Diablo 4 Items

For the past year, Diablo 4 has been updating its new seasons in a similar format: a unique seasonal power/mechanic, along with some related new enemy types and bosses, and optimizations to existing mechanics.

While this has become a formula, you still always hope for more fun in the next season. Several seasons have indeed achieved this, such as the still-unfinished Season 10, which won over many players with its Chaos Armor.

Therefore, as the final Diablo 4 season following in 2025, you can't help but have high hopes for Season 11. However, based on the information available, it may not necessarily perform better than Season 10.

Next, we will analyze why this conclusion is reached and whether it will negatively impact Diablo 4's development in 2026.

How Are Divine Gifts Performing?

Conceptually, this system is very cool, especially when you first equip these gifts. However, as you progress through the game, once you unlock all the gifts, you'll find it almost impossible to interact with the system anymore.

This isn't to say that gifts are useless, but rather that these passive upgrades only work silently, lacking many opportunities to interact with other mechanics or the combat itself - as seasonal mechanics, they should have a more noticeable presence.

Changes To The Gear Upgrade System

As the most notable change in Season 11, Tempering and Masterworking make the upgrade results of Diablo 4 items and related affixes more consistent. The game also introduces Sanctification as a way to further enhance items.

Overall, this change to enhancing affixes is a good thing, as you can directly choose the affixes you want. While being able to enhance only one affix might feel unsatisfying, at least it doesn't mean your weapon's strength has decreased.

Expanding the range of affix effects makes the upgrade system more interesting, giving you more incentive to re-roll and get the highest attribute for the enhanced affix.

Sanctification deserves separate attention. It allows your gear to randomly gain a bonus, but afterwards, your gear cannot be changed in any other way. The problem is that the chance of getting a valuable bonus is low.

Therefore, you might think it's great at first, but if you're unlucky, it could ruin one of your gears. To avoid this, you have to invest a lot of time playing the game to get multiple copies of the same gear just in case.

But this defeats the purpose of Tempering and Masterworking system optimization: the effort saved on affix rolling is ultimately wasted on sanctification.

Monster Combat Changes

While Season 11 makes monsters behave more intelligently in the early game, you'll encounter a variety of new enemy affixes in endgame. This not only makes the game look more cluttered but also requires more dodging and positioning to avoid these affixes.

Furthermore, after Season 11 is implemented, you only have a maximum of four potions during combat. But honestly, there are so many potions dropped in the game that you almost never have a chance to use them all.

If the above two points raise some concerns, the addition of lesser evils enriches the basic combat of Season 11. In The Pit, you can directly click on Belial to summon hordes of elite monsters, avoiding unnecessary running around.

Furthermore, Helltides will be occupied by Duriel, where you'll encounter new Duriel-themed monsters. You can utilize the seasonal Divine Gifts mechanic to enhance them and obtain more reward drops.

As the first entirely new boss added since Diablo 4's release, Azmodan boasts a massive size and a design clearly rooted in Diablo 4 aesthetics, making it one of the biggest highlights of Season 11.

Is The Tower Good Enough?

While this dungeon is brand new, those who have experienced 2.5.0 PTR will know that The Tower's gameplay itself offers little innovation, being quite similar to The Pit. Its real appeal lies in the return of the leaderboard.

However, frankly, very few players will actually reach the top of the leaderboard to obtain exclusive rewards, so your focus should be more on re-playability.

If a comparison must be made, The Tower is better in terms of map layout and monster spawn points, but its weakness lies in the final boss, Tower Guardian, which takes up too much time, especially if your builds lack single-target damage.

This leaves you no time to clear Pylons' shields to gain their buffs. While you can choose not to add them, this weakens the overall appeal of The Tower.

Interestingly, if you've played Greater Rifts in Diablo 3, you'll find it similar to The Tower, but the former rewards you with Bane of the Stricken gem.

This gem, when socketed into an amulet or ring, grants your enemies a damage debuff, increasing the more you attack, which is very helpful for builds lacking single-target damage.

Therefore, The Tower could easily adopt this mechanism, implementing a similar buff in the dungeon, or even adding a new Pylon based on it.

Healing Mechanism Update

The change in Season 11 to turn fortify into healing mechanics was essentially a good idea, but unfortunately, it didn't truly change the gameplay. If you're instantly killed or enemy damage is too high, even a large amount of healing won't help.

While the newest season seems to always be the best in Diablo 4, considering all the changes, if Season 11's content remains largely unchanged after launch, its brilliance might not surpass Season 10.

However, if we only evaluate a single season, Season 11 is far from being below average, so it's unlikely to make you lose interest in Diablo 4 in 2026, especially considering the new DLC coming next year!

Diablo 4 Season 11 will be released on December 9th. Based on the content revealed in PTR 2.5.0, Season 11 does indeed have many changes, but player feedback hasn't been entirely positive.

Besides the rework and enhancement of some items, most changes have significantly reduced build strength. In recent developer interviews, the official team confirmed that they will adjust some aspects that players are concerned about before the official release of Season 11.

Masterworking And Tempering

Masterworking is a system that allows players to gradually upgrade equipment by consuming materials, slightly increasing its affix values. Tempering is a system that adds extra special affixes to equipment.

However, in the PTR, both systems were significantly nerfed, preventing players from maximizing equipment strength, which limited character progression.

After receiving feedback from the PTR, the development team plans to revert some of the Masterworking and Tempering systems, but the specific values and methods have not yet been announced. It's speculated that this might be achieved by increasing base affix values or adjusting tempering effects.

Currently, it's confirmed that each piece of equipment can only have one Tempering affix, reduced from two on the PTR to one. This means that equipment customization flexibility and maximum power will decrease, but combined with power reverts, the overall effect still needs to be observed.

Sanctification System Risk Reduced

Sanctification is a seasonal theme mechanic that allows players to imbue equipment with powerful divine power, but the process is risky. It's somewhat similar to Vaal Orbs in PoE; it can significantly enhance your item or remove a core affix, rendering it useless.

The official plan is to remove Indestructible results, and for top-tier unique equipment, such as Mythic and Ancestral unique items, the chance of their core attributes being randomly removed during sanctification has been reduced. However, this risk isn't completely eliminated; this is primarily to protect players' important Diablo 4 items.

The Tower Gameplay Optimization

The development team will rework the overly narrow and visually cluttered map layouts in The Tower, making them more open and transparent. This is because players constantly need to find open areas to climb the rankings in The Tower. This change aims to make it easier for all players to find ideal maps, making competition more about player skill rather than luck.

A Solo Leaderboard will also be introduced in the future, allowing unteamed players to compete on a level playing field. Furthermore, a mandatory character view function will be implemented, preventing players from hiding their leaderboard character configurations. This is to prevent some players from exploiting game loopholes to obtain unfair rankings.

Regarding The Tower rewards, regardless of other players' performance, you will receive generous rewards for personally clearing certain tower floors. Additionally, rarer rewards will be provided based on your ranking range among all players on the server. Players at the top of the ladder will receive exclusive cosmetic rewards such as transmog, titles, and wings to commemorate their achievements.

Class Balance

Regarding class balance, the official statement indicates that class stats in Season 10 were too inflated, and Season 11 will return to normal levels. In the PTR, only Barbarians could reach The Pit Tier 120 or higher; other classes were generally limited to around The Pit Tier 100.

The developers stated that on the live servers, all classes will feel about a 5 to 10 Pit Tier increase in strength compared to their current state, ensuring a comfortable gameplay experience even when leveling Glyphs to 100.

Teleport And CDR Affixes

On the other hand, there has been negative feedback from the community regarding the ability of sorcerers to use Teleport infinitely. The development team doesn't intend to completely abolish this playstyle but hopes to make it healthier through two methods. One is possibly by reworking the unique equipment, The Oculus, where players who want to use this playstyle will have to sacrifice a significant number of other attributes. The other is to reduce the difficulty of obtaining Teleport Cooldown Reduction affix.

This doesn't only affect sorcerers - CDR is a core affix for many current builds, and it's very difficult for players to roll this affix. The official plan is to add CDR as a viable affix to rings and gloves to make these builds easier to achieve their requirement.

Boss HP Reduction

In the live servers, HP of most bosses will be reduced, ranging from 10% to 60%. This will reduce HP of endgame bosses. This means that a fight that originally took 5 minutes may only take 2 minutes after the change. This significantly speeds up the pace of obtaining boss rewards, improving the game experience, especially for endgame gameplay that requires repeatedly farming bosses.

QoL And Economic System

Currently, if a player completes the campaign with one character, subsequent characters who skip the campaign still need to manually traverse the entire map to unlock all waypoints and the fog of war. This is considered very cumbersome by many players. In Season 11, characters who skip the campaign will automatically gain access to all waypoints and the entire map, saving players a significant amount of time.

The development team is also considering changing the key of lair bosses to a non-tradable, account-bound currency, stored on the currency page. This is primarily to prevent the material duplication loophole that has appeared before and maintain the stability of the game's economy. However, this change may not be implemented in Season 11.

These are the specific changes in Season 11 discussed in the developer interview. The development team also urged players to pay attention to The Game Awards on December 12th, hinting that news about the next DLC and a new class will be announced at TGA.