What's Next for Diablo IV in 2024?
A look ahead of what future updates are planned
With Diablo IV closing its first year, let's delve into what's in store for 2024!
January 2024
Season 3
The first major update of 2024 will be the launch of Season 3, scheduled to release on Tuesday, January 23 as the Season of Blood concludes.
So far, we have limited details about Season 3, but we expect more news after Blizzard's Holiday break next week.
What we do know however:
The Gauntlet: Weekly Challenge Dungeon
The Gauntlet, a Seasonal Realm challenge, offers a competitive yet flexible Dungeon experience. Players must skillfully combine strategy and expertise to achieve high scores.
To increase their scores, players must gather Proofs of Might. These can be acquired by defeating Monsters and destroying objects within the Gauntlet.
Three Different Types of Leaderboards
From the preview images we've received, it looks like there will be three different types of leaderboards.
- One leaderboard will track our Ladder/Seasonal progress, which they've called "Trials" here.
- Another leaderboard will track the Weekly Gauntlet champions
- The final leaderboard is a historical leaderboard, and will display the top 10 player performances in the Gauntlet of all time. This leaderboard is called Hall of the Ancients.
Helltide Update
Helltides are changing to be active more frequently. A Helltide will now last 55 minutes, with a 5 minute break until the new rotation.
This should improve the bottleneck of
Duriel, Maggot King
Living Steel
Hopefully this update will also allow us to carry over
Aberrant CindersAdditional Season 3 Endgame Content
In the last Campfire Chat, the developers also mentioned additional Endgame Content coming with Season 3. We'll know more about this when they announce Season 3 late January.
April 2024
In April, Season 3 ends and a new Season will start again, anc we actually know of a few updates that have been planned for Season 4 already.
Big Itemizaton Overhaul Coming to Season 4
Itemization Update
In this update, Blizzard intends to fix the following issues with Itemization:
- Difficult to process all the items you find
- Difficult to find upgrades
- Virtually impossible to find a perfect item due to high degree in variability
- Affix combinations that don't make sense (up to 3 different plus Core Skills for example)
Expansion: Vessel of Hatred
Diablo IV's first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, is planned for late 2024 and picks up the story where the campaign ended. We'll be following Mephisto's storyline and his evil plans for Sanctuary.
Vessel of Hatred will unlock:
- A brand new region: Nahantu. This region lies south of Kehjistan is also known as the Torajan Jungles, featuring familiar places like Kurast and Travincal.
- A brand new playable class new to the Diablo universe. Datamining has shown hints towards the Spiritborn, but this is not confirmed in any way.
- Similarly, references towards Mercenaries have also been datamined, but we cannot confirm these will be part of the expansion.
To be Determined
Some additional updates have been mentioned, but no clear release plans have been shared about these as of yet.
- Extracted Aspects will be moved to the Codex of Power in some way, no longer taking up inventory space.
- Loadouts are planned to allow you to more easily switch between different builds.
- Loot filters have been discussed. They are definitely not coming before the Itemization update, because that would require a total redo.
- Better social features, e.g. a group finder, are planned to be released before the first expansion hits.
The changes to itemization are so significant that if we added a loot filter today, it wouldn't work after we changed [the itemization].
Legions
Helltide