Diablo 4 Renown

Diablo 4 typically releases more boost events at the end of each season to help you complete your seasonal journey or other tasks before the season ends, preventing you from missing out on rewards.

Therefore, with Season 10 ending in about a month, Diablo 4 launched Mother's Blessing and Seasonal Splendor events on October 28th, helping you earn more gold and Infernal Warp within about a week.

The development team originally planned to launch Compass to Carnage immediately after these two events on November 4th, but for unknown reasons, both this event and Patch 2.4.3 have been delayed.

While this change will disrupt your game schedule, it means you have more time to prepare for Compass to Carnage. Below, we'll introduce the new release date and participation method for this event.

Postponed Release Date

Compass to Carnage was originally scheduled for November 4th, as the first two boost events ended on November 3rd. It has been postponed to November 25th and will run until December 2nd - just one week before Season 11 begins.

The reason for the postponement is irrelevant to you, as it doesn't change the fact that the date has been delayed. The only thing to note is that this means the event's nature as a mid-Season 10 boost event has changed to a catch-up event at the end of the season.

While this may result in more farming pressure in Compass to Carnage, you also gain more time to familiarize yourself with the event mechanics and gameplay. Incidentally, the release of patch 2.4.3 has been delayed to November 12th.

What Is Compass To Carnage?

During this event, you can earn more Infernal Compasses by completing related Diablo 4 endgame events, allowing you to unlock and participate in Infernal Hordes more frequently. In addition, you will receive the following two buffs:

• Clearing and sealing Chaos Rifts will grant you more Burning Aether.
• Chaos Waves appearing in Infernal Hordes will bring more enemies.

More Infernal Compass means you can complete more Infernal Hordes challenges, earning rewards by defeating the final boss Bartuc or Fell Council, as well as Viz-Jaq'taar Veneration Reputation points.

More Burning Aether means you can unlock Bartuc boss fight earlier and redeem more rewards after completing Infernal Hordes challenges.

How To Participate In Compass To Carnage?

In fact, the event itself only provides various buffs. To fully utilize these buffs, you still need to complete Infernal Hordes.

First, you need to farm Infernal Compasses by participating in Helltides and Nightmare dungeons. If you can obtain Greater chests in Helltides, or enter Nightmare dungeons using Chaos Rifts-related affixes, you will obtain more compasses, and the drop rate will be more consistent.

It's worth noting that you can also earn Whisper caches by completing bounty missions posted by Tree of Whispers. Greater Collection of Dungeon Keys will reward you with more Infernal Compasses and Nightmare Sigils.

Infernal Hordes are wave-based endgame events, each wave lasting one minute. Infernal Compasses have three rarities; the higher the rarity, the more Chaos Waves are triggered:

• Magic: 6 waves
• Rare: 8 waves
• Legendary: 10 waves

After completing each wave, the game allows you to choose an Infernal Offer, which adds a positive and a negative effect to all subsequent waves. This means the deeper you go into the waves, the higher the difficulty becomes.

During wave clearing, you'll obtain Burning Aether. Collecting 666 unlocks Bartuc boss fight. Defeating this boss rewards you with Spoils of Greater Materials and Season 10 exclusive Chaos Armor.

It's worth noting that Season 10 introduces a new Offer, Chaos Waves, which primarily increases the drop rate of Burning Aether. Generally, one Legendary Infernal Compass can trigger two Chaos Waves.

What Are Aether Events?

When you kill enemies in the current wave, Aether events are randomly triggered. The faster you kill, the more events are triggered. Currently available Aether events include Soulspires, Masses, and blisters that spawn powerful enemies.

Soulspires are the most challenging because they require you to kill enemies within Soulspire circle, but the monsters spawn relatively far apart. Therefore, you need to find ways to gather and pull enemies closer, such as by unlocking Offering The Hungry Spires.

Hellborne deserves additional attention. While not an Aether event, it can be summoned through Infernal Offerings or occasionally appear briefly in Chaotic waves. Defeating it yields a large amount of Burning Aether.

How To Maximize The Value Of Completing S10 Infernal Hordes?

Based on understanding the above mechanics, if you want to fully utilize the benefits of Compass to Carnage and farm Infernal Hordes faster for more rewards, consider the following suggestions:

• Increase your speed by equipping relevant gear to reach Aether event location more quickly.
• Balance your AoE and single-target damage output.
• It's best to challenge it in a group with other players.
• Utilize relevant Infernal Offers or other effects to force enemies to approach you in groups.

When choosing specific Infernal Offers, the following are recommended to unlock first:

• The Exalted Hordes: Increases normal monster damage and accelerates Aether events' spawn rate.
• The Aether Goblins: Increases monster health, and the event also spawns killable Aether Goblins - they drop more Burning Aether.
• The Stalking Devil: Summons Burning Butcher; defeating it grants 100+ Burning Aether.
• The Burning Rain: Generates an additional 9-15 Burning Aether after the current wave ends.
• The Wrath of Hellfire: Generates an additional 15-24 Burning Aether after the current wave ends.

While Chaos Armor is only available in Season 10, the other rewards you gain from Infernal Hordes offer longer-lasting benefits, so you should take advantage of Compass to Carnage boost!

That's all for this time. Please remember the delayed date and don't miss Compass to Carnage! We wish you all the best during the event!

In Diablo 4, besides upgrading characters and Paragon Board, another crucial way to enhance a character's overall capabilities is by continuously acquiring better gear and upgrading it.

To ensure your gear always has room to improve throughout the season, Diablo 4 introduced several gear upgrade mechanisms, primarily Tempering and Masterworking.

However, these two mechanisms have long been criticized for their excessive randomness, meaning that even consuming a large amount of upgrade materials may not yield the desired gear benefits.

To address this, Diablo 4 plans to radically change these two mechanisms starting with Season 11 and add a new Sanctification mechanism, further raising the room for gear upgrades.

We will now introduce these changes based on their performance in 2.5.0 PTR and analyze whether this overhaul is necessary.

What Is Masterworking?

This is an endgame crafting mechanic in Diablo 4. You need to farm gold and available materials beforehand and then craft them at the blacksmith to upgrade your gear's affixes by 8-12 levels.

It's generally not recommended to Masterworking items below level 750, as they are easily replaceable, and Masterworking them wastes materials.

Furthermore, Diablo 4 items between 750 and 800 can have their affixes upgraded by eight levels, and those above 800 can be upgraded by 12 levels. Therefore, the rarer and higher the level of your gear, the greater the value increase after Masterworking it.

However, this valuable mechanic has a tricky aspect: every four levels, only one random affix receives a 25% upgrade. This means that if you're unlucky, you might end up with useless affixes applied in three such upgrades.

While you can reset Masterworking by salvaging the gear, you only get a portion of the crafting materials back, not including gold, which is undoubtedly a waste of your resources.

What Changes Will Season 11 Bring?

To avoid potential waste from random upgrades, starting with Season 11, Masterworking will no longer boost gear affix effects, but will directly increase the gear's base stats.

Based on this, each Masterworking will randomly increase the gear's stats by 2-5 levels, up to a maximum of 20 levels. After that, you can perform one last Masterworking to obtain the ultimate affix bonus.

This ultimate bonus will upgrade a random non-high-level affix on the gear to Greater Affix. This upgrade result is changeable and will not affect the gear's existing Masterworking bonuses.

What Is Tempering?

This mechanism is more widely applicable than Masterworking. You can add relevant affixes to your gear by finding Tempering Manuals during your exploration. Furthermore, Tempering only requires materials, not gold.

The randomness of this mechanism lies in the fact that the affixes included in each Tempering Manual appear randomly. You might perform multiple Tempering runs but still fail to obtain your desired affix.

If you don't intend to waste time and materials gambling and think that obtaining an affix is ​​enough to "make do," you're mistaken, because a meaningless affix will actually lower the value of your gear.

Changes In Season 11

After the update, when Tempering your gear in Season 11, you can directly specify the affixes you want each time using the recipe in Tempering Manual, eliminating the frustration of randomness!

However, to balance this, a gear can now only have one Tempering affix instead of the previous maximum of three. But honestly, getting the best one faster is always better than endless gambling, isn't it?

What Is Sanctification?

This system, added in Season 11, allows your gear to continue to improve after Tempering and Masterworking! Once sanctification is complete, the gear is permanently "finished" and cannot be modified further.

The benefits of sanctification are random; they might include gaining a Sanctification affix or new powers, or even making your gear's durability never deplete. Regardless, they are well worth the investment.

How Are These Changes Reviewed?

While the performance and experience on PTR may not fully represent Season 11, it's sufficient to evaluate these new mechanics.

With the reduced randomness of the benefits from Tempering and Masterworking, you'll notice a subtle decrease in the amount of materials dropped, such as Obducite.

This is understandable, as the reduced or eliminated randomness means a lower chance of needing to reset Tempering and Masterworking results, while the materials required to complete the upgrade haven't increased.

Therefore, from this perspective, these changes allow the updated Tempering and Masterworking mechanics to function better, preventing imbalances.

Furthermore, Season 11 will allow you to craft some Tempering materials yourself. For example, Veiled Crystals and Forgotten Souls.

As for Sanctification system, because its buffs are random and the gear cannot be changed after completion, player opinions are mixed. After all, if you randomly get a useless Sanctification affix, you can't even reset it.

However, before 2.5.0 PTR ended, according to the player community and other statistics, the percentage of unlucky players was not large; most people could obtain the desired buffs through Sanctification.

Therefore, after Season 11 goes live, if these gear upgrade mechanisms in PTR don't undergo significant changes, you will be able to upgrade your gear and even your entire build more efficiently, resulting in a better season experience.

Season 11 is expected to officially launch on Tuesday, December 9th. At that time, you will be able to personally verify whether these new mechanisms will bring positive effects! Let's look forward to it!