloves slots of the exclusive Conqueror Set, you’ll be able to earn the Pandemonium portraits and the cute and craggly Rocky pet first introduced in Season 9.
Season Journey Rewards
If you’ve been diligently slaying demons for the past few Seasons and reached Conqueror in the Season Journey each time, you’ve surely accrued a few extra stash tabs. You’ll earn one additional tab each Season by finishing the Conqueror tier, up to a maximum of five:
- Guardian of Sanctuary: Finish a level 70 Nephalem Rift on Torment XIII difficulty within 5 minutes.
- Gem of My Life: Level three Legendary Gems to level 55.
- All I Do is Win: Complete 2 Conquests this Season.
- Lose Yourself: Kill the Skeleton King at level 70 in under 30 seconds on Torment XIII difficulty.
- Money Ain’t a Thang: Slay Greed on Torment XIII difficulty. Treasure Goblins outside of Nephalem Rifts will sometimes open portals to Greed’s domain, The Vault.
- Take U There: Reach Greater Rift Level 60 Solo. Greater Rift keystones can be obtained from any Nephalem Rift guardian.
- Power Amplification: Use Kanai’s Cube to augment an Ancient Legendary item with a level 50+ gem.
- Cubic Reconfiguration: Use Kanai’s Cube to reforge a Legendary item.
Seasonal Conquests
Want to prepare your Conquest plan for Season 21? Here are the challenges you’ll face!
For Curses!/Stars Align, pick any Cursed Chest event that requires killing monsters and defeat over 350 or more at level 70 on Torment X or higher. Also returning for Season 21 is Sprinter/Speed Racer, where you’re challenged to complete the entire Diablo III campaign from Act I to Act V at level 70 in under 1 hour! Next is Avarice/Avaritia, where all that glitters is gold—that is, if you can complete a 50 million gold streak outside of The Vault or its Inner Sanctum. We're also bringing Thrill/Superhuman, which requires completion of a Greater Rift level 45—solo and without any Set items equipped. And lastly we'll be bringing back Speed Demon/Need for Speed, meaning you'll need to beat a Torment X Nephalem Rift at level 70 in 2 minutes. Best of luck!
Haedrig’s Gift
Finally, the Class Sets rewarded for completing certain chapters in the Season Journey courtesy of Haedrig’s Gift have rotated once more. We’ve listed the available Sets below. For those new to Seasons, here’s how it works:
Completing Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the Season Journey will reward you with three of Haedrig’s Gifts. Each Gift contains a few pieces from one of your Class Sets. Players can only unlock one Class Set in this manner per Season across Hardcore and Non-Hardcore, so choose wisely!
The set you receive depends on the class of the character you’re playing when you open each Haedrig’s Gift. To collect a full Class Set, you’ll need to open all three on the same character.
Here are the sets granted by Haedrig’s Gift in Season 21:
- Barbarian - Might of the Earth
- Crusader - Thorns of the Invoker
- Demon Hunter - The Shadow's Mantle
- Monk - Monkey King's Garb
- Witch Doctor - Raiment of the Jade Harvester
- Wizard - Firebird's Finery
- Necromancer - Grace of Inarius
Patch Notes
Below you will find the final patch notes for the most recent update for Diablo III, Patch 2.6.9. Changes specifically from the last version of the PTR have been highlighted in RED.
Items
Demon Hunter
- New Demon Hunter Set: Gears of Dreadlands
- 2-Piece Bonus
- Gain 4 seconds of Momentum when attacking with a Primary skill, at a maximum of 20 seconds. Your Primary skills deal 10% increased damage per second of Momentum.
- 4-Piece Bonus
- Casting Strafe against enemies will automatically shoot your last used primary skill, and also give 60% damage reduction while strafing and for 5 seconds after. While Strafing, you gain 8% increased movement speed for each second of Momentum.
- 6-Piece Bonus
- Your primary skills deal 10000% more damage
- Leonine Bow of Hashir
- Bolas have a
30%100% chance on explosion to pull in all enemies within 24 yards, and also deal 100-150% increased damage.- Emimei's Duffel
- Bolas now explode instantly and deal 150-175% increased damage.
- The Ninth Cirri Satchel
- Hungering Arrow
has 20-25%is guaranteed to pierce and also deals 450-600% increased damage.- Odyssey's End
- Enemies snared by your Entangling Shots take
20-25%100-150% increased damage from all sources.- Hunter's Wrath
- Your primary skills attack 30% faster and deal
45-60%150-200% increased damage.- Holy Point Shot
- Impale throws 2 additional knives and deals 75-100% increased damage.
Necromancer
Developer's Note:With the adjustments coming in for a few past Necromancer sets and abilities, we will continue to evaluate the performance of the new set this season and may make additional adjustments in future seasons if we believe they are necessary.
- New Necromancer Set: Masquerade of the Burning Carnival
- 2-Piece Bonus
- Your Simulacrums no longer take damage, gains all runes, and its cooldown is refreshed when you die.
- 4-Piece Bonus
- While you have a Simulacrum, damage is reduced by 50%. Damage you take is split with your Simulacrums as well.
- 6-Piece Bonus
- Your Bone Spear deals 10,000% increased damage. Simulacrums gain triple this bonus.
- Grasps of Essence
- When an exploded corpse damages at least one enemy, Your Corpse Explosion deals
75-100%150-200% increased damage for 6 seconds, stacking up to 5 times.- Haunted Visions
- Simulacrum now drains
5%1% of your maximum life every second and laststwice as longforever. They can now duplicate Grim Scythe instead of Skeletal Mage.- Razeth's Volition
- Skeletal Mage gains the effect of the Gift of Death and Singularity runes. You gain 35-60% damage reduction if your Essence is not full.
- Jesseth Arms
- 2-Piece Set Bonus: While your skeletons are commanded to attack a target, you deal 400% increased damage.
- Grace of Inarius
- 4-Piece Set Bonus: Bone Armor grants an additional
2%3% damage reduction per enemy hit.- Pestilence Master's Shroud
- 6-Piece Set Bonus: Each corpse you consume grants you an Empowered Bone Spear charge that increases the damage of your next Bone Spear by 3300%. In addition, Corpse Lance and Corpse Explosion damage is increased by
1650%3300%.Crusader
- Shield of Fury
- This effect may stack up to
2010 times.General
- Stone of Jordan
- Added power: Each of your elemental's damage bonus is equal to your highest static elemental bonus to skill.
- Reaper's Wraps
- Added a 2-second internal cooldown to the Health globe effect.
- Mantle of Channeling
- Now works with the Necromancer's Siphon Blood.
- Convention of Elements
Added "non-static" to the wording of the legendary power's description. The functionality is unchanged
Skill Changes
- Necromancer
Simulacrum
These will now warp to the Necromancer if they begin to move too far away from the player. This only works if the Necromancer is wearing the Masquerade of the Burning Carnival set or Haunted Visions.
Simulacrums cannot use Grim Scythe (with Haunted Visions) or Skeletal Mage unless the Necromancer had either of those abilities while the Simulacrums were created.
Final Service
No longer consumes pets.
Final Service now activates before Simulacrum's Self Sacrifice.
- Bone Prison
- Simulacrums now benefit from this passive skill.
- Serration
- Simulacrums now benefit from this passive skill.
- Corpse Explosion
- Damage increased from 350% to 1050%.
- Witch Doctor
- Spirit Barrage
- The Spectres from the Phantasm rune no longer benefit from pet bonuses.
Bug Fixes
- Necromancer
- Fixed an issue where Skeletal Mages were not attacking certain creatures
- PTR Specific:
- Note: The following issues were only live on the PTR, but we’re including the fixes here for visibility to indicate intended functionality on live.
- Seasonal effects no longer deal area damage.
- Seasonal buff resets if player exits and reenters a rift.
- Seasonal theme should no longer work in Set Dungeons.
- Fixed Maltorius' Petrified Spike dealing additive bonus damage instead of multiplicative.
- Fixed seasonal buff that sometimes may drop off whenever the player enters an invulnerable state.
- Changed seasonal buff to base its damage on the amount of kills. (not really a bug, more of a change)
