Diablo 4’s Season of Blood Detailed, the Big Changes You Need To Know

Blizzard’s latest developer livestream spilled the beans on the major additions and changes coming to Diablo 4’s season 2, titled ‘Season of Blood’. The new season goes live on October 17, so here is a breakdown of all the big changes you need to know.

For starters, season 2’s overall theme is all about vampires as the player’s new seasonal characters will go through a completely new storyline that eventually leads you to have your very own vampiric powers.

When you start Season of Blood, you’ll be introduced to a new character that’s a vampire hunter attached to the new storyline that leads to you fighting the big bad of the new season called Lord Zir.

Vampiric Powers

Vampiric Powers will be the new system that’s exclusive to seasonal characters as there will be 22 class-agnostic Vampiric Powers to choose from. Characters can equip up to five powers at a time, assuming you have the right amount of pacts found in your armor pieces. Every armor you find during Season of Blood will have pacts associated with them, and you can remove or add pacts to suit what vampiric power you’ll need in your build.

To improve a specific Vampiric Power, players will need Potent Blood, a seasonal currency that you earn by killing Bloodseekers, a new enemy type that is described as heroes that succumb to Lord Vir’s influence, as these enemies can be any of the five classes of the game and can that can be found in Dungeons and in the new seasonal event called Blood Harvest.

New Seasonal Event - Blood Harvest

As you explore Sanctuary once again, you’ll come across the new event called Blood Harvest, an event that will be available to all seasonal characters at level 1. This new event will always be available as one Blood Harvest ends, another one will start at a different part of the world map. These events will also feature Vampiric Keys that can be used to open specific chests.

New Rewards System - Hunters’ Acclaim

Season 2 will also feature a new reward system attached to the Blood Harvest event, as killing enemies in a Blood Harvest will increase your progression through the Hunters Acclaim, earning rewards such as item stashes, Potent Blood, gear, and Vampiric Powers.

End-Game Bosses and Uber Unqiues

Season 2 will feature end-game bosses for both the Seasonal and Eternal realms of Diablo 4. There will be five end-game bosses added to the game and will requires specific materials to summon these bosses.

Each of the new bosses will have five uniques tied to them, meaning players can actually target farm-specific bosses to get the item they need for a specific build they are working on.

• Grigoire, The Galvanic Saint - Helltide activities

• Echos of Vershan - Whispers activities

• The Beast in the Ice - Nightmare Dungeons tiers 21-100

• Lord Zir - World Bosses and Legion Events (World Tier 4)

• Duriel, King of the Maggots - Echos of Vershan, and Grigoir, The Galvanic Saint (World Tier 4)

Each of these bosses will be tied to a specific activity, which will drop resources needed to summon that specific boss. Duriel, King of the Maggots seems to be the hardest as its the new level 100 boss, and you’ll need to farm two other bosses in World Tier 4 in order to eventually have the resources to summon Duriel.

Uber uniques, the rare items currently in the game, can also drop when fighting Duriel, making them the optimal activity to hunt for them.

These five new bosses will not go away after season 2.

General improvements announced

Blizzard also pointed out a few key changes coming to season 2

Scroll of Escape - hardcore players with a Scroll of Escape will instantly be triggered the moment your character disconnects while in combat, ideally to save your character from permanently dying.

Incenses - will also grant a bonus to experience while active, and it will now persist after death

Experience bonuses - will now be multiplicative with the world tier bonus. Meaning, all the bonus experience you have on your character, will be added together, and then multiplied based on the bonus given to the World Tier you are currently on. According to the developer’s calculations based on this change, the road to reaching level 100 will now be 40% faster with this change.

New Waypoints - Each zone will now have two new waypoints, which means ten new waypoints will be added to the game. This change is meant to make it easier to go around the world, especially when you skip the campaign.

Renown Rewards - All rewards will now persist between seasons and new characters. This means that the region rewards such as Skill Points, Obols capacity, and Paragon Points, potion upgrades, will now remain unlocked. The process of doing the same activity like side quests per season is finally over.

Overworld Monsters - Monsters found in World Tier 3 and 4 will no longer trail the player’s level after levels 55 and 75 respectively. This is how it was at the launch of the game but made changes based on player feedback. Now, they are bringing it back based on the new changes coming to season 2.

New Character slots - Two Character slots will be added in season 2, just added space so that players will not have to worry about erasing specific characters to make space.

More stashes found in towns - They are adding more stashes to major capitals and small cities in order for players to no longer need to travel from one area to another just to access their stash inventory.

Purveyors of Curiosities vendors - these vendors are now moved closer to Waypoints, giving players an easier time to spend their Obols.

Mounts Responsiveness and speed - Mounts will now respond better in season 2, less likely getting stuck or slowing down bast on the terrain they are trying to go through. They are also increasing the base movement speed is increased by 14%. The duration of speed burst was also increased by 50%. They also reduced the cooldowns of dismounting your mount and the cooldown of your dismount combat skill.

The best addition is that triggering a spur will now break barricades.

Nightmare Dungeons

Nightmare Dungeons are also being improved. The biggest change is that when you activate a Nightmare Dungeon, you will not teleport inside the Nightmare Dungeon instead of you being teleported by the entrance of said dungeon.

Other changes mentioned are the improvements to Dungeon Events, traps, and the amount of experience you earn for Paragon Glyphs.

They also made various changes to dungeon afflictions, hopefully, to make some of them entertaining instead of it being a pain to go through.

A critical change is that they’ve completely removed objectives in Nightmare Dungeons for a “handful of dungeons”, as those affected will now only require you to find the boss.

Some dungeons have some layout changes, so expect some to look different entering season 2.

World Event Changes

World Events are seeing changes in Season 2, simply reducing the time between these events.

Those affected are the Legion Events, and the World bosses.

Gems are no longer part of your inventory

For the sake of saving space in a player’s inventory or stash, actual gems will no longer drop from monsters. Instead, monsters will drop gem shards, a new resource that will be stored in the Materials tab and can be used to craft the gems you need through the Jeweler vendor, hopefully lessening the clutter and saving up space.

Weaker Normal, Magic, and Rare items will no longer drop in World Tiers 3 and 4

When you enter World Tiers 3 and 4, items that are weak in item power will no longer drop in these tiers and instead will be replaced with crafting materials that will likely benefit you more.

These are the big changes announced but not all as there’s more to come, apparently.

The developer livestream that talked about everything in season 2 is just one of two planned to cover Season of Blood, as the next developer livestream, happening on October 10, will be focusing on changes to elemental resistances, quality-of-life updates, unique, and more changes coming in season 2.

Diablo 4’s Season of Blood goes live on October 17, 2023.

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