Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred Developer stream — Season of Hatred Rising brings back an enemy from Diablo 3 and will be available for all players

What you need to know

• Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred launches on October 7 or October 8 depending on your region, and will launch alongside Season 6: Season of Hatred Rising. 
• The new Season will bring back the Realmwalkers from Diablo 3, in an activity for all players regardless of if they have purchased the expansion.
• Changes have been made following the Patch 2.0 Public Test Realm (PTR) as a result of community feedback.

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred is days away from launch, in fact, you can preload the game right now! Today the developers sat down for a live stream to discuss the Season 6 theme ‘Hatred Rising’, post patch 2.0 Public Test Realm (PTR) changes, runewords, and more about the new content coming with the Vessel of Hatred expansion. Here’s everything as it happened.

Post Patch 2.0 PTR learnings 

The Patch 2.0 PTR ran earlier in September and allowed the community to test the new leveling system, difficulties, runewords, and other changes being implemented to the game when Vessel of Hatred launches. The team went through several things changed as a result of the feedback during this period.

Difficulty Changes

For Standard Difficulty Tiers, you will now be able to go straight to Penitent difficulty if you wish to. You do need to have completed the campaign at least once to have this unlocked.

Itemization Changes

• Masterworking – Non-Ancestral Legendaries may reach rank 8 (up from 4)
• Tempering – Non-Ancestral Legendaries may be Tempered twice
• Unique Item Drop Chance – the chance for a Unique item to drop as an Ancestral has been tripled
• Scrolls of Restoration in Season Journey – this scroll has been added to the final two stages of the Season Journey (for resetting Tempering chances on an item)

Player Power changes

The developers reiterated that all the best gear can be found in Torment 1, the only benefit of pushing the difficulty is the increased drop chance of those items. The new difficulties are a move away from the old system that pushed players to World Tier 4 to unlock the ‘best gear’.