As we stroll, slowly but surely, into spooky season, Diablo 4 is beginning a new season of its own. Following on from the Season of the Malignant, the Season of Blood is coming on October 17, bringing with it a veritable banquet of new content and new mechanics for the game. This is the biggest update Diablo 4 has seen yet, and looks set to revitalize the experience for new and returning players alike. What’s new in Diablo 4 Season of Blood? Read on to find out.
Everything coming to Diablo 4 in Season of Blood
Vampiric Powers
Image: Blizzard
Narratively, Season of Blood introduces a new villain into the world of Diablo 4: the vampire Lord Zir. He leads a huge vampire army and is making moves to take over Sanctuary. The player character, in the course of events, contracts vampirism themselves, giving them access to one of the Season’s major new features: Vampiric Powers.
These are new skills the player can find throughout their time with the Season and slot onto their character via the skills menu. Vampiric Powers rely on Pacts, which are new items you can attach to your Armor pieces, to function. Every Armor piece that drops during Season of Blood will feature Pacts in some form, and you’ll be able to gain more Pacts by completing Blood Harvest events and defeating Bloodseeker enemies (more on both later). Later on, you’ll be able to extract and add Pacts to Armor pieces as well.
Vampiric Powers will be able to inflict the new Vampiric Curse status on your enemies, and defeating enemies afflicted with this status will drain their souls, which you can use as fuel for devastating skills later on. Vampiric Powers are designed to be class-agnostic in nature, meaning that every player will be able to make use of them.
Blood Harvest
Image: Blizzard
Another major addition in the Season of Blood is that of Blood Harvest events. These are events that affect specific sections of the map in a similar fashion to Helltides, bringing Lord Zir’s powerful minions and new side objectives for you to tackle. Unlike Helltides, Blood Harvest events will be available to all characters right from level one, and there will always be at least one Blood Harvest Event active at any given time with no cooldown in between.
Within Blood Harvests, you’ll encounter new enemies such as Blood Skeletons and even Bloodseekers, a dangerous new breed of Elite that we’ll touch on more below. If you can survive such tribulations, you’ll receive materials for improving your Vampiric Powers, as well as Blood Lures, which you can use to intentionally summon Bloodseekers to fight. In addition, completing Blood Harvest events will earn you Hunter’s Acclaim: a new currency you can redeem for Vampiric Powers, Gear, and more in town. It’s worth noting that, while they’re similar in function, Blood Harvests are not replacing Helltides, and you’ll still see both at higher World Tiers.
Bloodseekers
Image: Blizzard
We’ve danced around them for long enough: Bloodseekers are another major addition coming in Season of Blood, and they may just be the most interesting Elite enemies the game has seen yet. Bloodseekers are lieutenants of Lord Zir, and they represent other heroes like yourself who contracted vampirism, but who were unable to resist its dark allure. In a narrative sense, they’re spooky ‘what if?’ scenarios for the player. In a mechanical sense, they’re Elite enemy versions of all five of Diablo 4’s playable classes.
This means that the movesets of Bloodseekers are hugely varied, and taking them on will be a refreshing change of pace compared to the usual foes you’ve grown used to. You can encounter Bloodseekers within Blood Harvest events, naturally, but they can also appear randomly in dungeons, in a similar fashion to The Butcher. Defeating Bloodseekers will shower you with upgrade materials for your Vampiric Powers, making them well worth fighting when they appear. As mentioned above, you can also draw them out intentionally using Blood Lure items from Blood Harvests — great for grinding out your Vampiric Powers later on.
New Endgame Bosses
Image: Blizzard
One of the most common criticisms of Diablo 4 since launch has been its lack of endgame content, and Season of Blood is addressing that criticism in a big way. A whopping five new endgame bosses are being introduced this Season, all of which come with their own unique loot drops and involved processes for being challenged.
For example, you can collect the items needed to summon Echoes of Vershan, one of the new endgame bosses, by completing Tree of Whispers quests, and you can collect those needed to summon Grigoire, the Galvanic Saint, from Helltides. These new bosses reward players for engaging with systems that previously offered little in the way of late-game rewards, and they also specialize in different elemental attacks, forcing players to engage with the previously irrelevant elemental resistance systems Diablo 4 offers.
All of these bosses will be capable of dropping specific unique items, giving players a new way of target-farming key pieces for their builds. More excitingly, one of the new bosses, Duriel, King of Maggots, actually drops the previously-nigh-inaccessible uber-unique items, such as The Grandfather, at a more reasonable rate, and with the best possible stat rolls to boot. These new bosses are being added to both the Seasonal and Eternal realms for the game, meaning they won’t rotate out when the Season of Blood ends.
Quality of Life changes
In addition to all of the exciting new features covered above, Season of Blood is also bringing a huge number of small but impactful tweaks to existing aspects of the game. These are as follows:
General Improvements:
- Scrolls of Escape are now consumed if a Hardcore player disconnects while in combat, teleporting them to a safe location.
- Incenses now grant a bonus to experience and they persist after death.
- Experience bonuses are now multiplicative with world tier bonuses.
- Ten unlocked Waypoints have been added to Skip Campaign, 2 in each zone.
- All Renown Rewards now persist between Seasons and new characters.
- Overworld monsters in World Tier 3 and World Tier 4 now scale up to the player’s level rather than trailing behind.
- Two additional character slots have been added.
Towns and Vendors:
- The Occultist has set up shop by the Tree of Whispers.
- Stashes have been added to all small towns with Waypoints.
- Additional stashes have been added to capital cities near important vendors.
- Purveyors of Curiosities have set up shop closer to the Waypoints in Kyovashad, Zarbinzet, Ked Bardu, and Gea-Kul.
Mounts:
- Responsiveness – Mounts are now less likely to get stuck or slow down unexpectedly. Improved mounts automatically jumping over traversals.
- Speed – Base mount movement speed increased by 14%. Top speed remains unchanged. Achieving full speed using mouse and keyboard has been improved. The speed boost from Spur duration has been increased by 50%. Using Spur now breaks through barricades.
- Cooldowns – Manual dismount reduced from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. Forced dismount reduced from 30 seconds to 15 seconds. Dismount combat skill reduced from 10 seconds to 3 seconds.
Nightmare Dungeons:
- Teleporting to a Nightmare dungeon now takes the player inside the dungeon, instead of teleporting to the Dungeon Entrance.
- Events – Dungeon events monster density increased. NPCs no longer get one shot in later World Tiers.
- Traps – Overall readability has been improved. CC overall, from monsters and traps, has been greatly reduced.
- Paragon Glyph Experience has been increased.
- Objectives – Completely removed objectives from a handful of dungeons, just find the boss. Placed objectives on the critical path through the dungeon.
- Layouts – Redesigned many dungeon layouts. Additional changes were made to dungeon layouts to limit backtracking while preventing the dungeon from feeling too linear.
Nightmare Dungeon Afflictions:
- Backstabbers – Close monster attacks from behind cause you to become Vulnerable. Vulnerable damage taken is increased by X%.
- Monster Critical Resist – Monster attacks reduce the damage of your critical strikes for 3 seconds by X%, stacking up to Y%.
- Death Pulse – Prevent death pulses on monsters that have on-death explosions. Prevent death pulses from spawning on top of each other.
- Lightning Storm – Being ‘shocked’ while in the bubble grants 35% bonus movement speed for 5 seconds. Lightning Storm will only start when players are in combat. Lightning Storm will only start when the player has a direct path to the bubble.
- Drifting Shade – Persistent duration from 5 seconds to 3 seconds. Respawn time increased by 2 seconds.
World Events:
- Legion Events – Time between events reduced from 30 minutes to 25 minutes. Warning timer increased from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. Fixed an issue where the Legion Event pin would not display at the edge of the player’s minimaps if a Whisper was active for the Legion Event.
- World Boss spawns have been reduced from 6 hours to 3.5 hours. Warning timer increased from 30 minutes to 60 minutes. Fixed an issue where the World Boss pin would not display at the edge of the player’s minimaps if a Whisper was active for the World Boss. A message is broadcast to all players when the World Boss is 15 minutes from spawning.
Endgame Activities:
- Nightmare Sigils rewarded from Whisper Caches will now always be within 5 levels of the highest level Nightmare Dungeon the player has completed.
- Gold reward from Whisper Caches has been greatly increased.
- Experience from Whispers/Helltides has been increased substantially.
- Whisper Caches adhere to the item slot of the cache.
- Helltide Chests now have specific icons on the map to indicate their type.
UI/UX:
- Items can now be marked as “Favorite” or “Junk” in your stash or inventory. Favorited items cannot be sold or salvaged.
- Extracted Aspects with the same legendary power will now be grouped together when sorted in the inventory and stash.
- Sorting of normal affixes on items has been improved to be more consistent.
- Dungeon Map Tooltips that have active Whispers associated with them will now display the Aspect name and Description earned when completing that dungeon as well.
- Stash can now be searched and filtered to more quickly find items.
- Streamer mode has been implemented. Players that wish to hide identifying information, such as character name or Battle.net tag, can now find these settings in the Social Options menu.
- Combat text has an added option for hiding text (i.e. Vulnerable, Dodge, Fortified).
- Auto-run has been added. When pressing the bound key/button, the player character will continuously move in the direction currently faced or of the mouse cursor until another movement action or skill is initiated.
- Minimap has been zoomed out farther to capture a wider area.
Items:
- Gems no longer drop directly as rewards. Now players will earn Gem Shard materials they can use at the Jeweler to craft Gems.
- Enchantment costs have been updated: Initial enchantments will be more expensive, but later ones will be cheaper than previously.
- Crafting Materials will now drop in place of lower Item Power Normal, Magic, and Rare equipment in World Tiers 3 and 4.
- Higher-level monsters in World Tiers 3 and 4 drop Sacred and Ancestral items of greater Item Power potential.
- Normal Whisper Cache rewards now provide +10 Item Power. Upgraded Caches now provide +20 Item Power rewards.
- Helltide Cache rewards now provide +20 Item Power value.
As if all of the above wasn’t enough, there’s one last major new feature coming with Season of Blood: Diablo 4 is coming to Steam! The Steam version will feature full cross-play with other versions of the game, as well as Steam Deck compatibility, letting you protect Sanctuary while on the move.
So there you have it: a full run-down of what’s new in Diablo 4’s Season of Blood. This is a massive update and one that addresses many of the community’s problems with Diablo 4 as a whole. Based on this strong first showing, this may be the Season that puts Diablo 4 firmly back in the spotlight again. Stay tuned for more information as it’s revealed, and look out for Season of Blood’s launch on October 17, at 10 am Pacific.
