Diablo news and guides

Diablo V Director Says the Right Build Should Beat Any Challenge

2026-10-02T00:50:08.830-07:00

How much of an action game should Diablo actually be?

It sounds like a slightly ridiculous question about a series built around hitting demons until increasingly colourful objects fall out of them, but it has become one of the more interesting debates surrounding Diablo V. Path of Exile co-creator Chris Wilson recently questioned whether modern Diablo has drifted too far toward reflexes and moment-to-moment execution, and now Diablo V Senior Game Director Joe Shely has provided a surprisingly clear answer about where Blizzard wants the next game to sit.

Yes, Diablo V will require some player skill.

But the build is supposed to win the fight.

Diablo V Will Be More INT and STR Than DEX

Shely describes Diablo V's combat philosophy using traditional RPG attributes. There will still be what he calls DEX mechanics, meaning positioning, timing and moment-to-moment execution. But overall, Blizzard wants Diablo V to behave more like an INT/STR game, where planning, investment and character construction matter more.

Most importantly, Shely says Blizzard is designing around a fundamental ARPG principle: any challenge should be beatable with the right build.

That matters because Chris Wilson's surprisingly hopeful reaction to Diablo V came with one major reservation. He believes Diablo combat has become increasingly "arcadey" since Diablo III, shifting some of the emphasis away from character preparation and toward the player's ability to dodge, position and react quickly.

There is nothing inherently wrong with action-heavy combat. Diablo IV can feel excellent when movement, attacks and enemy mechanics all click together. The concern is what happens when mechanical execution becomes more important than the collection of skills, equipment and terrible statistical decisions you have spent 80 hours assembling.

Your Build Is Supposed to Be the Solution

Shely's answer suggests Blizzard understands the distinction.

A difficult boss may still require you to move out of something glowing ominously on the floor. You will probably still have to aim attacks, react to enemies and occasionally discover that standing directly underneath a giant demon's axe was not an advanced strategy.

But Diablo V wants character building to remain the actual solution.

That philosophy fits neatly with several other systems Blizzard has already discussed. We know Diablo V wants loot to borrow more ideas from Diablo II, including meaningful stat requirements and stronger item identity. Blizzard is also building a more procedural version of Sanctuary, where revisiting an area may not produce exactly the same layout or situation every time.

Then there is the enormous class roster. Diablo V is planned to launch with more classes than any previous Diablo game has ever contained, which only works if those classes support genuinely different ways of solving problems rather than simply providing different animations for the same dodge-and-attack rhythm.

This Does Not Mean Diablo V Is Becoming Diablo II Again

It is worth keeping expectations under control.

Diablo V is still targeting a Spring 2029 release, and Blizzard has repeatedly stressed that many systems remain early in development. Shely has not revealed how bosses work, how severe movement mechanics will become or whether Diablo V will reduce the sort of level scaling that Wilson has also criticised.

What we have is a design principle rather than a finished combat system.

Still, it is a useful principle.

Diablo has always been at its best when the answer to an impossible encounter is not simply "press dodge better."

Sometimes the answer should be finding a ridiculous sword, rebuilding half your character, discovering an interaction nobody sane would have predicted and returning twenty minutes later to turn the monster into soup.

According to Joe Shely, Diablo V still believes that is what an action RPG should be.

Diablo 4 Accidentally Gave Players Free Cosmetics, and Blizzard Says Keep Them

2026-10-02T00:37:03.192-07:00

Diablo IV bugs have deleted rewards, broken quests, confused wardrobes and occasionally sent bosses wandering somewhere they were very clearly not supposed to be.

For once, though, a bug worked in the player's favour.

Shortly after Patch 3.2.2 went live on September 30, some Diablo IV players logged in and discovered cosmetics appearing on their accounts that they had never actually earned or purchased. Blizzard investigated, discovered that the items were being granted unintentionally, fixed the problem and then made the rarest possible live-service decision.

You can keep them.

Blizzard Says the Accidental Cosmetics Will Not Be Removed

Community Manager filthierich confirmed that the problem appeared around the launch of Patch 3.2.2 and caused certain cosmetics to be automatically awarded when affected players logged into Diablo IV. Blizzard has since stopped additional items from being granted, but anyone fortunate enough to receive something before the fix will retain it permanently.

So if you logged in after the patch and wondered why your wardrobe suddenly contained something unfamiliar, congratulations. Sanctuary has finally experienced a loot bug where the appropriate response is not opening a support ticket.

Blizzard's official clarification does not specify exactly which cosmetics were affected, how many players received them or whether every affected account received the same items. The important part is considerably simpler: the grants were accidental, the bug has been fixed, and Blizzard has no plans to claw the cosmetics back.

Diablo 4 Has Been Giving Away Quite a Lot of Clothing Lately

The timing makes the whole thing slightly funnier because Diablo IV has already spent the last few months distributing cosmetics through almost every method imaginable.

In August, players began finding random free cosmetics inside Diablo IV's personalized shop, although those legitimate gifts did not appear for everyone. One player might find a free wand, another a bow, while somebody else received the traditional Blizzard reward of absolutely nothing.

More recently, Game Pass subscribers were offered more than 50 Diablo IV cosmetics after connecting their subscription to Battle.net. Blizzard has also continued filling seasonal tracks, events and promotions with armour sets, weapons, portals and enough decorative skulls to suggest Sanctuary employs an entire department devoted exclusively to accessories.

The Patch 3.2.2 cosmetics are different because nobody was supposed to receive them this way at all.

This Is Probably the Best Kind of Diablo Bug

Patch 3.2.2 itself was mostly a repair job. Blizzard fixed problems with the Season of Hell's Legacy questline, Chamber of Bone rewards, Nihlathak teleporting outside his arena, several Rune interactions and various Tower and UI issues. None of those changes mentioned a surprise wardrobe lottery.

Then players logged in and discovered one anyway.

There is also a sensible reason for Blizzard not to remove the items. Taking cosmetics away from players after they appeared automatically would create considerably more frustration than simply allowing the lucky accounts to keep them, especially when players did nothing to exploit the issue.

It is a refreshingly simple solution.

The bug happened.

Blizzard fixed it.

The people who got free stuff keep the free stuff.

Check Your Wardrobe

Additional accidental grants have now stopped, so repeatedly logging in and out is unlikely to summon free armour through sheer optimism. But if you played around the release of Patch 3.2.2, checking your cosmetic collection may still be worthwhile.

Diablo IV players have spent years arguing about cosmetic prices, Battle Pass rewards and whether older seasonal cosmetics should eventually return.

This time Blizzard found an entirely new distribution model.

Make a mistake.

Give players cosmetics.

And, remarkably, leave everyone happier than before.

Diablo 3 Season 40 Starts Today: Light’s Calling and Angelic Crucibles Return

2026-10-02T00:29:52.952-07:00

Diablo III is thirteen years old, has been replaced by Diablo IV, has another sequel officially waiting in 2029, and apparently has absolutely no intention of going quietly.

Season 40 begins today, October 2, at 5:00 PM CEST, bringing back the Light’s Calling seasonal theme and its wonderfully excessive Angelic Crucibles. At this point Diablo III is less a retired game and more that one Nephalem who keeps turning up for work despite nobody being entirely certain who is still paying them.

And honestly, there are worse problems to have.

Angelic Crucibles Are Back

Light’s Calling originally appeared in Season 27, and its central mechanic remains Angelic Crucibles. These consumable items allow players to Sanctify any equippable Legendary item, transforming it into Ancient-level quality while also giving it one of three special class-specific Sanctified Powers at random.

That makes Season 40 considerably more interesting than a simple numerical reset. Sanctified Powers can fundamentally change how familiar builds behave, and they encourage exactly the sort of ridiculous experimentation Diablo III has become very good at during its later life.

Blizzard is no longer pretending these recurring seasons represent enormous new chapters for the game. Diablo III is firmly in its rotating-season era, something we discussed when asking whether Diablo III is still worth playing in 2026. What keeps the system working is that some of those old themes were genuinely fun, and Light’s Calling belongs near the top of that pile.

Season 40 Haedrig’s Gift Sets

As always, completing Chapters II, III and IV of the Season Journey rewards Haedrig’s Gifts containing pieces of a class set. You only get one complete set this way per season across Hardcore and Non-Hardcore, so opening everything on the character you actually want to play remains highly recommended.

Barbarian: Horde of the Ninety Savages
Crusader: Aegis of Valor
Demon Hunter: Gears of Dreadlands
Monk: Patterns of Justice
Witch Doctor: Mundunugu’s Regalia
Wizard: Typhon’s Veil
Necromancer: Masquerade of the Burning Carnival

The seasonal Conquests also rotate again, including Speed Demon, Boss Mode, Curses!, Years of War and the challenge to level three Legendary Gems to 65.

Diablo III Somehow Reached Season 40

The number itself deserves a moment.

Season 40.

When Season 38 launched earlier this year, Diablo III already felt like a fascinating survivor from another era of Blizzard. Six months later, we are starting Season 40 while Diablo IV is deep into its own seasonal cycle and Diablo V is officially scheduled for Spring 2029.

Blizzard has increasingly described Diablo as a franchise where older games do not necessarily disappear when the next one arrives. We have already seen that philosophy applied to Diablo IV, with the studio confirming that Diablo IV seasons are expected to continue after Diablo V launches as long as players remain interested.

Diablo III is the evidence that this can actually work.

It no longer receives giant expansions or completely new endgame systems. Instead, Blizzard rotates some of its strongest seasonal ideas back into circulation and gives players another excuse to create a fresh character, rediscover an old build and spend a weekend turning Greater Rifts into brightly coloured particle soup.

Season 40 Begins Today

Blizzard’s official Season 40 preview confirms that Light’s Calling begins today, October 2, with Angelic Crucibles, returning seasonal rewards and the latest Haedrig’s Gift rotation.

There is a new Diablo game coming in three years. Diablo IV is still receiving major seasonal content. Sanctuary currently has considerably more modern ways to consume your free time.

And yet somewhere this evening, thousands of people are going to create another level-one Diablo III character.

Season 40 has arrived.

Apparently Hell still has monsters left.

Diablo 4 Season 15: How to Turbo Farm Soul Splinters, Runes and Gems

2026-10-01T03:07:08.073-07:00

Kurast Undercity has a merchant that can turn spare Gold and crafting materials into one of Season 15’s fastest shortcuts for socketable power.

Diablo 4 Season 15 has created a familiar endgame problem: the game gives you several excellent new toys, then quietly asks whether you have enough time to farm all of them. Soul Splinters are central to the seasonal buildcrafting, Runes matter more than ever, and high-tier Gems can devour resources at a rate normally associated with small infrastructure projects.

There is, however, a remarkably direct shortcut hiding inside Kurast Undercity. With the right War Plan nodes, a Portal Prankster can unlock the Cabochon Merchant after the District Boss. The node description says this merchant sells Runes and Gems for Gold. That is true, but it undersells the interesting part: the current shop can also stock Soul Splinters, and the inventory can be refreshed. If your account already has a healthy pile of Gold and crafting materials, this becomes less of a normal farming route and more of a controlled shopping spree.

The Cabochon Merchant can stock Soul Splinters alongside Runes and Gems. Lesser Soul Splinters shown here cost 400,000 Gold each.

1. Unlock the two War Plan nodes that make the farm possible

The loop starts in the Undercity War Plan tree. You want Gutter Filth and Bauble Day. Season 15 finally made War Plan progression much friendlier for alt-heavy accounts, and our guide to the account-wide War Plans change explains how that progression is shared. The important thing here is that the character you are using still needs the correct Undercity setup.

Gutter Filth gives every Beacon activation inside the Undercity a small chance to summon a Portal Prankster. That means Beacons are no longer merely part of the Attunement route. They are lottery tickets with legs. Hit as many as you reasonably can, and when the goblin appears, stop pretending the timer is your biggest problem and kill it before it escapes.

Gutter Filth gives Beacon activations a chance to summon a Portal Prankster. This is the node that creates the opportunity.

Bauble Day is the second half of the machine. If you kill a Portal Prankster during the run, the Cabochon Merchant appears after the District Boss. That merchant sells Runes and Gems for Gold. We have already covered how War Plans can turn Kurast Undercity into a loot machine, but for this route the merchant is the real prize.

Bauble Day makes the Cabochon Merchant appear after the District Boss when a Portal Prankster has been killed during the run.

2. Run the Undercity for Beacons, not sightseeing

Once the two nodes are active, the actual run is simple. Enter Kurast Undercity, keep moving, activate Beacons, and watch for a Portal Prankster. The goblin behaves like a Treasure Goblin with an advanced degree in being irritating: it can move through portals and waste precious seconds if your build lacks burst damage or mobility. A fast speed-farming setup is therefore ideal. You do not need to kill every demon that expresses an interest in your personal space. You need enough time, enough Attunement to make the run worthwhile, and the goblin dead.

After killing the Portal Prankster, finish the District Boss. The Cabochon Merchant will then be available, and that is when the run changes from dungeon farming into economics. If the Prankster never appears, there is no merchant trigger to cash in at the end, so the whole method is naturally streaky. The advantage is that each successful appearance can be squeezed for far more than one purchase.

3. Buy Soul Splinters first when the price is absurdly good

The most striking item in the shop is the Soul Splinter. The current inventory shown during testing offered Lesser Splinters for just 400,000 Gold each. For an established endgame character, that is barely money. It is especially attractive when you need several copies for upgrading or simply want to test different seasonal trade-offs without farming the exact drop again.

That matters because Season 15’s Splinters are not generic stat sticks. Some completely change how a build behaves, and the choice of Diablo, Baal or Mephisto and their associated seasonal paths can push you toward different endgame activities. The Cabochon Merchant does not replace the entire seasonal progression system, but it is an excellent way to fill gaps in the socketable part of your setup.

Do not assume every merchant inventory will look identical. Stock is randomized, and that is precisely why refreshes matter. The useful rule is simple: when a Splinter you actually want appears for pocket-change Gold, buy it. Diablo has offered considerably worse investment opportunities.

4. Use Rune prices as a target farm, not an excuse to buy everything

Runes occupy the middle ground between wonderfully cheap and 'perhaps we should consult the accountant.' Current merchant stock demonstrates several price bands: some Runes appear at around 500,000 Gold, others at 5 million, and high-end examples can reach 50 million. The exact value depends on what the shop rolls, so the best use of the merchant is targeted purchasing rather than clearing the shelves because they are there.

Rune prices can vary dramatically by tier. This stock shows examples at 500,000, 5 million and 50 million Gold.

Season 15 also gave Runes a second life through the hidden Diablo II-style recipes inside the Horadric Cube. If you are hunting a specific combination, the merchant can save an enormous amount of random drop farming. Our guide to Season 15’s hidden Diablo II Runewords covers why familiar names such as Tal, Eth and Jah suddenly matter in a very different way.

5. Gems are the Gold sink, so buy with a purpose

Gems are where the Cabochon Merchant stops pretending to be charitable. The current pricing ladder shown in the shop is brutally clear: a Flawless Gem can cost around 5 million Gold, Royal Gems around 50 million, and Grand Gems around 500 million. That is not a farming method for a fresh seasonal character. It is a conversion tool for accounts sitting on billions and wondering what the pile is actually for.

The Gem ladder gets expensive quickly: Flawless examples at 5 million Gold, Royal Gems at 50 million and Grand Gems at 500 million.

Still, there are situations where that price makes sense. High-end Gems have become a major part of character power, and we have already looked at how filling top-end Gem slots can become its own endgame grind. If the only thing separating your build from the next upgrade is one Gem and your Gold reserve resembles a telephone number, buying the problem away is perfectly rational.

The wrong approach is buying expensive Gems merely because the merchant finally appeared. The right approach is arriving with a shopping list. Know the Gem type and tier you need before you start rerolling. Sanctuary already contains enough gambling without turning grocery shopping into another one.

6. The first refresh is cheap. The next ones are paid in Forgotten Souls

The merchant’s inventory can be refreshed. The first refresh is the pleasant one: you get a free reroll of the stock. After that, additional restocks cost 666 Forgotten Souls each. At that point the bottleneck stops being Gold and becomes one of Diablo 4’s most useful crafting materials.

This is why the farm can feel spectacular for a well-stocked account and terrible for a character still trying to fund basic enchanting. Forgotten Souls are used elsewhere, so repeatedly throwing 666 of them at the merchant is not free just because no Gold leaves the wallet. Use the free refresh every time. Use paid refreshes only when you are actively targeting something valuable enough to justify them.

7. Convert Baleful Fragments into Forgotten Souls when you need more rerolls

There is one useful pressure valve. At the Alchemist, Baleful Fragments can be transmuted into Forgotten Souls. The current recipe converts 100 Baleful Fragments into 10 Forgotten Souls and charges 250,000 Gold. This lets you turn a large stockpile of Baleful Fragments into more merchant refreshes instead of simply waiting for Souls to accumulate naturally.

At the Alchemist, 100 Baleful Fragments can be converted into 10 Forgotten Souls for 250,000 Gold.

The numbers also show why you should not treat paid rerolls casually. Starting from zero Forgotten Souls, one 666-Soul merchant refresh requires 67 transmutations to get at least 666 Souls. That consumes roughly 6,700 Baleful Fragments and 16.75 million Gold before you have bought a single item from the new stock. It is a useful conversion, not a licence to mash the Restock button until your materials file for bankruptcy.

8. Farm Forgotten Souls from the activities you already run

The better long-term plan is to collect Forgotten Souls as part of normal endgame play and reserve conversion for emergencies. The material tooltip itself lists several sources: salvaging Ancestral equipment, Salvage Spoils from War Plans, Legion Events, Tortured Gifts in Helltides, Tree of Whispers caches, Infernal Hordes and Kurast Undercity. In other words, you do not need a separate full-time career in Forgotten Soul production.

Forgotten Souls come from multiple endgame sources, including salvaging Ancestral gear, War Plans, Helltides, Whispers, Infernal Hordes and Kurast Undercity.

That makes this merchant route fit naturally into the broader endgame instead of replacing it. Diablo 4 now has so many overlapping activities that almost every endgame road eventually feeds another progression system. Here, the elegant loop is to earn Souls and Baleful Fragments while doing the things you already wanted to do, then spend those reserves only when the Cabochon Merchant gives you a genuine shortcut.

9. The best farming loop

For most endgame players, the efficient version looks like this: set the Undercity War Plan to include Gutter Filth and Bauble Day, enter with a fast build, activate Beacons aggressively, kill the Portal Prankster when it appears, finish the District Boss, buy any useful Soul Splinters, Runes or Gems, use the free stock refresh, and only then decide whether a 666-Forgotten-Soul reroll is worth the price. When Souls run low, rebuild them through normal endgame play or convert excess Baleful Fragments at the Alchemist.

1. Unlock Gutter Filth in the Undercity War Plan.

2. Unlock Bauble Day so a killed Portal Prankster can summon the Cabochon Merchant after the boss.

3. Activate as many Beacons as practical during the run.

4. Kill the Portal Prankster before it escapes.

5. Defeat the District Boss and open the merchant.

6. Prioritize cheap Soul Splinters and specific Runes you actually need.

7. Treat high-tier Gems as deliberate Gold sinks, not impulse purchases.

8. Always use the free stock refresh.

9. Spend 666 Forgotten Souls on extra restocks only when the target is worth it.

10. Convert 100 Baleful Fragments into 10 Forgotten Souls at the Alchemist when necessary.

The real trick is knowing when to stop

This farm is powerful because it converts resources you can control into rewards that are normally random. Gold becomes Runes and Gems. Gold plus Forgotten Souls becomes repeated chances at better shop stock. Baleful Fragments can become more Forgotten Souls. The whole thing is very Diablo: kill monsters, collect several currencies, feed them into increasingly suspicious machines, and eventually emerge with the exact purple rock you wanted.

But the farm is at its best when used surgically. If you need one Rune, a handful of Soul Splinters, or a specific high-tier Gem, the Cabochon Merchant can be one of Season 15’s fastest shortcuts. If you are simply refreshing because the button exists, the merchant will happily convert a week of crafting materials into a valuable lesson about self-control.

Two Weeks Into Diablo 4 Season 15, Warlock Still Rules the Tower

2026-10-01T02:43:13.811-07:00

Two weeks ago, Diablo 4 Season 15 launched with one fairly obvious question hanging over it.

Did Blizzard actually fix the Warlock?

During the PTR, the class was producing numbers that looked less like damage and more like somebody had accidentally pasted a bank account into the combat log. We covered Warlock builds reportedly hitting 80,000 trillion damage, and by early September we were already asking whether Warlock might completely dominate Season 15.

At the time, there was an important disclaimer: it was the PTR. Numbers could change. Bugs could be fixed. Blizzard still had time to adjust the class before millions of players were allowed near it.

Well, we have live data now.

The Warlock is still ridiculous.

1,000 Warlocks Have Already Cleared Tower 150

The current Tower leaderboard paints a fairly brutal picture. All 1,000 players displayed on the Warlock leaderboard have cleared Tower Tier 150. That means clearing the highest listed Tower tier is no longer enough to make you unusual among serious Warlock players. It is effectively the entry requirement for appearing on the leaderboard at all.

Blazing Scream is the main culprit. The build that looked terrifying during testing has survived into the live season as the defining Warlock setup, combining enormous damage with enough consistency to make Tower 150 look considerably less frightening than Blizzard probably intended.

This is not completely surprising. Our Season 15 PTR review already highlighted the enormous gap between competitive builds, and Warlock was the clearest example. What is surprising is how much of that gap survived the journey from test server to live game.

Paladin Is Still Looking Up at Tier 150

Then there is Paladin.

At the time of the latest leaderboard review, Paladin remained the only class without a Tower 150 clear. The top three Paladins had reached Tier 148, and every single top-20 clear was using Shield of Retribution.

That last part may actually be the more worrying statistic.

We already looked at Blizzard's attempts to improve the class when Judgement received double single-target damage for Season 15. Paladin also received broader scaling improvements, yet the live leaderboard suggests those changes have not produced the same range of competitive endgame options enjoyed by some other classes.

Season 15 even removed some possibilities before launch, including Paladin's ability to use X'Fal's Corroded Signet, which becomes particularly interesting now that Damage over Time has become one of the season's defining mechanics.

Season 15 Is Becoming the Season of Damage Over Time

Warlock is not the only class telling us something interesting about the current meta.

Sorcerer has dozens of Tower 150 clears, with Firewall and Burning effects playing a major role. Druid's strongest pushes revolve heavily around Rabies. Rogue's Penetrating Shot builds are using Poison Imbuement. Spiritborn's leading Stinger setups are also built around Poison.

The common language is Damage over Time.

Season 15 introduced new ways for DoT effects to scale, including Deadly Strike mechanics and powerful interactions with seasonal systems. The result is a leaderboard where poison, burning and other lingering damage effects keep appearing wherever players are pushing the absolute limit.

Warlock simply appears to have received the largest flamethrower.

The PTR Warning Was Correct

This is the interesting part.

Back in August, it would have been easy to dismiss Warlock's absurd PTR numbers as exactly what a test realm is supposed to uncover. Players find broken interactions, Blizzard collects the data, numbers are adjusted and everyone starts again on launch day.

Except the basic prediction survived.

Warlock entered Season 15 enormously powerful. Blazing Scream became the dominant build. Tower 150 clears multiplied until the entire visible Warlock leaderboard was filled with them, while Paladin still had not crossed the same finish line.

Blizzard did not necessarily need every class to perform identically. Diablo has never worked that way, and perfect balance would probably be considerably less entertaining than players imagine.

But there is a difference between having a strongest class and having 1,000 Warlocks sitting at Tower 150 while another class is still trying to reach it once.

We asked before launch whether Season 15 would become the season of Warlock.

Two weeks later, the Tower has supplied its answer.

Diablo Immortal Is Under EU Consumer Protection Scrutiny Over Virtual Currency and Game Design

2026-10-01T02:13:42.970-07:00

Diablo Immortal has spent four years developing increasingly elaborate ways to separate demons from their limbs and players from their Eternal Orbs. Now some of those systems are receiving attention from European consumer authorities. The EU's Consumer Protection Cooperation Network has confirmed that it launched a coordinated action against Microsoft and Activision Blizzard earlier in 2026 covering both Diablo Immortal and Call of Duty Mobile.

This is not a fine, a court ruling or a declaration that Diablo Immortal has broken EU law. The process is still at the dialogue stage. But the list of practices being examined is broad enough to make this considerably more interesting than another argument about whether one cosmetic costs too much.

Virtual Currency Is Only Part of the Investigation

The CPC Network says its concerns include the use and sale of in-game virtual currencies, collection of consumer data, potentially addictive game design, preselected parental-control settings, direct exhortations to children, insufficient information before purchases and unilateral blocking of gaming accounts.

That is an unusually wide net. Diablo Immortal's economy has always relied heavily on virtual currencies, bundles and layered purchasing systems, but European authorities are not looking only at the price of Eternal Orbs. They are examining how players are presented with purchases, how vulnerable consumers are treated and whether the structure surrounding those transactions complies with EU consumer law.

The timing is particularly interesting because Diablo Immortal has just launched its large Spawn collaboration. As we covered in our look at the divide between the Spawn event's free content and premium cosmetics, much of the actual crossover is free while the full Crimson Cloak cosmetic sits inside a Phantom Market and Lil' Violator appears in a separate bundle.

That does not automatically make either system illegal.

It does make the broader discussion about how games communicate prices considerably less theoretical.

The EU Wants Virtual Currency Prices to Be Clearer

The CPC Network has already published broader principles for virtual currencies in games. Its position is that players should receive clear and transparent pricing information, including information that makes the real-world cost of digital content understandable before a purchase is made.

That sounds simple until you remember how many games place an intermediate currency between your credit card and the object you actually want. A skin does not cost €17. It costs 1,700 Shiny Demon Coins, which arrive in bundles of 1,250 or 2,600 because apparently arithmetic is now part of the endgame.

The EU's principles specifically warn against practices that obscure the cost of digital content or effectively force consumers to purchase more virtual currency than they need.

Diablo Immortal is hardly alone here. The CPC Network announced new coordinated actions against several other game companies on September 30, covering titles including Minecraft, Valorant, Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga. The wider message is therefore aimed at the industry rather than Diablo specifically.

Children and Addictive Design Are Also Part of the Conversation

The investigation becomes more serious once it moves beyond price presentation. The CPC Network's Diablo Immortal action also lists potentially addictive design and practices affecting children among its concerns.

European regulators have increasingly focused on systems that use urgency, repeated prompts, reward loops or other design techniques capable of influencing spending behaviour, particularly when younger players are involved. The EU's broader consumer policy work now treats those questions as part of digital fairness rather than simply leaving them to parental judgement.

Again, that does not mean the CPC Network has concluded Diablo Immortal deliberately exploits players. It means those systems are among the issues being discussed with Microsoft and Activision Blizzard.

Diablo Immortal Has Also Been Improving Its Less Commercial Systems

It would be equally misleading to reduce

Diablo 5 Says the Right Build Should Beat Any Challenge, Not Just Fast Reflexes

2026-10-01T02:04:07.145-07:00

Diablo V is going to have dodging, positioning and all the other moment-to-moment decisions modern action RPGs have taught us to expect. But Blizzard has now drawn a surprisingly clear line around what it does not want the game to become. According to Senior Game Director Joe Shely, Diablo V should fundamentally be a game where planning your character, investing in the right systems and building intelligently matter more than possessing the reflexes of a caffeinated teenager.

Shely described Diablo V as having some “DEX” mechanics, meaning moment-to-moment execution, but said the game will ultimately be much more of an “INT/STR game” built around planning and investment. More importantly, he spelled out what Blizzard considers a core rule for the genre: any challenge should be beatable with the right build.

That is one sentence, but it tells us an awful lot about what Blizzard thinks Diablo V is supposed to be.

Diablo V Is Not Supposed to Be a Reflex Test

The timing is particularly interesting because Path of Exile co-creator Chris Wilson recently raised almost exactly this concern. Wilson said he was cautiously optimistic about Diablo V, but worried that the series had increasingly moved toward a more arcade-like style where player dexterity mattered more than the RPG machinery underneath. We covered Wilson's surprisingly hopeful reaction to Diablo V, including his enthusiasm for the game's darker presentation and more traditional inventory ideas.

Shely did not directly name Wilson in his statement, so this should not be treated as an official back-and-forth between the two developers. But the design philosophy he described addresses the same question almost perfectly.

You should still need to move out of the fire.

You just should not need to become Elden Lord before Diablo lets you finish the campaign.

The Build Is Supposed to Be the Answer

The important part is not that Diablo V will contain less action. It is that Blizzard apparently wants character construction to remain the primary way players solve problems. If a boss is destroying you, the answer might be better resistances, different skill interactions, another weapon, a redesigned passive setup or simply more investment into the character.

That fits remarkably well with what Blizzard has already revealed about Diablo V's attempt to make loot feel more like Diablo II. Items are supposed to have stronger visual and mechanical identities, Sets and Runewords are returning, and Blizzard has even experimented with old-fashioned stat requirements. None of those systems matter very much if every difficult encounter ultimately boils down to whether the player can press dodge at precisely the correct millisecond.

The RPG needs to be allowed to win occasionally.

That Does Not Mean Standing Still and Holding One Button

There is an obvious opposite danger here. Diablo II fans sometimes romanticize older combat to the point where one could imagine Diablo V consisting entirely of spreadsheet preparation followed by a character standing in one spot while Hell politely explodes around them.

That is not what Shely said either.

Diablo V will still contain those DEX elements. Positioning, reacting to enemy attacks and making decisions during combat remain part of the formula. The difference appears to be one of balance. Execution can improve how well you perform, but Blizzard does not want execution to replace the character-building game underneath it.

That distinction could become particularly important if Diablo V really does succeed in making character progression feel meaningful again. A world only feels dangerous if your decisions about equipment, skills and preparation visibly change how dangerous it is.

This Is Starting to Look Like a Pattern

Individually, Blizzard's Diablo V comments can look like disconnected design notes. Put them together, however, and a fairly coherent picture is beginning to appear.

We have a game where the world itself is supposed to tell stories through its ruins and survivors. We have loot moving back toward stronger identities. We have progression being reconsidered. We have more playable classes planned than any previous Diablo game. And now Blizzard is saying that the correct build should be capable of overcoming every challenge.

None of this guarantees Diablo V will suddenly become Diablo II wearing a very expensive 2029 coat. The game is still years away, and design philosophies have a habit of encountering production schedules, balance patches and millions of players doing things developers never anticipated.

But the language matters.

Blizzard is not describing Diablo V as an action game with some RPG systems attached. It is describing an ARPG where the build remains the machine at the center of everything.

You can still dodge the demon.

But apparently, the real victory

Diablo 4’s Annihilus Mystery Is Finally Cracked: Uber Diablo Walks the Earth

2026-10-01T01:48:47.117-07:00

For almost two weeks, Diablo IV players have known that Annihilus exists somewhere inside Season 15. We found the item in the data. We found a hidden Stone of Jordan salvage counter. We found references to Uber Diablo and the wonderfully familiar warning “Diablo Walks the Earth.” What nobody could do was make the thing actually happen. That changed on September 30. Players are now encountering Uber Diablo immediately after World Boss kills, and when the Lord of Terror goes down, he drops the long-missing Annihilus.

The Season 15 mystery is therefore half solved in the most Diablo II way imaginable.

We finally know who has Annihilus.

We still do not know what makes him show up.

“Diablo Walks the Earth” Is Finally Happening in the Live Game

The first wave of confirmed reports arrived after World Boss encounters on September 30. Players defeated bosses such as Azmodan, received the message “Diablo Walks the Earth”, and then watched Uber Diablo appear directly afterward.

Killing him produced Annihilus as a Unique Seal.

More reports quickly followed. One player initially failed to get Uber Diablo after a World Boss, then successfully spawned him after a later kill. Others reported Annihilus dropping on different Torment levels, including Torment VII, which tells us this is not simply a Torment XII reward reserved for the absolute top end.

That finally confirms the central theory behind our original Annihilus investigation. The Season 15 item was not unused data or an unfinished reward waiting for some future patch.

Uber Diablo really was standing behind the curtain.

World Bosses Are Involved, but They Are Not the Whole Trigger

This is where things remain interesting.

A World Boss kill appears to provide the opportunity for Uber Diablo to spawn, but it does not guarantee him. Several players have killed the same World Boss during the same general period and received nothing unusual afterward. Others immediately saw “Diablo Walks the Earth.”

So the recipe is not simply:

Kill World Boss. Receive Diablo. Collect Annihilus.

Something else appears to determine whether the Uber Diablo event fires.

And that brings us straight back to the biggest clue we found last week.

The Stone of Jordan Counter Is Suddenly Even More Suspicious

Datamining previously revealed that Diablo IV secretly records how many Stones of Jordan an individual character has salvaged. That was already almost impossible to ignore because Diablo II tied Uber Diablo directly to players sacrificing Stones of Jordan.

Now we know Uber Diablo genuinely exists in the live game.

That makes the hidden counter considerably more interesting.

We still cannot say that salvaging Stone of Jordan triggers him. Players have encountered Uber Diablo without being able to identify anything unusual they personally did beforehand, and some reports suggest another player in the World Boss group may have satisfied whatever requirement matters.

One player even said they were wearing Stone of Jordan “just to be safe,” which is excellent Diablo science but unfortunately not yet peer-reviewed.

The possibility of a shared trigger also fits the old Diablo II joke rather nicely. Diablo Clone was never purely an individual event. Enough Stone of Jordan sales across the relevant server eventually caused him to invade games and announce that Diablo walked the earth.

Season 15 may be doing something spiritually similar without copying the original mechanic exactly.

Annihilus Is Exactly as Ridiculous as We Expected

The reward explains why people have been chasing this secret so aggressively.

Annihilus is not merely a nostalgia trophy. Diablo IV's version is a Unique Horadric Seal capable of rolling enormous universal bonuses, including up to +10 to All Skills, alongside All Stats, resistance and bonus experience.

Those bonuses echo the original Diablo II Annihilus while translating the item into Season 15's Talisman system.

In practical terms, it is the kind of drop that causes a build planner to stop whatever it was doing and quietly open another spreadsheet.

Players are already discovering the next layer of the problem: Annihilus can roll with Set bonuses that may not match the build you are actually playing. So even after solving one of Season 15's largest mysteries, Diablo has thoughtfully preserved the traditional endgame question:

Excellent item.

Wrong version.

The September 30 Patch May Have Enabled the Encounter

The timing is difficult to ignore. Confirmed Annihilus drops began appearing after the September 30 update, and players on Blizzard's forums immediately wondered whether the patch silently enabled Uber Diablo.

There is no Annihilus or Uber Diablo line in the published Patch 3.2.2 notes.

That does not mean nothing changed server-side. Season 15 has already relied heavily on hidden content, undisclosed triggers and systems Blizzard deliberately chose not to explain. Quietly enabling the final major anniversary secret would be entirely consistent with the season's philosophy.

For now, the safest wording is that Annihilus began dropping after the update.

Whether the patch itself unlocked the encounter has not been officially confirmed.

Season 15’s Secret Checklist Just Lost Its Biggest Question Mark

Our Season 15 secret checklist has spent most of September accumulating increasingly strange discoveries. Hidden Runewords led to Diablo II equipment. Wirt's Lucky Coin opened Uber Tristram. Ogden handed out a guaranteed Harlequin Crest. Mefishto required fishing equipment because apparently somebody at Blizzard had been waiting thirty years to make that joke.

Annihilus remained the big unresolved item.

Not anymore.

We now know the final step of the chain:

Uber Diablo drops Annihilus.

What remains is discovering how Season 15 decides when Uber Diablo gets invited to the World Boss afterparty.

Do Not Salvage Your Entire Stone of Jordan Collection Yet

That warning from our previous article still stands.

The hidden SoJ salvage counter is more suspicious than ever, but nobody has yet demonstrated a reproducible sequence such as “salvage ten Stones of Jordan, kill the next World Boss and Uber Diablo appears.”

Until somebody can repeat the process deliberately, destroying valuable rings remains an experiment rather than a guide.

We finally have Annihilus.

We finally have Uber Diablo.

We finally have “Diablo Walks the Earth” appearing in actual live games rather than datamined text.

Now Season 15 has one last trick left to explain.

What, exactly, makes Diablo start walking?

Save 38% on Diablo: Sword of Justice – A Trip Back Into Sanctuary

2026-09-30T01:37:37.864-07:00

Diablo's 30th anniversary has understandably put most of the attention on Season 15, Diablo V and the various demons currently finding new ways to ruin Sanctuary. But if all the anniversary nostalgia has left you wanting something from the older corners of Diablo lore, Amazon currently has Diablo: Sword of Justice at 38% off. It is a 128-page hardcover graphic novel collecting the complete five-issue comic series, and unlike another evening spent farming Prime Ribs, this one can actually sit on a shelf when you are finished.

Check the current Diablo: Sword of Justice deal on Amazon

As always with Amazon discounts, prices can change without warning, so the 38% saving reflects the deal available when we spotted it.

A Diablo Story From Before Diablo III

Sword of Justice originally appeared as a five-part comic series beginning in 2011, before Diablo III had even launched. Written by Aaron Williams and illustrated by Joseph Lacroix, it follows a young man named Jacob who has fled his northern homeland after being accused of murder. Unfortunately for Jacob, Sanctuary has never been particularly good at allowing people to simply move somewhere quiet and reconsider their life choices.

Jacob begins receiving visions connected to an ancient prophecy and eventually finds himself drawn toward a weapon considerably more important than the average rusty sword lying outside Tristram: the sword of the Archangel Tyrael.

The result is one of those Diablo stories that works particularly well away from the games. Instead of beginning with a hero capable of destroying several hundred demons before lunch, it focuses on somebody being dragged into the larger mythology of Sanctuary one unpleasant revelation at a time.

Tyrael Makes This Particularly Interesting for Lore Fans

The Tyrael connection is the obvious attraction. Few Diablo characters have been involved in more of Sanctuary's history, from the destruction of the Worldstone through Diablo III and the rebuilding of the Horadrim. We have recently spent plenty of time talking about how Diablo V wants its ruined world to tell the history of what happened before, but Sword of Justice comes from an era when Blizzard and its partners were filling some of those gaps through novels and comics instead.

That also makes it a nice companion piece to Diablo's current 30th anniversary. Season 15 has spent weeks digging through the franchise's past, bringing back old bosses, Runewords and pieces of Diablo history. Sword of Justice represents another layer of that history, created long before anyone knew what Diablo IV, Lilith or the current version of Sanctuary would eventually look like.

This Is the Hardcover Collection

The Amazon listing is for Blizzard Entertainment's later hardcover edition, published in 2021. It collects the complete story in one 128-page volume rather than asking you to hunt down five individual comic issues from more than a decade ago.

That is probably the best way to approach it today. Original Diablo comics can become collector hunting projects of their own, and there are already enough Diablo systems asking us to search for obscure objects.

The hardcover gives you the entire Jacob story, Lacroix's dark Sanctuary artwork and one of the more unusual pieces of Diablo's expanded universe in a single book.

A Nice Pickup While Diablo Lore Is Everywhere Again

The timing is also unusually good. Blizzard has just announced an animated Diablo series for Netflix, Diablo V is building an entirely new era of Sanctuary, and Season 15 is essentially one enormous history lesson disguised as an ARPG season.

If that has sent you back toward the books, comics and lore that exist between the games, Sword of Justice is an easy place to start. It is self-contained, short enough to read without committing to an entire novel series and connected to one of Diablo's most important characters.

And at 38% off, it is currently cheaper than discovering you suddenly need another cosmetic from a Phantom Market.

Diablo: Sword of Justice – see the current Amazon price and discount

Sanctuary has never been especially kind to Jacob.

Amazon, for the moment, is being slightly more generous to us.

Blizzard Says Diablo 4’s Switch 2 Compromises Are “Barely Noticeable”

2026-09-30T01:28:41.769-07:00

Putting Diablo IV on a handheld was always going to require compromises. Sanctuary was originally built for considerably larger boxes, stronger graphics hardware and people sitting close enough to a television or monitor to appreciate every miserable corpse Blizzard carefully placed beside the road. Nintendo Switch 2 has less power to work with, yet Diablo IV Game Director Brent Gibson says the concessions Blizzard had to make are “barely noticeable.” After years of wanting Diablo IV on Nintendo hardware, his reaction to the finished version is rather simple: it was about time.

Speaking to TechRadar following BlizzCon 2026, Gibson described the Switch 2 version as something the team had wanted for a long time. The challenge was never whether Diablo made sense on a portable machine. Diablo III had already demonstrated that remarkably well on the original Switch. The problem was squeezing a much larger, more technically demanding Diablo IV onto Nintendo hardware without making it feel like the version you bought because no other version was available.

There Are Compromises. Blizzard Is Not Pretending Otherwise

We already went through the technical details in our Diablo IV Switch 2 performance breakdown, and there is no magic happening here. Performance Mode targets 40 FPS at 1080p in handheld mode. Docked Performance Mode also targets 40 FPS at 1080p, although Blizzard requires a compatible 120 Hz display. Quality Mode runs at 30 FPS, with 1080p handheld output and up to 1440p while docked.

There is no 60 FPS option.

Textures, effects and other rendering details inevitably have to fit inside a smaller performance budget than they do on a powerful PC, PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X. Blizzard has not discovered a secret Horadric recipe that turns Switch 2 into an RTX graphics card.

Gibson's argument is different. The compromises exist, but during actual play he believes they fade into the background quickly enough that the game still feels like Diablo IV.

Forty Frames Per Second May Be the Smart Compromise

The 40 FPS target initially looked slightly odd because console discussions normally revolve around 30 or 60. On a display capable of supporting the appropriate refresh rate, however, 40 FPS sits in a useful middle ground. It provides smoother frame pacing and more responsive combat than 30 FPS without requiring the severe visual reductions often needed to chase 60 on portable hardware.

Diablo IV is also unusually well suited to that compromise because its combat does not depend on twitch aiming or frame-perfect competitive inputs. Smoothness matters, especially when twenty demons, six explosions and half a Necromancer's extended family occupy the screen simultaneously, but a stable presentation matters more than winning a specification-sheet contest.

Early Switch 2 players have echoed some of that sentiment. Blizzard's own forums contain players praising the handheld 40 FPS mode while still reporting occasional frame pacing issues during especially busy scenes. That sounds considerably less dramatic than the sort of performance disaster people understandably feared when Diablo IV on Nintendo hardware was still only a rumor.

The Portable Format Makes Almost Too Much Sense for Diablo

The more important question is whether Diablo IV benefits from being portable enough to justify the compromises.

It does.

A surprising amount of modern Diablo consists of self-contained twenty-minute tasks. Run a Nightmare Dungeon. Finish several Whispers. Clear a few Waking Nightmares. Progress a War Plan. Farm Prime Ribs from demonic cattle for reasons that would require far too much explanation to anyone watching over your shoulder.

That structure fits handheld play extremely well. Diablo does not always require a four-hour evening with headphones and the curtains closed. Sometimes you want to clear one dungeon while sitting on a sofa and discover that the one dungeon has somehow become six.

Cross-progression makes that considerably more useful. Characters, progression and most account content can move with you between Switch 2 and other supported platforms. The handheld therefore does not need to become your new primary Diablo machine. It can simply become another door into the same account.

Touchscreen Support Is More Useful Than It Sounds

Blizzard has also done more than simply shrink the console version onto a smaller display. Switch 2 supports touchscreen navigation through most menus, the map and inventory. That sounds like a small feature until you remember how much time Diablo players spend moving through precisely those screens.

Inventory management has always been one of the slightly awkward parts of translating a mouse-driven action RPG to a controller. Diablo IV's controller interface is already good, but tapping directly on the map or inventory makes more sense on a handheld than repeatedly moving focus boxes around with an analog stick.

USB mouse and keyboard support is available too, which creates the slightly strange possibility of turning Nintendo's portable console into a tiny Diablo PC.

One feature is conspicuously absent: Joy-Con 2 mouse functionality is not supported. Blizzard confirmed that before launch, despite the feature looking like a natural fit for Diablo's PC heritage.

The Biggest Portable Compromise Has Nothing to Do With Graphics

Ironically, the Switch 2 limitation that may matter most is not the one Gibson was discussing.

Diablo IV remains an always-online game.

That requirement is much easier to ignore when playing on a desktop PC connected to home broadband. It becomes considerably more noticeable when the game is running on something designed to leave the house.

Want to play on a train? You need a connection.

Want to clear a dungeon during a flight without Wi-Fi? Sanctuary is closed.

Want to suspend the console, put it in a bag and resume hours later? Diablo IV's server connection may have other opinions.

Some Switch 2 players have already pointed out that this undermines one of the traditional advantages of owning a portable version. Blizzard can optimize shadows, texture quality and frame pacing. It cannot optimize the railway tunnel currently blocking your mobile signal.

This Is Still the Full Modern Diablo IV

What Switch 2 does not feel like is an archival version of Diablo IV arriving several years late. The Age of Hatred Collection includes the base game alongside Vessel of Hatred and Lord of Hatred, which means Nintendo players are entering the same modern Diablo IV ecosystem as everyone else rather than beginning with the version released back in 2023.

That distinction matters even more after Blizzard confirmed that Diablo IV seasons are expected to continue even after Diablo V launches. Switch 2 is not receiving Diablo IV near the end of its useful life. Blizzard expects the game to remain active for years.

Season of Hell's Legacy is already available there, and future classes, seasonal stories and systems are intended to arrive as part of the same ongoing game.

“Barely Noticeable” Is Probably the Right Goal

A Switch 2 port was never going to become the technically definitive version of Diablo IV. Anyone expecting 4K, ray tracing and 120 FPS on a handheld was probably setting both Nintendo and mathematics an unfair challenge.

The more realistic goal is exactly what Gibson describes.

Make the compromises disappear once you actually start playing.

If you stop thinking about texture resolution halfway through a dungeon, the port has done its job. If 40 FPS feels smooth enough that you notice the monsters rather than the frame counter, the compromise worked. If cross-progression means you can put the console down and continue the same character elsewhere that evening, the Switch 2 version has justified its existence.

Diablo IV is not at its prettiest on Nintendo's handheld.

It may be at its most convenient.

And for a game built around saying “one more dungeon” far too many times, convenience can be a dangerous feature.

Diablo Immortal’s Spawn Event Has a Big Divide Between Free Rewards and Premium Cosmetics

2026-09-30T01:07:56.213-07:00

Spawn has officially arrived in Diablo Immortal, and Blizzard has done something slightly more interesting than simply placing a famous comic-book character inside the shop. The actual crossover contains a surprising amount of playable content that costs nothing extra: a Spawn-themed version of Survivor's Bane, six Hellspawn abilities, a Malebolgia boss fight, an event reward track, ten weapon skins and a new Legendary Gem. If you want to actually look like Spawn, however, Sanctuary suddenly remembers that it is Diablo Immortal.

The iconic Crimson Cloak lives inside a limited-time Phantom Market. Lil' Violator is attached to a separate shop bundle. Blizzard has even created an Empowered upgrade for the Spawn cosmetic with classic color variations, enhanced weapon effects and unique finisher effects.

So the collaboration has developed a remarkably clean dividing line.

Playing Spawn content is largely free.

Becoming Spawn is where the wallet enters the story.

The Free Side of the Event Is Actually Substantial

That distinction matters because it would be unfair to describe the crossover as nothing but a cosmetic sale. Blizzard's official Spawn event breakdown includes several real activities running through November 1.

Hellspawn's Bane transforms Survivor's Bane into a Spawn-themed mode with six new temporary abilities inspired by the character. Players can attack with Hell Chains, surround themselves with the K7-Leetha Cloak, fire Necroplasm, open a Hell Rift, use Spiritual Manipulation and throw Agony through groups of enemies.

A timer eventually drags the player into another version of Hell to fight Heap before returning them to the main survival arena with a temporary buff.

Then there is The Eighth Circle, where groups can fight Malebolgia himself. Blizzard has built weekly time targets and rank-based rewards around the boss, while players who earn MVP four times in team battles with at least three people can unlock an additional cosmetic reward.

That is considerably more effort than “log in, see Spawn, open shop.”

The Reward Track Gives Away Ten Spawn Weapon Skins

Hellspawn's Vengeance provides the main event progression. Completing weekly objectives across activities such as Hellspawn's Bane and The Eighth Circle earns Vengeance Marks, which advance the reward track.

Blizzard lists the rewards as including:

10 Hellspawn's Guise weapon skins
6 Spawn-themed emojis
Hellspawned Dominion Avatar Frame
Necroplasmic Totem Legendary Gem
Legendary Crests
Legendary Gear
Set Items

The weapon skins are explicitly described by Blizzard as free Spawn-inspired weapons earned by progressing through Hellspawn's Vengeance.

That is worth emphasizing because the collaboration is not withholding every recognizable piece of Spawn behind a purchase. A player can participate in the event, use his powers, fight his villains and walk away with visible crossover gear without buying the main cosmetic.

The problem begins when you look at the cape.

The Crimson Cloak Is in the Phantom Market

Spawn without the Crimson Cloak is a little like Diablo without horns. Technically possible, perhaps, but somebody has misunderstood the assignment.

Blizzard knows this.

Hellspawn's Guise, the full Spawn-themed cosmetic featuring the legendary Crimson Cloak, is being sold through a limited-time Phantom Market rather than the event reward track. Blizzard does not present the cloak as an earnable reward from Hellspawn's Vengeance. It sits on the premium side of the collaboration.

And this time there is another layer.

Players can purchase an Empowered upgrade offering classic Spawn colorways, enhanced weapon effects and additional finisher effects. The base cosmetic therefore is not necessarily the visual endpoint. The flashiest version has its own upgrade path.

Community reaction was predictable. Diablo Immortal players are already debating the value of another Phantom Market cosmetic with additional paid enhancements, with several comments specifically objecting to the idea of paying again to complete or improve an already premium appearance.

Lil’ Violator Lives in a Separate Bundle

The Crimson Cloak is not the only famous Spawn cosmetic outside the free reward track.

Lil' Violator turns a Familiar into Violator, one of Malebolgia's most recognizable servants. It is exactly the kind of wonderfully stupid companion Diablo Immortal players are likely to enjoy seeing run beside them through Westmarch.

It is also sold separately.

Blizzard says the Violator Familiar transmog comes from the limited-time Hellbound Leash Bundle, which also contains Eternal Orbs, Legendary Crests and Gem Fragments. The bundle is available from September 29 through November 1.

There is also a separate Boon of the Hellspawn Login Bundle containing Eternal Orbs, Necroplasmic Totem, a random 2-Star Legendary Gem Selection Chest and Legendary Crests.

So the collaboration does not have one premium door.

It has several.

Necroplasmic Totem Exists on Both Sides of the Economy

The new 2-Star Necroplasmic Totem Legendary Gem is an interesting example because it crosses the divide.

The Gem appears as a reward in Hellspawn's Vengeance, but Blizzard has also added it to Legendary Gem drop pools and includes another copy inside the paid Boon of the Hellspawn bundle. Its effect surrounds the player with Necroplasm after dealing damage, increases outgoing damage temporarily and can consume a harmful periodic effect to launch an explosive Necroplasmic Bolt.

That means the gameplay item itself is not simply locked behind payment. Players participating in the collaboration can obtain it through the event, while spenders have additional acquisition paths.

That distinction matters in Diablo Immortal, where the line between cosmetic monetization and character progression has never exactly been invisible.

This Is a Better Crossover Than the Monetization Makes It Look

We already covered the full Spawn event reveal, and mechanically this remains one of Diablo Immortal's more ambitious collaborations. Players are not simply wearing Spawn clothes while running ordinary Elder Rifts. Blizzard built themed powers, a special survival activity and an actual encounter with Malebolgia.

The collaboration even brings Heap into Hellspawn's Bane and gives Violator a presence beyond another player costume.

There is obvious affection for the source material here.

Which may be exactly why the premium cosmetics sting more for Spawn fans.

The people most excited about this crossover are also the people most likely to want the cape.

Diablo Immortal Knows Exactly Which Part of Spawn You Want

That is ultimately the clever part of the monetization structure.

Blizzard gives players enough free Spawn content that the crossover feels like a real event. You can use Hell Chains. You can fire Necroplasm. You can fight Malebolgia. You can earn ten weapon skins. You can obtain Necroplasmic Totem.

Then the game places Spawn's most recognizable visual feature somewhere else.

Not his axe.

Not one of the weapon skins.

The cloak.

The enormous, living, impossible-to-ignore red cape that has been part of the character's silhouette since 1992.

Diablo Immortal did not accidentally choose the least important cosmetic for the Phantom Market.

The Divide Is Clearer Than Ever

There is something almost refreshing about how obvious the arrangement is.

The free side says: come play the crossover.

The premium side says: now look like the crossover.

Players can decide for themselves whether the Crimson Cloak, Empowered effects or Lil' Violator are worth whatever the shop ultimately asks from their account. The important thing is that none of those purchases are required to fight Malebolgia or participate in Hellspawn's Bane.

That makes the Spawn event simultaneously easier to praise and easier to criticize.

Blizzard built real crossover content instead of disguising a shop refresh as an event.

It also looked at Spawn's most iconic visual feature and knew exactly where to put it.

Hell may be free to visit.

The cape shop is on the way in.

Diablo 5’s World Is Telling Three Stories at the Same Time

2026-09-30T00:48:54.120-07:00

Diablo games have always been good at putting skeletons in ruined buildings and trusting the player to understand that something unfortunate happened there. Diablo V wants to take environmental storytelling considerably further. Blizzard says Sanctuary is being designed to tell three stories at the same time: the past, showing the world Diablo destroyed; the present, where humanity is desperately trying to survive his rule; and the future, revealed through areas being physically transformed into something closer to Hell. The interesting part is that these stories are not simply delivered through dialogue. They are supposed to exist in the landscape itself.

That makes Diablo V's procedural world more than a way of rearranging caves and putting the treasure chest somewhere different on Tuesday. Blizzard wants the same region to communicate where Sanctuary came from, what Diablo is doing to it now and what will happen if nobody stops the monsters currently redecorating the neighborhood.

The Past Is Written in Sanctuary’s Ruins

Diablo V begins roughly a century after Diablo IV in a world where Diablo has already won. Westmarch has fallen, Sanctuary's greatest heroes are gone and humanity survives in scattered groups rather than comfortably waiting behind city walls for adventurers to arrive.

That means much of the Western Continent is effectively an archaeological site.

Game Director Joe Shely describes the first of Diablo V's three stories as the story of the past: how Diablo conquered Sanctuary and what happened to the civilizations that lived there. Ruined castles, broken settlements and abandoned roads are supposed to tell that history before an NPC needs to explain it in a twelve-minute conversation.

Blizzard's own description puts it neatly: the ruins tell the story of what was lost.

That is important because Diablo V does not begin with the apocalypse approaching. The apocalypse already happened. You are walking through the evidence.

The Present Is About the People Still Living There

The second story belongs to the survivors. This is where Diablo V's caravan becomes more than a replacement for Kyovashad with wheels.

Traditional safe towns are largely gone. Instead, the player travels with a growing group of merchants, companions and refugees trying to survive in territory controlled by Diablo. Blizzard has already introduced examples including a former Sister of the Sightless Eye and, wonderfully, a Treasure Goblin attempting to discover what greed means when civilization has collapsed.

The caravan represents Sanctuary's present tense. These people are not legendary heroes from an ancient war. They are the ones currently living with the consequences.

That also fits Blizzard's ambition to give Diablo V what it internally calls its “best campaign ever”. The story is supposed to become more personal, with companions who travel alongside the player rather than existing as stationary quest dispensers beside a waypoint.

If the ruins tell us what Diablo destroyed, the caravan tells us what remains.

The Future Depends on Who Controls the Land

The third story is where things become considerably more Diablo.

Dread Commanders can physically reshape parts of Sanctuary through a system Blizzard calls terror-forming. These corrupted human champions serve Diablo but retain enough personality that their individual nature changes what happens to the regions they control.

A biome under one Dread Commander may not look or play exactly like the same biome under another. Terrain can change. Points of interest can move or transform. Monster populations and rewards can shift. Hell gradually pushes further into Sanctuary.

Narrative Director Jennifer Hepler says locations can therefore evolve over time, either because a Dread Commander takes control or because humanity manages to reclaim territory.

That is the future layer.

You are not only seeing the world Diablo created. You are watching what it may become next.

Procedural Generation Is Doing Narrative Work

This may be the most interesting difference between Diablo V and Diablo IV's open world. Diablo IV built an enormous Sanctuary, but once you learned the map, Scosglen remained Scosglen. The road was still there. The village was still there. The dungeon entrance had not moved because a demon woke up feeling architectural.

Diablo V wants to restore what Blizzard calls a sense of constant discovery. The overworld itself becomes more procedural, borrowing an idea from older Diablo games but applying it to a much larger space.

That means procedural generation is no longer just responsible for making two dungeon layouts slightly different. It can support the story. A changed landscape becomes evidence that something happened while you were away.

This also helps explain why Blizzard is taking a different approach to progression and level scaling. If the world keeps changing, revisiting old territory needs to feel useful without making every return trip feel identical.

Diablo Is Supposed to Be Everywhere Without Standing Everywhere

There is another clever part to the three-story idea. Blizzard has made Diablo the central villain from the beginning, but the Lord of Terror cannot physically stand behind every tree waiting to remind you that he won.

The landscape can do that instead.

A ruined fortress tells you what his victory cost.

A starving caravan tells you what his reign means today.

A Dread Commander twisting a region into something increasingly infernal tells you where the world is heading.

Diablo becomes present even when he is not on screen.

That may ultimately matter more than giving him another enormous boss entrance.

The World Has to Remember What Happened

Diablo V is still nearly three years away, and Blizzard has deliberately revealed the game early so these systems can change through testing and feedback. We covered that unusual strategy when Blizzard explained why it announced Diablo V so far ahead of launch.

So “three stories” is currently a design philosophy, not a guarantee that every ruined mill will contain a beautifully constructed historical narrative about the farmer who once owned it.

But the idea is strong.

Diablo has conquered Sanctuary.

The important question is not simply what the world looks like afterward.

It is whether the world remembers how it got there, shows what survival looks like now and makes you worry about what it will look like tomorrow.

Diablo V wants the answer written directly into the ground beneath your feet.

Path of Exile’s Chris Wilson Calls Diablo 4 Season 15 “Pretty Distasteful”

2026-09-30T00:39:52.731-07:00

Yesterday, Path of Exile co-creator Chris Wilson gave Diablo V something Blizzard has not always received from him: cautious optimism. The return of different inventory sizes, stronger randomization and several small visual callbacks to Diablo I and II gave him what he called a “glimmer of hope.” His reaction to Diablo IV's current season is considerably less charitable. Wilson calls Season of Hell's Legacy “pretty distasteful”, arguing that Blizzard's 30th anniversary celebration treats Diablo's story, its dead characters and even the Lord of Terror himself with less respect than they deserve.

It is a fascinating criticism because Wilson was surprisingly positive about Diablo V. His problem is not simply that modern Blizzard is incapable of making Diablo correctly. He appears to think Blizzard is moving the next game in a promising direction while simultaneously being far too casual with the mythology of the game players are currently playing.

Wilson Thinks the Prime Evils Should Have Meant More

The central problem for Wilson is how Season 15 handles Diablo, Baal and Mephisto. Diablo IV spent years keeping the Prime Evils largely outside direct confrontation. Mephisto gradually became more important through the campaign and Lord of Hatred, while Diablo himself remained conspicuously absent. That created the expectation that finally facing the Prime Evils would be a major narrative event.

Then Season of Hell's Legacy arrived and put all three on the anniversary menu at once.

“Diablo 4 was slowly building up to you eventually getting to fight the Prime Evils,” Wilson says in comments reported by GamesRadar, before criticizing Blizzard for introducing all three together in an event that is not really part of the main storyline.

That criticism becomes particularly understandable when looking at Season 15's Prime Evil system. Players fight Echoes of Diablo beneath Tristram Cathedral, Baal at Arreat Summit and Mephisto inside the Durance of Hate. Their defeated essence becomes Splinters that players can then carry around as seasonal powers.

Mechanically, it is fun.

Narratively, Wilson thinks these characters deserved something heavier.

Deckard Cain’s Return Bothers Him Even More

The same argument applies to Deckard Cain. Cain was killed during Diablo III, an event that remains one of the most controversial moments in the series. Season 15 brings his lost soul back as the player's guide through Diablo history.

Wilson thinks doing that too casually weakens the meaning of death in the story. If major characters can simply return for an anniversary event, he argues, players have less reason to take future consequences seriously.

There is an obvious counterargument, however, and Blizzard has actually built it directly into Season 15.

The company does not describe the season as Cain simply walking back into Sanctuary and announcing that his death has been reversed. Blizzard calls Season of Hell's Legacy a “living history of Diablo's past games”, filled with memories, Echoes and recreated moments from the franchise's history. Cain is specifically described as a lost soul, and Blizzard warns that “memories are fickle.”

That matters.

Season 15 is less Deckard Cain Returns From the Dead and more Diablo IV Lets You Walk Through Thirty Years of Haunted Memories With Deckard Cain as Your Tour Guide.

Whether that distinction solves Wilson's objection depends on how seriously you expect seasonal content to obey the main campaign's narrative rules.

Then Blizzard Called Diablo “The Birthday Boy”

This is the detail that appears to have pushed Wilson from disagreement into genuine irritation.

During Blizzard's anniversary presentation, Diablo was referred to as “the birthday boy.”

Wilson argues that this is exactly the wrong tone for the central villain of a franchise built around the fear and anticipation of eventually confronting the Lord of Terror. If your entire series is called Diablo, he says, Diablo himself should be treated with maximum respect.

There is something wonderfully strange about the argument because both sides are understandable.

Blizzard is celebrating a videogame's 30th birthday. Somebody making a joke on stage is hardly unprecedented.

Wilson is looking at it from inside the fiction.

Diablo is not supposed to be your slightly difficult uncle arriving late with a cake.

He is the Lord of Terror.

Season 15’s Greatest Strength May Be the Thing Wilson Dislikes

The ironic part is that players appear to be enjoying Season 15 precisely because Blizzard has been so willing to raid its own museum.

We have spent the last two weeks covering hidden Diablo II Runewords, Uber Tristram and the Hellfire Torch, Ogden's Sign, Whimsyshire, Mefishto, cow secrets and the continuing Annihilus hunt. Yesterday we covered the growing community call to keep large parts of Season 15 permanently.

Players are not reacting as though Blizzard has accidentally ruined Diablo history.

A significant portion of the community appears delighted that thirty years of it has suddenly become playable again.

That does not make Wilson wrong. It simply exposes two very different ways of treating videogame history.

One says important fictional events should remain important. Death should matter. Villains should retain mystique. Narrative buildup should not be bypassed because an anniversary needs familiar faces.

The other says it is Diablo's 30th birthday. Let us fight everything.

Diablo V May Be Where Wilson Gets the Serious Diablo He Wants

This is where his reaction becomes especially interesting. Wilson dislikes Season 15's treatment of Diablo mythology, but he is cautiously optimistic about the sequel where Blizzard is apparently taking Diablo extremely seriously indeed.

Diablo V begins after the Lord of Terror has already won.

Sanctuary has fallen. Civilization survives in fragments. The landscape itself is being twisted by Diablo's servants. Blizzard has said the entire game is built around Diablo as the central threat, which is one reason he never simply became another Diablo IV expansion villain.

That sounds much closer to Wilson's preferred treatment of the character.

No birthday cake required.

Maybe Diablo Can Be Both Things

There is a larger question underneath Wilson's criticism. How seriously does Diablo need to take itself at all times?

This is a franchise where kings go mad, civilizations collapse and humanity repeatedly discovers that Heaven is not especially interested in customer service.

It is also a franchise where players have spent decades opening cow portals, arguing about Wirt's Leg and wearing ridiculous equipment because one particular numerical interaction is 4.7% better.

Diablo has always contained both darkness and absurdity.

Season 15 pushes unusually hard toward the anniversary theme park version of that history. Wilson clearly thinks Blizzard has crossed a line and turned important characters into attractions.

Plenty of players seem to think Blizzard has finally built the sort of anniversary season they actually wanted.

Perhaps both reactions reveal the same thing.

Thirty years later, people still care enough about Diablo to argue over whether the Lord of Terror is allowed to have a birthday.

Diablo Immortal Just Made Every New Set Ring Versatile

2026-09-29T01:57:40.587-07:00

Six months ago, Diablo Immortal players were asking Blizzard to stop treating Versatile Rings like a special event and simply make them part of the game. Blizzard listened surprisingly quickly. The feature became permanent in May, allowing newly acquired 3+2 and 3+3 quality Set Rings to use a Gem of any color. Now Blizzard has taken the obvious final step: every newly acquired green Set Ring will roll with a Versatile Socket.

No specific quality requirement. No hoping the ring lands in the correct configuration. No finding an otherwise excellent ring and discovering that its socket has already decided which color of Gem you are allowed to use.

From the latest Diablo Immortal update onward, newly dropped Set Rings simply understand the assignment.

This Started as a Temporary Experiment in March

The history makes the change more interesting. Back in March, Blizzard launched Versatile Rings as a temporary event running from March 19 to May 13. During that period, qualifying 3+2 and 3+3 Rings automatically received a Versatile Socket, allowing any color of Normal Gem to be inserted.

We wrote at the time that players immediately wanted Versatile Rings to become permanent. The reaction was not particularly difficult to understand. Ring socket color had become another layer of RNG sitting on top of item quality, stats, Magic Attributes and everything else Diablo Immortal already asks players to evaluate.

Finding the right ring and then discovering it could not support the Gem setup your build required rarely created an interesting decision.

It mostly created another trip back into the dungeon.

Blizzard Made Them Permanent in May

Blizzard's first response arrived when the temporary event ended. In May, the studio announced that Versatile Rings would become a permanent improvement to ring drops. The existing restriction remained, however: only newly acquired 3+2 and 3+3 quality Rings automatically received the flexible socket.

That was already a major quality-of-life improvement, but it left an odd gap. Lower-configuration Set Rings still followed the older socket rules even though Blizzard had effectively acknowledged that color restrictions on better rings were not making the game more interesting.

Today's update removes that final distinction.

Every New Green Set Ring Gets a Versatile Socket

Blizzard's new Diablo Immortal update notes could hardly be clearer:

All newly obtained green Set Rings will contain Versatile Sockets.

The important word is newly. Blizzard is changing future drops, not automatically converting every Set Ring already sitting in inventories and Armory loadouts.

If you have an old ring with the wrong socket color, it remains an old ring with the wrong socket color.

The solution remains the traditional Diablo solution.

Find another one.

This Removes RNG Without Removing the Item Hunt

That distinction is probably why the change works so well. Blizzard is not removing the hunt for good Set Rings. Players still care about attributes, Combat Rating, Magic Attributes and the Set itself. A terrible ring does not become wonderful because its socket is flexible.

What disappears is one additional failure condition after the useful item has already dropped.

That is the kind of RNG removal Diablo Immortal increasingly seems comfortable making. Patch 4.3 already ensured Set Items always roll with the maximum number of sockets, another change we covered in our breakdown of the March quality-of-life improvements.

Blizzard is not guaranteeing perfect equipment.

It is gradually removing ways for otherwise useful equipment to become pointless for reasons unrelated to the actual build.

Normal Gems Matter More Than They Did Six Months Ago

The timing is also better than it might initially appear because Normal Gems have become more important, not less.

Earlier this month, Blizzard introduced Progressive Upgrades for Normal Gems beginning at Rank 6. Instead of waiting until the entire next rank has been funded before receiving any improvement, high-rank Gems can now gain smaller incremental increases along the way.

That makes socket flexibility increasingly valuable. Serious characters are carrying years of Normal Gem investment. Being forced to reorganize that progression because a new ring happened to roll the wrong socket color becomes harder to justify when individual Gems represent such enormous long-term investment.

A Versatile Socket means the equipment adapts to the Gem collection rather than asking the Gem collection to adapt to the latest random ring.

It Also Makes Armory Loadouts Less Fragile

There is another practical advantage: builds become easier to move between loadouts.

Diablo Immortal players frequently maintain different setups for PvE, Battlegrounds, raids and specific classes. Socket colors can make those transitions unnecessarily awkward if two otherwise comparable Set Rings demand different Gem arrangements.

The community reaction to the new patch has already focused heavily on exactly that quality-of-life benefit. One of the more popular responses to the update essentially ignored the rest of the patch and declared this “THE RING PATCH.” Others pointed out that guaranteed maximum sockets combined with universal Versatile Rings finally removes much of the old socket RNG from green gear.

There are larger features in today's update.

Spawn is invading Sanctuary.

Malebolgia has a boss fight.

Inferno XV is being adjusted.

Some players are apparently more excited that their ring no longer tells them which colored rock they are allowed to put inside it.

Understandable.

The Change Arrives Beside More Progression Cleanup

Versatile Rings are part of a broader pattern in the update. Blizzard is also lowering several Combat Rating requirements in Inferno XIV and XV, adjusting Helliquary bosses and adding additional salvage protections so upgraded equipment or gear containing Gems is less likely to disappear through an accidental Blacksmith click.

The Helliquary Gauntlet is getting a permanent First Clear Leaderboard as well, giving teams another way to record accomplishments beyond simply having several people insist they definitely killed it first.

Individually, these are small changes compared with a new zone or class.

Together, they show Diablo Immortal continuing to polish systems players interact with every day.

Players Asked for Less Ring RNG. Blizzard Kept Going.

The nice thing about this particular story is that we can actually trace the progression.

In March, Versatile Rings were temporary.

Players immediately asked Blizzard to keep them.

In May, Blizzard made the system permanent for high-quality 3+2 and 3+3 Rings.

Now, in September, the quality restriction is disappearing entirely for newly acquired green Set Rings.

That is almost suspiciously logical.

Diablo Immortal still contains more than enough RNG to ensure nobody will mistake Sanctuary for a predictable place. The perfect Set Ring can still refuse to drop. The right Magic Attributes can still hide for weeks. The Dungeon Finder remains perfectly capable of introducing you to three strangers with completely different ideas about speed.

But once the ring finally appears, at least one question has been removed.

What color socket did it roll?

Whatever color you need.

Diablo 4 Players Are Begging Blizzard Not to Delete Season 15

2026-09-29T01:50:15.456-07:00

Diablo IV players have spent years becoming extremely good at saying goodbye. A new season arrives, everybody learns the mechanic, somebody discovers an interaction that melts a boss in 0.8 seconds, Blizzard applies several hotfixes, and three months later most of the interesting machinery disappears into the seasonal cupboard. Season 15 is beginning to create a different reaction. Players are not asking when Season of Hell's Legacy ends. They are increasingly asking Blizzard to make sure large parts of it never do.

A community post calling on Blizzard to make Season 15 content permanent has passed 1,100 upvotes, joining several other highly supported discussions praising the anniversary season and asking for its best additions to become part of the base game. The distinction is important. Players are not necessarily asking Blizzard to preserve every Prime Evil Splinter, every reputation track and every temporary seasonal power forever. The repeated request is much more targeted: keep the Runewords, dungeons, encounters and secrets.

That is a considerably more interesting proposal than simply freezing Season 15 in place.

Players Don’t Want the Good Content Thrown Away

The most popular recent discussion puts the problem rather simply: seasonal content is often temporary content, and Season 15 contains too much genuinely enjoyable material to discard after a few months. The player behind the thread specifically says Splinters and seasonal powers can disappear while arguing that the Runes, Runewords and dungeon encounters deserve to remain. A separate discussion earlier this month called Season 15 the best season yet, largely because of the returning Runewords, nostalgic dungeons and bosses, and made the same request for permanent integration.

That sentiment makes sense after the last two weeks.

Season 15 has hidden Diablo II-style Runewords inside the Horadric Cube, rebuilt Uber Tristram and the Hellfire Torch, returned Whimsyshire, created a secret Bovine Sanctum, brought back Ogden's Sign with a guaranteed Harlequin Crest and turned Annihilus into an ongoing community investigation.

Those are not simply temporary damage multipliers.

They are places, recipes, encounters and mysteries.

Runewords Are the Obvious Candidate

The hidden Runewords may be the easiest feature to argue for. Blizzard effectively created a second language for Runes. Diablo IV's normal Rune system remains intact, while players can also combine specific Runes with white base items to create familiar Diablo II equipment such as Stealth, Enigma, Spirit and Grief.

That system immediately changed how people look at loot. White items became interesting again. Old Rune names gained another purpose. Players started remembering twenty-five-year-old recipes or discovering them for the first time.

It also gave Season 15 something modern Diablo frequently struggles to manufacture artificially: discovery.

Blizzard did not announce every recipe in a developer stream. Players simply found one, tried another and collectively began dismantling the mystery.

Deleting the entire system at the season transition would mean throwing away both the items and that extra layer of Diablo's loot language.

Challenge Dungeons Already Look Like Permanent Endgame Material

The same argument applies to Challenge Dungeons. We actually made this case before Season 15 even launched when we wrote that Challenge Dungeons could finally give Diablo IV's open world a permanent endgame purpose.

The structure is reusable almost by definition. Portals appear while players travel through Sanctuary. Enter one, choose a harder version of the encounter and fight something unpleasant for better rewards. Blizzard can rotate bosses, add modifiers and update the reward pool without rebuilding the framework every season.

Blizzard itself emphasized during the PTR that the early Challenge Dungeon encounters were merely testing the underlying system and that Season 15 would use different content. That strongly suggests the technology was designed as something more flexible than one specific anniversary boss fight.

If Diablo IV is going to keep receiving seasons even after Diablo V launches, reusable systems like this become more valuable, not less.

The Secrets May Be Season 15’s Most Important Contribution

The community also seems to be responding to something less mechanical.

Season 15 has been unusually willing to let players not know things.

Modern live-service games normally explain everything before launch. Feature blogs, trailers, PTRs, build calculators and datamines can leave a season feeling solved before the servers even open. Blizzard deliberately withheld parts of Season 15, and the result has been several weeks where players are still discovering things together.

That approach is probably impossible to preserve literally. Once everyone knows where Whimsyshire is, Whimsyshire is no longer a secret.

But the philosophy can remain.

Future seasons can hide recipes, bosses and quest chains instead of presenting every feature in a bullet-point graphic three weeks before release. Season 15 has demonstrated that players will happily investigate absurd clues when the reward is worth finding.

Blizzard Has Not Promised to Keep Everything

There is an important reality check here. Game Director Brent Gibson was asked directly whether Season 15 content could remain after the season ends. His answer was deliberately noncommittal.

Some things will move forward, including items Blizzard has already designated as permanent. Other seasonal systems will be retired. Gibson also said Blizzard may revisit certain ideas later and potentially transform them into future capstone content, but there is currently no public roadmap showing exactly what survives Season 15.

That means community enthusiasm should not be mistaken for confirmation.

Runewords are not currently guaranteed to stay.

Old Tristram is not guaranteed to remain.

Challenge Dungeons are not guaranteed to become permanent.

Players are asking Blizzard to make that decision before some of the season's best work disappears.

Season 15 May Have Accidentally Shown Diablo IV What It Should Be

That may be the larger reason this conversation has gained traction.

Season 15 feels unusually full. Not because it added another progression bar, but because Sanctuary contains more things worth stumbling into. A portal might matter. A white item might matter. A Rune might mean something completely different inside the Cube. A familiar name from Diablo I or II may be more than a reference.

One recent community post praising the season put the appeal down to the combination of nostalgia and sheer density of random content, saying the world simply feels fuller. Another discussion arguing for permanent Season 15 content says removing it now would feel like wasting the work Blizzard already did.

That is probably the strongest argument for keeping parts of Season of Hell's Legacy.

Not because nostalgia needs to last forever.

Because Diablo IV is better when Sanctuary contains more reasons to be curious.

Season 15 has spent two weeks teaching players to inspect strange portals, remember old recipes and distrust perfectly ordinary cows.

Blizzard may eventually remove the Splinters.

Players would very much like it to leave the fun behind.

Path of Exile’s Chris Wilson Says Diablo 5 Gave Him a “Glimmer of Hope”

2026-09-29T01:43:24.688-07:00

Few people outside Blizzard have more reason to examine Diablo V suspiciously than Chris Wilson. Path of Exile exists partly because Wilson and his friends loved Diablo II enough to eventually decide they should build another action RPG themselves. He never connected with Diablo III in the same way, and Diablo IV's open world, level scaling and streamlined itemization did little to change his mind. Diablo V, however, has managed something Blizzard's previous two games apparently could not. It gave him what he calls a “glimmer of hope.”

In a new video discussing Blizzard's reveal, the Path of Exile co-creator says he is “tentatively hopeful” that Diablo V may be moving back toward some of the ideas that made the original games so compelling to him. And the interesting part is that his optimism is not based on Blizzard simply saying the words “back to our roots.” Wilson is looking at the small things Blizzard deliberately chose to show.

The Inventory Immediately Got His Attention

One of those details is Diablo V's inventory. Blizzard has already confirmed that Diablo V is bringing back different item sizes, meaning a large weapon once again physically occupies more space than something tiny like a ring.

To modern players, that may sound like Diablo rediscovering inconvenience.

To Wilson, it is a signal.

Diablo III and Diablo IV moved toward standardized inventory slots, where almost every object consumes the same amount of space. Diablo and Diablo II treated equipment like actual objects. A giant polearm was inconvenient because giant polearms are inconvenient.

Wilson says choices like that suggest Blizzard may be looking seriously at what made the first two games distinct instead of simply applying their visual style over another modern loot system. He even points toward the flaming Diablo V logo, which resembles the visual identity of Diablo I and II more closely than the cleaner logos of III and IV.

Diablo II Literally Changed Wilson’s Life

There is a reason he notices these things.

Wilson says he spent his teenage years obsessing over Diablo and played Diablo II so extensively that it changed the direction of his life. Six years after Diablo II launched without a sequel in sight, he and several friends began building the project that eventually became Path of Exile.

His disappointment with later Diablo games is therefore less “competitor complains about competitor” and more somebody watching the series that created his career move in a direction he personally stopped enjoying.

Wilson says Diablo III felt too different from Diablo II when it finally arrived. Diablo IV raised different warning signs for him during its 2019 reveal, including its open-world structure and monster level scaling. Interestingly, Blizzard has already confirmed that Diablo V intends to rethink level scaling so players can feel character progression more clearly.

For somebody with Wilson's preferences, several of Blizzard's current decisions therefore appear to be pointing in the correct direction.

He Still Has Plenty of Questions

This is not a Chris Wilson endorsement sticker for the Diablo V box.

He remains cautious. Diablo V's inventory may bring back different item sizes, but Blizzard's early concept contains significantly more inventory space than Diablo II. Its world still needs to explain how procedural generation, caravan progression and endgame systems fit together. And many of the design decisions Blizzard showed at BlizzCon remain prototypes rather than finished mechanics.

That caution fits Diablo V's unusual development strategy. Blizzard revealed the game almost three years ahead of release specifically because, as we covered in our look at Diablo V's early announcement, the team wants more time for outside testing and iteration.

Spring 2029 is a long way away.

There is plenty of time for both hope and terrible decisions.

Wilson Wants Diablo V to Succeed Even Though Path of Exile Competes With It

The most interesting part of Wilson's comments may actually have nothing to do with inventory grids.

He says he “desperately” wants Diablo V to be a good game, arguing that a major Diablo release succeeding helps the entire action RPG genre. A successful Diablo brings mainstream players into ARPGs. Some of those players eventually try other games, including Path of Exile.

Wilson describes it through the old phrase that a rising tide lifts all ships.

That is a healthier interpretation of the Diablo-versus-Path-of-Exile rivalry than internet discussions normally produce. Path of Exile did not become successful because Diablo disappeared. It became successful partly because Diablo created millions of people interested in killing monsters until interesting objects fell out.

Diablo V Is Sending Signals to Old Diablo Players

We have seen those signals repeatedly since BlizzCon. Itemization is looking back toward Diablo II. Runewords and Sets return. Equipment has physical inventory size again. Blizzard is experimenting with stat requirements. The overworld becomes less predictable. Dread Commanders can reshape regions, while dungeons return to stronger procedural generation.

None of that guarantees Diablo V will feel like Diablo II.

It probably should not.

Diablo II already exists, and somehow Blizzard is still updating that too.

But when the man who helped create Path of Exile looks at Diablo V and sees enough of the old DNA to become cautiously hopeful, that says something about the direction Blizzard is signaling.

Chris Wilson is not convinced yet.

For Diablo V, getting him interested again may already be a surprisingly good start.

Diablo 4 Will Keep Getting Seasons Even After Diablo 5 Launches

2026-09-29T01:37:02.586-07:00

Diablo V arrives in Spring 2029, but apparently nobody has told Diablo IV that sequels are supposed to kill their predecessors. Blizzard has now made its long-term plan considerably clearer: Diablo IV seasons are expected to continue even after Diablo V launches, provided players keep showing up. Game Director Brent Gibson says Blizzard views Diablo less as a sequence of games replacing one another and more as a collection of active Diablo communities, pointing directly at Diablo II and Diablo III as examples of older games that continue to exist long after their successors arrived.

That is an important clarification because Diablo V's announcement created an obvious question for anyone currently investing hundreds of hours into Diablo IV. Blizzard has already confirmed that no additional traditional Diablo IV expansions are currently planned, and the franchise is now moving toward an entirely new numbered game. It would have been easy to assume Diablo IV had therefore entered a three-year farewell tour. Gibson says that is not the plan.

Diablo V Is Not Diablo IV’s Expiration Date

Speaking during a BlizzCon interview, Gibson was asked directly whether Diablo IV would continue receiving new seasons once Diablo V was actually available. His answer was unusually straightforward: Blizzard plans to support seasons for as long as the Diablo IV community continues to play them. He compared that philosophy with Diablo II and Diablo III, both of which still maintain active communities years after newer games entered the franchise.

That does not mean Blizzard has promised Season 37, another decade of major systems overhauls or an infinite supply of new classes. The scale of Diablo IV support after 2029 will presumably depend on how many people are still playing and what development resources make sense at the time. But the important distinction is now clear.

Diablo V launching does not automatically put Diablo IV into maintenance mode.

Blizzard Says Diablo Is a Universe, Not a Replacement Cycle

Gibson's broader explanation may be more interesting than the season confirmation itself. He says Blizzard does not really think of Diablo as a collection of games where each new release replaces the previous one. Instead, different parts of the franchise can continue serving different communities.

That is increasingly visible already. Diablo II: Resurrected is five years old and recently received the Warlock, its first completely new class in decades. Diablo Immortal continues receiving major updates and collaborations. Diablo IV is currently running its enormous 30th anniversary season while preparing the Amazon class for 2027. Diablo V is being developed alongside all of them.

The old model was comparatively simple. Diablo II existed until Diablo III arrived. Diablo III dominated until Diablo IV became the current game. Blizzard's modern approach looks messier, but also more interesting: several different versions of Diablo may remain alive simultaneously because they appeal to different kinds of players.

Diablo IV Still Has More Than Two Years Before Diablo V

There is also a practical reason Blizzard cannot treat Diablo IV like a game waiting for retirement. Diablo V is still roughly two and a half years away. That is an eternity in live-service development, particularly when Blizzard has already stopped planning additional traditional expansions for the current game.

The seasons therefore have to carry considerably more weight. We already know future Diablo IV seasons are becoming part of a continuing storyline rather than completely isolated three-month adventures. Blizzard has around a century of fictional history separating Diablo IV from Diablo V, where Diablo has already conquered Sanctuary.

Somewhere between those two points, things need to become dramatically worse.

That gives Diablo IV's seasonal team an unusually large narrative playground. The current game does not need another $40 expansion to show kingdoms falling, cults growing, characters disappearing or the world gradually moving toward the disaster waiting in Diablo V.

The Amazon Is Proof Diablo IV Still Has Large Updates Coming

The Amazon is probably the clearest evidence that Blizzard is not quietly winding development down. She arrives during the first half of 2027 as a dedicated class pack, bringing javelins and four gameplay archetypes into the game. That is major production work for something Blizzard supposedly intends to abandon eighteen months later.

Gibson has been equally dismissive of the idea that Diablo V means the current game is stopping. His message to worried Diablo IV players is essentially not to panic. Blizzard still has a considerable amount coming, and the “train isn't stopping.”

The interesting question is what happens once both games are running simultaneously.

Diablo IV and Diablo V May Serve Different Players

Diablo V already looks mechanically different enough that it may not simply become Diablo IV with larger numbers. Blizzard is rebuilding itemization around stronger Diablo II influences, bringing different item sizes back into the inventory, experimenting with attribute requirements, changing monster scaling and creating a procedurally shifting overworld.

Some Diablo IV players may prefer that.

Others may not.

That is precisely why keeping Diablo IV alive makes sense. Players who enjoy its build systems, open world and seasonal structure do not necessarily need to migrate simply because the box number increased by one.

Diablo II players have spent twenty-six years demonstrating this concept with considerable determination.

Seasonal Content Could Also Return Later in Different Forms

Gibson also addressed what happens to seasonal mechanics after their original season ends. Blizzard does not plan to preserve everything permanently. Some systems will disappear, some items will survive and other ideas may be revisited later in completely different forms.

That is particularly relevant right now because Season of Hell's Legacy contains an absurd amount of content players already want to keep. Hidden Runewords, Challenge Dungeons, Old Tristram, anniversary encounters and other discoveries have made Season 15 feel considerably more substantial than a temporary gimmick.

Gibson says Blizzard may eventually revisit seasonal systems and turn them into something like future capstone content even if the original season disappears. In other words, “seasonal” does not necessarily mean “deleted from history forever.”

Diablo V Is the Future, but Diablo IV Is Not Finished

That leaves Blizzard in an unusual position heading toward 2029. Diablo IV is no longer the franchise's final destination. We know exactly what comes next. We know when it is supposed to arrive. We even know that Diablo himself became too large a story for another Diablo IV expansion and helped push Blizzard toward a full sequel instead.

But knowing the next game exists does not make the current one obsolete.

If Blizzard follows through on Gibson's plan, 2029 will not be the moment everyone leaves Diablo IV and shuts the door behind them. It will be the first time players can choose between an actively supported Diablo IV and an actively supported Diablo V.

Diablo II already proved that Diablo players can spend decades refusing to move out of their favorite game.

Blizzard has apparently decided to stop arguing with them.

Diablo 4 Players Can Get Trapped in a War Plan With No Way to Reset It

2026-09-28T01:21:49.420-07:00

Diablo IV's War Plans are supposed to turn the endgame into a neat playlist. Pick your activities, complete one, travel directly to the next and gradually build a personalized route through Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, The Pit, Infernal Hordes and everything else Sanctuary uses to prevent you from going to bed. Season 15 even made War Plans progression account-wide within matching character partitions, fixing one of the system's most annoying problems. Unfortunately, a new player report suggests War Plans can still produce a considerably less useful kind of playlist: one containing an activity that refuses to progress and no currency left to escape it.

A Season 15 player has reported becoming soft-locked by Growing Conquest. According to the report, the relevant Growing Nightmare Dungeon can be completed, but the expected progression into the next stage does not happen correctly. The player's War Plan remains stuck, and because they no longer have enough Marks of El'Druin to generate another plan, the normal escape route is unavailable.

In other words, the War Plan knows what you are supposed to do.

You do it.

The War Plan disagrees.

War Plans Depend on Activities Passing the Baton

The entire War Plans system is built around chaining activities together. Blizzard describes it as an endgame playlist: finish the first activity and the system should move you seamlessly into the next one, generating the required access item when necessary. A plan can include Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, Kurast Undercity, Lair Bosses, Infernal Hordes and The Pit.

That structure makes progression failures particularly painful. A normal bugged dungeon can usually be abandoned. A War Plan activity is part of a chain. If the system fails to recognize that one stage has been completed, everything behind it effectively waits in line.

We have already written extensively about how Season 15 finally made War Plans progression shared across compatible characters. It was one of the best quality-of-life changes Blizzard made to the system. Your fifth character no longer needs to repeat the same administrative career simply because your first four already completed it.

Shared progression, however, does not help much when the actual plan cannot move forward.

Running Out of Marks Makes the Problem Much Worse

Marks of El'Druin are the reset currency behind War Plans. Players can use them to generate a new plan rather than completing the current board, and party synchronization also consumes Marks when a new shared plan is created. Blizzard's Season 14 documentation confirms that generating a new party plan costs two Marks of El'Druin.

Normally, that provides a safety valve. Get a plan you dislike or cannot complete and reroll it.

The trouble begins when a player is both stuck and out of Marks.

That combination has already caused problems before Season 15. During Season 14, players became trapped when Infernal Hordes appeared in War Plans they could not progress. Several affected players reported that once their Marks of El'Druin were exhausted, they could neither finish the activity nor reset the board.

The current Growing Conquest report therefore does not represent an entirely new category of War Plan failure.

It appears to be a new way of reaching an old destination.

Players Previously Found an Alt-Character Workaround

The older Infernal Horde softlock eventually produced a wonderfully Diablo solution. Players discovered that Marks of El'Druin were shared across characters. Completing War Plans on another compatible seasonal character could restore the Marks available to the account, allowing the trapped character to finally reroll its board.

That workaround may be worth remembering if somebody encounters the current Growing Conquest problem, but there is an important caveat: we have not seen the workaround reproduced specifically for this Season 15 report.

Season 15 also changed War Plans significantly by making reputation and earned progression account-wide within matching partitions. Blizzard says Seasonal, Hardcore and Solo Self Found states determine which characters share that progress, while each character still keeps its own individual planner.

So an alt may provide an escape route again.

It should not yet be treated as a guaranteed fix.

This Is Why Reset Currency Should Never Be the Only Emergency Exit

The larger design problem is not Growing Conquest specifically. It is what happens whenever a War Plan activity becomes impossible to complete.

If a reroll is simply a convenience, charging currency makes sense. Players are paying to replace a perfectly functional plan because they prefer another activity.

A softlock is different.

The player is not rerolling because they dislike Nightmare Dungeons today. They are rerolling because the current plan has stopped functioning.

Those two situations probably should not use the same emergency exit.

An obvious solution would be a free reset after the game detects an abandoned or failed War Plan activity. Another would be allowing players to delete the entire plan without rewards and start again. Even a cooldown-based emergency reset would be preferable to discovering that the only button capable of freeing your character requires currency you can no longer earn through the broken plan.

War Plans Have Improved Enormously, but Progression Bugs Keep Following Them

It is worth emphasizing that War Plans are considerably better than they were when Lord of Hatred launched. Blizzard added party synchronization, increased Activity XP at higher Torment levels and finally delivered the account-wide progression players had been requesting for months. Season 15 also increased their experience value further, particularly at Torment X and above.

The basic idea remains strong. Diablo IV contains enough endgame activities that a system organizing them into personalized chains genuinely solves a problem.

But War Plans have repeatedly suffered from progression states failing to register correctly. We have previously covered activities completing without advancing objectives, characters getting stuck near the end of progression and the old Infernal Horde softlock.

A planner that occasionally refuses to acknowledge completed plans is an unfortunate occupational hazard.

This Is Still a Small Number of Reports

There is an important limitation to the current story. The Growing Conquest report itself is currently a small technical-support thread, not a huge community-wide outbreak. Blizzard's forum index also shows a separate September 27 report titled “War Plan Stuck and have no currency”, but the available public summary does not establish that both players encountered exactly the same underlying bug.

So we should not write that Growing Conquest is universally broken.

Most players may never encounter this.

But the combination is worth watching precisely because War Plans have a documented history of similar failure states.

For Now, Keep at Least One Reset Available

Until Blizzard comments or more players reproduce the issue, there is one sensible precaution: avoid spending your final War Plan reset casually if your current board contains unfamiliar or potentially troublesome activities.

If Growing Conquest stops progressing, repeatedly completing the same activity may not fix the underlying state. And if your Marks are already gone, your options become considerably narrower.

War Plans were designed to answer a simple question:

What do you want to do next?

Season 15 has apparently discovered another possible answer.

Nothing.

You live here now.

Diablo 4’s Tower Champions Say Their Permanent Season 14 Rewards Never Arrived

2026-09-28T01:14:14.130-07:00

Diablo IV spent Season 14 asking players to take The Tower seriously. Blizzard moved the mode out of Beta, attached exclusive rewards to leaderboard positions and gave the most dedicated players a reason to spend hundreds of hours shaving seconds from runs while arguing about Transfiguration RNG. The promise at the end was simple: when Season 15 began, players would receive a permanent Emblem showing the highest leaderboard rank they achieved during Season 14. Some of the people who actually climbed those leaderboards are now asking a fairly reasonable question.

Where is it?

Multiple players have reported logging into Season 15 without receiving the promised Tower Emblem. One of the clearest reports comes from a player who says they finished #1 on the Spiritborn Hardcore Non-SSF leaderboard. Their permanent Emblem never appeared. Stranger still, the temporary Halo and Prestige Title that were supposed to disappear at the season transition are apparently still sitting on the character transferred to Eternal.

Blizzard Was Very Clear About the Season Reward

This is not a case of players inventing a reward they thought Blizzard might provide. When Tower and Leaderboards left Beta for Season 14, Blizzard explicitly laid out how the system would work. Weekly leaderboard performance could earn a Halo Cosmetic, Prestige Title and Gear Cache, with reward brackets for participation, Tower Tier 100, Top 1,000, Top 500, Top 100, Top 10 and rank #1.

Those weekly Halos and Titles were temporary. Blizzard said they would remain throughout the season and then reset when the next season began.

The permanent reward was different. At the start of the next season, players were supposed to receive an Emblem showing their highest rank from any weekly leaderboard during the previous season. Blizzard specifically said it would be granted on the player's first login after the new season started.

Season 15 started almost two weeks ago.

For some players, the first login apparently forgot the important part.

Some Players Still Have the Rewards That Were Supposed to Disappear

The strangest part is that the transition appears to have failed in both directions.

Several players say the permanent Emblem never arrived, while the Season 14 Halo remains attached to their Eternal character. Others report that their old leaderboard Title is still available too. That is essentially the opposite of the system Blizzard described: the temporary reward survived while the permanent one vanished.

One player even reports retaining the Halo after rebirthing the character.

Diablo IV has therefore managed to create a reward system where the temporary cosmetic may be more permanent than the permanent cosmetic.

There is a certain elegance to it.

This Matters More When Players Spent Hundreds of Hours Competing

The missing Emblem would be easier to dismiss if The Tower were simply another activity players visited twice for a seasonal objective. It was not.

We already covered a Season 14 player who spent roughly 400 hours chasing a Top 100 Tower position, rebuilding gear and optimizing specifically for the leaderboard. We also looked at the wider debate over whether Tower ranking measured skill or simply better Transfiguration RNG.

Those arguments mattered precisely because Blizzard had turned rankings into something tangible.

Rank 101 and rank 100 were no longer simply adjacent numbers on a website. Leaderboard brackets came with recognition. The permanent Emblem was supposed to become the lasting proof after the seasonal Halo disappeared.

For players who actually pushed those rankings, “maybe the reward did not get distributed correctly” is not a particularly satisfying finale.

The Reports Are Not Limited to One Account

The original missing-reward reports appeared almost immediately after Season 15 launched. Players on September 17 were already asking whether anyone had actually received the permanent Season 14 Emblem, with several replies saying theirs was missing too. More reports followed on September 19, September 23 and September 25.

There is at least one important counterexample. One player reported successfully receiving their Emblem after logging into the Eternal character they had ranked with, with the reward apparently arriving through the mailbox.

So this does not appear to mean every ranked player lost the reward.

It does mean the distribution looks inconsistent enough that multiple players across different ranking brackets are still filing bug reports almost two weeks into Season 15.

Logging Into the Ranked Character May Be Worth Trying

Because at least one player says logging into the specific Eternal character used for the leaderboard caused the reward to arrive, anyone still missing an Emblem may want to try that before assuming it is permanently lost.

That should not be treated as a confirmed universal fix. Other players have logged into their characters repeatedly and still report no Emblem. Restarting, checking profile customization and revisiting older leaderboard information have also failed in some cases.

At the moment, there does not appear to be a Blizzard-published workaround.

Season 15 Has Inherited Another Season 14 Problem

The irony is that Season 14 spent months turning The Tower into a more serious competitive system, and we repeatedly argued that doing so meant the administrative details had to become more reliable too.

When the Tower closed before one player's expected final push, the complaint was ultimately about communication. Competitive systems need visible finish lines.

The same principle applies to rewards.

If Blizzard asks players to care about Top 1,000, Top 100, Top 10 and rank #1, the permanent proof of achieving those positions cannot become the least reliable part of the system.

Season 14's Tower competition is over.

The leaderboard has stopped moving.

The winners have been decided.

Some of them are apparently still waiting for Diablo IV to remember that they won.

Diablo 4’s Steam Players Are Still Here After the Sale Ended

2026-09-28T01:02:46.348-07:00

Two weeks ago, Diablo IV's Steam population looked like somebody had accidentally opened the gates of Sanctuary during rush hour. Season 15 launched, Blizzard made the game temporarily free, the Standard Edition dropped to $12.49 and tens of thousands of players suddenly appeared. That was interesting, but it was also easy to explain. Free games tend to attract people. Games discounted by 75% tend to attract people. The real test was always what happened after Blizzard removed both incentives. We now have that answer, and Diablo IV's Steam audience is still dramatically larger than it was before Season of Hell's Legacy began.

At the time of writing on September 28, SteamDB shows roughly 22,800 players currently in Diablo IV, with a 24-hour peak of 49,734. The exact live number naturally moves throughout the day, but the important comparison is much harder to dismiss: when we checked Diablo IV on September 2, Steam was hovering around only 2,400 to 2,500 concurrent players.

The free weekend is gone.

The 75% discount is gone.

The players, apparently, are not.

This Was the Test We Were Waiting For

When we checked the numbers again on September 22, Diablo IV still had roughly 26,700 concurrent Steam players after free access ended. That looked promising, but there was one enormous asterisk attached to the number. Blizzard was still selling the Standard Edition for $12.49, down from $49.99, and anyone who had just spent the free weekend enjoying Season 15 had until September 24 to convert into a paying player at an unusually low price.

We therefore ended that article with a very specific prediction: the next meaningful checkpoint would arrive after September 24.

It has arrived.

Steam's weekend deal is over, and Diablo IV has not returned anywhere close to the quiet levels we saw at the beginning of the month.

The 24-Hour Peak Is Still Close to 50,000

The most surprising number may actually be the daily peak. SteamDB currently records 49,734 concurrent players during the last 24 hours. That is remarkably close to the peaks we were watching while the game was still free.

Back on September 19, during the promotion, the 24-hour peak sat at 48,865. Three days later, while the sale was still active but free access had ended, SteamDB showed another peak close to 50,000.

Now the discount is gone too, and the latest daily peak remains in roughly the same territory.

That does not mean the exact same 50,000 people have remained continuously since the free weekend. Concurrent-player figures cannot tell us that. Some players will be new buyers, some returning veterans, some long-term Steam owners and some people who spent $12.49 after trying the game for free.

But the trend tells us something useful.

Whatever brought people back to Diablo IV has survived the end of the promotion considerably better than a temporary free-weekend spike normally would.

Season 15 Has Given Players an Unusual Amount to Chase

The obvious candidate is Season of Hell's Legacy itself.

Season 15 has problems. We have spent much of the last two weeks documenting them. Prime Evil Powers can remain locked at Rank 24. Moophisto occasionally forgets that bosses traditionally drop items. Grief's headline Weapon Damage appears suspicious. Wirt's Lucky Coin has required multiple rounds of repair. Blizzard has now reached the point where even the apology gift for the messy launch has generated its own missing-reward reports.

And yet the season has also been unusually good at giving players reasons to log in tomorrow.

Our Season 15 secret checklist keeps expanding. Players have found hidden Diablo II Runewords, Uber Tristram, the Hellfire Torch, Whimsyshire, Mefishto, Bovine armor, a guaranteed Harlequin Crest and increasingly suspicious clues surrounding Annihilus and Uber Diablo.

Even when the game is malfunctioning, there is often something new to investigate while waiting for the hotfix.

BlizzCon Probably Helped Too

Season 15 also arrived immediately after Blizzard put Diablo back in the spotlight at BlizzCon.

Diablo V was announced. Blizzard revealed a new long-term direction for Diablo IV. The Amazon is coming in 2027. Diablo II: Resurrected continues receiving substantial development. Diablo Immortal is about to launch its Spawn collaboration.

That makes September unusually difficult to interpret as a simple seasonal comparison.

The Steam rebound is almost certainly not caused by one thing.

Season 15 arrived at exactly the same moment Blizzard gave former players several reasons to think about Diablo again. Then Steam removed the financial barrier for a few days and followed it with an aggressive discount.

The interesting part is that the promotional machinery has now stopped while the Steam population remains elevated.

This Still Does Not Tell Us Diablo 4’s Total Player Count

The usual warning remains necessary.

Steam is only one part of Diablo IV's audience. Battle.net players are not included. Xbox players are not included. PlayStation players are not included. Blizzard does not publish a live cross-platform population total that lets us convert SteamDB into a percentage of Sanctuary.

We therefore cannot say Diablo IV currently has 22,800 players.

We can say it has approximately 22,800 people playing simultaneously through Steam at this particular moment, and that Steam's daily peak remains near 50,000.

That makes Steam useful as a trend line rather than a census.

And the trend line has changed dramatically since September 2.

We Still Need to See Where the New Baseline Settles

There is another reason not to declare victory after one weekend.

Season 15 is still new. Anniversary discoveries are still being solved. Blizzard is still issuing patches. Gift of the Tree is currently providing additional rewards. Players who bought the game during the sale have barely had time to decide whether Diablo IV becomes part of their regular rotation or something they played enthusiastically for ten days before remembering they also own 412 other Steam games.

The more interesting number may therefore be the one we see in mid-October.

If Diablo IV eventually settles at 5,000 concurrent Steam players, then much of September's surge was temporary.

If it settles at 15,000, 20,000 or higher, Blizzard will have established a significantly larger Steam baseline than it had before Season 15.

We are not there yet.

But the first major retention test has now happened.

The Doors Cost Full Price Again

That is what makes today's number different from the ones we reported earlier.

On September 19, Diablo IV was free.

On September 22, free access had ended, but the game still cost $12.49.

Today, neither explanation applies.

SteamDB still shows more than twenty thousand people playing in the morning and almost fifty thousand at the latest daily peak.

At the beginning of September, we were wondering whether Diablo IV's Steam population had fallen into an end-of-season hole it might struggle to escape.

Four weeks later, Sanctuary is considerably louder.

The free weekend got people through the door.

The sale gave them a cheap reason to stay.

Now Diablo IV has to prove the game itself can keep them there.

Diablo 4’s Apology Gift Is Apparently Bugged Too

2026-09-28T00:48:52.423-07:00

Diablo IV Season 15 did not have the smoothest arrival in Sanctuary. The launch was delayed, Solo Self-Found remained unavailable after the seasonal realm finally opened, Tree of Whispers rewards misbehaved and the following days produced enough bugs to keep Blizzard's hotfix notes unusually well fed. Blizzard has now started apologizing in the traditional Diablo language: loot. Players are receiving an in-game message through the Horadric Post containing a free Resplendent Spark. There is only one wonderfully Season 15-shaped problem. Some players say the apology itself is not arriving correctly.

Reports began appearing after Blizzard sent the compensation through the recently added Horadric Post. Some players opened the mail and received the promised Spark normally. Others say the letter arrived without the attachment. A few report receiving neither the message nor the item at all. One Blizzard forum report even describes the Resplendent Spark disappearing from the mail before it could be claimed.

Which means Season 15 has apparently reached the stage where Blizzard is fixing the bugs caused by the bugs and may now need to investigate the reward sent because of the bugs.

Sanctuary remains efficient.

The Gift Is a Resplendent Spark

The compensation itself is actually quite generous. Blizzard is distributing a Resplendent Spark, one of Diablo IV's most valuable crafting resources. Sparks are central to Mythic crafting and have become even more important in Season 15 because the Horadric Cube offers new ways to turn carefully prepared Unique equipment into targeted Mythics.

As we recently covered in our look at Season 15's increasingly complicated Crafted Mythic system, five Sparks can be used as part of the deterministic Upgrade Direct Item to Mythic recipe. One free Spark is therefore not simply another cache containing three Legendary gloves and some crafting materials. It represents a meaningful chunk of progress toward one of the game's most expensive upgrades.

Players who received the gift normally have reported finding it through the Horadric Post in major towns. If you have not checked the mailbox recently, it is worth doing so before assuming the compensation never arrived.

Not Everyone Is Seeing the Same Thing

The confusing part is that the rollout does not appear completely consistent.

Reports collected after the gift began arriving describe three different experiences. Some players received the message and Spark exactly as expected. Some received the apology message but no Spark. Others say nothing appeared at all.

There are also isolated cases where players claim the Spark appeared but was lost through another technical problem. That does not necessarily mean the compensation system itself is broken in every case. Mail delivery, disconnects and lost-item behavior can complicate individual reports.

What we can say is simpler: players are not all reporting the same successful delivery.

Blizzard has not yet published a detailed explanation for the differences.

This Comes After the Missing Seasonal Spark Bug

The choice of compensation is particularly appropriate because Resplendent Sparks have already been part of Season 15's problems.

Earlier in the season, players completing the seasonal reputation track discovered that the Resplendent Cache could fail to provide the Spark listed among its rewards. Blizzard fixed that issue in Hotfix 4. We covered the change in our Hotfix 4 breakdown, alongside repairs for Wirt's Lucky Coin, class quests and the infinitely enthusiastic Butcher.

That means some players who missed a Spark during progression are now opening their mailbox to receive another Spark as part of Blizzard's broader apology for the launch.

Unless, naturally, that one is missing too.

There are jokes Blizzard writes.

And then there are jokes that appear naturally through software development.

Blizzard Is Already Running a Second Make-Good Event

The mailed Spark is not Blizzard's only compensation for Season 15's rough beginning.

From September 23 through October 7, the Tree of Whispers is running Gift of the Tree. Completing Grim Favors during the event awards additional Gift of the Tree Caches, providing extra experience and loot. Blizzard explicitly introduced the event because Season of Hell's Legacy arrived later than planned.

The timing is almost poetic because Tree of Whispers cache turn-ins were themselves among the systems that malfunctioned around launch.

The Tree is therefore now giving players extra rewards because the Tree previously had trouble giving players rewards.

Diablo IV may occasionally be more self-referential than intended.

Season 15’s Launch Problems Went Well Beyond a Few Hours of Delay

The original launch delay alone was relatively short. As we covered when Season 15 finally went live, Blizzard restored the Seasonal Realm the same day. The bigger issue was the pile-up around it.

Solo Self-Found remained disabled while Blizzard continued investigating problems. Tree of Whispers reward turn-ins malfunctioned. Seasonal reputation could fail to provide its Spark. Wirt's Lucky Coin could disappear without opening Uber Tristram. Class quests became blocked. Runewords produced strange interactions. Prime Evil Powers are still failing to unlock correctly for some players even after Rank 24.

Tomorrow's Patch 3.2.2 continues the cleanup, addressing more seasonal progression, Runeword and reward bugs, although several reported problems remain outside the published fix list.

Seen against that background, a Resplendent Spark and two weeks of improved Whisper rewards make sense as a goodwill gesture.

The unfortunate part is that goodwill gifts work considerably better when everybody receives the goodwill.

Check the Horadric Post Before Assuming Yours Is Missing

There is one practical complication worth mentioning: the Horadric Post is still relatively new, and plenty of players simply do not check it regularly.

The Spark is not automatically dropped into your inventory when you log in. Players who received the compensation normally report collecting it through the in-game mail system in a major town.

So before filing a bug report, visit the Horadric Post and check whether Blizzard's message is waiting there.

If the message appears without the promised Spark, or if the mail disappears incorrectly, that is a different problem and worth documenting.

The Apology Is Actually a Good Idea

It would be easy to turn this into nothing but another joke about Blizzard bugs, but the underlying gesture is sensible.

Resplendent Sparks are valuable enough to matter without trivializing the entire Mythic economy. Gift of the Tree gives everyone an incentive to play rather than simply placing another item in a mailbox. And Blizzard has been deploying hotfixes quickly enough that several first-week problems are already gone.

Season 15 itself has also been considerably more interesting than its launch suggested. Hidden Runewords, Uber Tristram, Mefishto, Annihilus clues, cow secrets and a growing collection of Diablo history have given players more reasons to investigate Sanctuary than most recent seasons.

The problem is not that Blizzard apologized.

The problem is that Season 15 has become so thematically consistent that even the apology may require troubleshooting.

So check your Horadric Post.

There may be a Resplendent Spark waiting for you.

And if there isn't, at least Blizzard has accidentally given us the most Season 15 ending possible.

A Diablo 4 Player Just Found a Seasonal Ber Rune on the Eternal Realm

2026-09-27T11:53:30.493-07:00

Diablo IV's Eternal Realm is supposed to be the sensible part of Sanctuary. Seasonal characters can run around carrying Prime Evil soul fragments, reconstructing ancient Runewords and throwing valuable fish into the Horadric Cube, while Eternal characters remain safely outside the temporary madness. At least that is the theory. One Eternal-only player has now opened a War Plans Rune reward and received something that appears to have wandered through the wrong door: a Ber Rune marked “Seasonal Item.”

The same reward also produced an Amn Rune.

The player says they have never played the Seasonal Realm, posted a screenshot of the Ber and confirmed that it came directly from War Plans rune rewards. That makes the find considerably more interesting than an old seasonal character transferring an item somewhere it should not be. If the report is accurate, an Eternal Realm reward table directly generated Season 15 Rune content.

Whether it was supposed to do that is another matter entirely.

The Ber Rune Still Says “Seasonal Item”

The most important detail is printed directly on the item.

Seasonal Item.

That is why the Blizzard forum report immediately attracted attention. The player did not find an ordinary Rune that happened to share a name with one of Season 15's additions. The screenshot shows the same seasonal item designation players see while hunting the new Runes on seasonal characters.

Another player responded that everything they had read pointed toward those Runes being seasonal-only. Others immediately reached the more important scientific question: if Ber can drop on Eternal, can Eternal characters actually build the hidden Runewords?

Nobody has demonstrated that part yet.

Season 15’s Hidden Runewords Are Supposed to Be Part of the Anniversary Hunt

The new Runes became one of Season of Hell's Legacy's best surprises shortly after launch. Players discovered that familiar Diablo II combinations could once again be used through the Horadric Cube, leading to hidden Runewords including Stealth, Enigma and Grief.

That system has always been framed as part of the Season 15 anniversary content rather than one of the explicitly permanent additions to Diablo IV.

Blizzard's own Season 15 announcement makes a very clear distinction elsewhere. The nine new Legacy Uniques, including Stone of Jordan, Leoric's Crown, In-Geom and Messerschmidt's Reaver, are described specifically as permanent additions available on both Seasonal and Eternal realms.

The new seasonal Runes are not given that same declaration.

And unlike Stone of Jordan, this Ber Rune is literally carrying a Seasonal Item label.

That Makes a War Plans Drop Especially Strange

If the Rune had appeared from some obscure anniversary dungeon, it might be easier to blame a strange interaction between seasonal content and an Eternal location.

Instead, the player says Ber and Amn came from a War Plans Rune reward.

War Plans exist on both Seasonal and Eternal characters, and Blizzard specifically updated the system for Season 15 so reputation is shared between compatible characters inside the same realm partition. The official patch notes also continue to reference Rune rewards from War Plans and related activities.

In other words, this looks less like somebody sneaking through a seasonal portal and more like an Eternal reward chest reaching into the seasonal Rune pool when deciding what to hand out.

That sounds suspiciously like a loot-table bug.

But right now, “sounds suspiciously like” is as far as we can responsibly go.

There Is No Blizzard Confirmation That Season 15 Runes Are Becoming Permanent

This is where it would be very easy to turn one Ber Rune into an announcement Blizzard has not made.

There is currently no official confirmation that the new Season 15 Runes or hidden Runewords are being added permanently to Eternal Realm.

Blizzard has not published a note saying Ber, Jah, Amn or the other anniversary Runes are now Eternal drops. There has been no announcement that Season 15's hidden Runeword system is becoming part of Diablo IV's permanent itemization.

One Eternal player getting Ber therefore does not establish a policy change.

It establishes that one Eternal player got Ber.

That is still weird enough to write about.

Eternal Players Have Been Asking About This Exact Divide

The timing is particularly interesting because Eternal players have spent the past week discussing exactly which Season 15 additions they are supposed to receive.

The Legacy Uniques are permanent. The Bovine Sanctum can appear in parts of Eternal content, although not every seasonal interaction around it works the same way. Season-specific Prime Evil mechanics remain seasonal. The Runewords have generally been treated as part of the anniversary season.

That has created some understandable confusion, particularly because Season 15 contains a mixture of permanent game updates and temporary seasonal systems.

Blizzard deliberately made the distinction explicit for the Legacy Uniques. A Stone of Jordan dropping on Eternal is therefore normal.

A Ber Rune with “Seasonal Item” written underneath it is considerably harder to explain.

If Eternal Can Make Runewords, Things Get Much More Interesting

The next obvious experiment is whether the Runes actually function as ingredients for Season 15's hidden recipes on Eternal.

A Ber by itself is mostly a very prestigious rock.

Ber combined with the correct companions is where things become interesting.

Season 15's Runewords include several combinations imported directly from Diablo II, and those items can carry powerful effects. We recently covered the reports that Grief's enormous Weapon Damage affix may not currently be functioning correctly, while earlier in the season Blizzard had to repair an interaction where Stealth could inherit Enigma-level power.

If Eternal characters can suddenly create those Runewords too, this stops being a funny screenshot and becomes an unexpected extension of one of the season's largest systems.

There is currently no evidence that has happened.

But someone with a Ber Rune is inevitably going to try.

The Rune Could Simply Disappear Later

There is another reason Eternal players should probably avoid constructing an entire build around this discovery.

If the drop is unintended, Blizzard can fix the relevant reward table. What happens to Runes already generated on Eternal is less obvious.

They could remain as curiosities.

They could stop functioning.

They could be converted or removed during a future patch.

Blizzard has not said.

Players in the forum thread are already joking that the Ber may vanish with the next update, which is precisely why treating the drop as a permanent addition would be risky.

Season 15 has already produced enough strange item-state problems on Eternal. We have seen older Mythics unexpectedly receive Crafted restrictions and previously valid builds become impossible to equip. A Seasonal Ber Rune appearing there adds another object to the museum labelled Please Do Not Build Your Retirement Plan Around This Yet.

There May Be More Than One

The original player received both Ber and Amn, which is perhaps the most interesting small detail in the report.

If this were a single corrupted item or visual glitch, two different seasonal Rune rewards appearing together would be unusual. Getting multiple Rune types from the same Eternal reward source points more naturally toward the reward pool itself containing something it possibly should not.

That still needs reproduction.

If other Eternal players begin opening Rune rewards from War Plans and reporting Jah, Ber, Amn or other Season 15 Runes, the evidence becomes much stronger very quickly.

If nobody can reproduce it, then we may simply have one of Sanctuary's stranger individual loot accidents.

For Now, Eternal Has One Very Suspicious Ber Rune

That is where the story stands on September 27.

We have a screenshot.

We have a player who says they exclusively play Eternal.

We have a specific source: War Plans Rune rewards.

We have Ber and Amn.

And we have an item that openly identifies itself as seasonal while sitting in a realm where players did not expect it to exist.

What we do not have is Blizzard saying the rules have changed.

So no, Season 15 Runewords are not suddenly confirmed as permanent Eternal content.

But somewhere on the Eternal Realm, there is currently a Ber Rune that appears to have missed that particular memo.

Diablo 4 Players Love Season 15, but Switching Prime Evil Powers Is Becoming a Grind

2026-09-27T11:47:48.435-07:00

Diablo IV Season 15 gives players three Prime Evils to choose from, three separate reputation tracks to complete and three different sets of activities that become stronger depending on which demonic fragment currently lives inside their jewelry. On paper, that sounds like an invitation to experiment. Run Helltides with Diablo. Switch to Baal before farming Lair Bosses. Equip Mephisto when it is time to push Nightmare Dungeons or The Pit. In practice, players are discovering that changing allegiance is considerably less casual. Every switch requires another Prime Evil Splinter, the Splinters are rare, duplicates do not stack nicely, and unlucky players can spend hours finding exactly the wrong one.

The frustration has become one of the louder community complaints around an otherwise surprisingly popular Season of Hell's Legacy. One recent discussion climbed past 300 upvotes after a player described spending roughly 28 hours in the season and receiving four Splinters of Destruction in a row while trying to switch to Mephisto. Other players have described leveling entirely new characters because selecting a different Prime Evil during the seasonal quest can sometimes feel easier than farming the consumable needed to change one character.

When creating another character becomes a quality-of-life feature, something has probably gone slightly wrong.

The Three Prime Evils Are Designed for Different Activities

The important part is that your Prime Evil choice is not merely cosmetic. As we explained in our Season 15 Prime Evil Splinter guide, each fragment modifies different sections of Diablo IV's endgame.

Splinter of Terror, tied to Diablo, modifies Helltides and Infernal Hordes. Splinter of Destruction, belonging to Baal, affects The Undercity and Lair Bosses. Splinter of Hatred, tied to Mephisto, modifies The Pit and Nightmare Dungeons. All three also change Tree of Whispers activities.

Those modifiers can be substantial. Baal can improve Undercity experience rewards. Mephisto can make Pit progression more efficient. Diablo enhances activities players may be farming for entirely different materials.

So the natural way to use the system is obvious.

Switch according to what you are doing.

Unfortunately, Season 15 then asks whether you brought the correct receipt.

Switching Requires Another Splinter

Blizzard deliberately made changing Prime Evil Powers require another Splinter from the larger Waking Nightmares. The official season description calls the switching material rare and tells players to return to the largest Waking Nightmares when they want to pursue another path.

That makes some thematic sense. Bearing part of a Prime Evil should perhaps feel more significant than selecting a loadout from the Wardrobe.

The problem is that the system becomes increasingly awkward after players understand how useful switching can be.

You might finish an evening of Helltides with Diablo equipped and decide to spend the next session leveling Glyphs in Nightmare Dungeons. Mephisto is the obvious choice. But unless you already have the correct Splinter of Hatred, that decision first becomes a farming project.

And finding a Splinter does not mean finding the one you wanted.

Players Keep Finding the Wrong Splinter

Community reports describe one of the system's most frustrating little loops: repeatedly earning Splinters for Prime Evils they are not currently trying to switch to.

One player reported four Destruction Splinters in succession while hunting Hatred. Others have accumulated several Terror or Destruction drops without seeing Mephisto once. Seasonal reputation caches can also provide Splinters, but again, the resulting type is not necessarily the one the player needs.

There is another small annoyance on top of that: duplicate Splinters are limited in inventory rather than behaving like a normal stackable currency.

So Diablo IV can create the extraordinary situation where the rare seasonal item finally drops, the player walks over to pick it up and the game effectively replies:

No thank you. You already own that particular demon.

Prime Evil Splinters Are Also Used for Uber Tristram

The problem becomes more interesting because these Splinters have another extremely important purpose.

Combine Terror, Destruction and Hatred in the Horadric Cube and they become Wirt's Lucky Coin, the key required for Season 15's hidden Uber Tristram encounter and Hellfire Torch.

That means the same rare resource serves two very different types of content.

One is basic seasonal flexibility. Change which Prime Evil modifies your activities.

The other is aspirational secret endgame content involving Diablo, Baal and Mephisto simultaneously.

Several players have pointed directly at that collision. They do not necessarily object to Wirt's Lucky Coin requiring valuable materials. Uber Tristram is supposed to be something players prepare for.

They object to using the same scarce materials every time they want to change which Nightmare Dungeon modifier is active.

Maxing All Three Reputation Tracks Does Not Make Switching Free

This is where the design becomes particularly strange.

Players can level all three Prime Evil reputation tracks separately. Each contains its own rewards, activity modifiers and six upgrades to the associated Iconic Power. We have already covered the separate problem where some players reach Rank 24 and still cannot unlock their final Prime Evil Power.

But even when everything works correctly, completing all three tracks does not appear to graduate the character into free switching.

That is what a growing section of the community wants Blizzard to change.

One popular suggestion is simple: make Splinters necessary while progressing the three tracks, but once all three reach Rank 24, let players swap freely between them.

That preserves the importance of discovering and leveling each Prime Evil while removing the repetitive farming once the seasonal progression has effectively been completed.

It also gives Rank 24 another meaningful reward.

You have mastered Diablo.

You have mastered Baal.

You have mastered Mephisto.

Congratulations. You may now use the menu.

Some Players Are Just Making Alts Instead

The funniest workaround may also be the strongest argument that the current system needs another look.

Prime Evil Powers that have already been unlocked are account-wide. New seasonal characters can also skip most of the seasonal story and select a Prime Evil relatively quickly.

As a result, some players are creating alternate characters dedicated to different Splinters rather than repeatedly farming switching consumables. Gear can then be transferred where appropriate.

That is obviously not convenient for every build or class, and character-specific progression still needs to be considered. But the fact that players are discussing character creation as an alternative to clicking from Baal to Mephisto says plenty about how expensive the intended switching method can feel.

The System Would Probably Feel Better With One Small Change

There are several obvious possibilities.

Splinters could stack.

Players could target a specific Splinter more reliably.

Changing Prime Evils could become free once the relevant reputation track is completed.

Or Blizzard could separate the currency used for seasonal power switching from the ingredients required to create Wirt's Lucky Coin.

None of those ideas require removing the progression system. They simply make the system better at encouraging the behaviour it was apparently designed around.

Blizzard explicitly gave Diablo, Baal and Mephisto different activity bonuses.

Players naturally want to use those bonuses.

The current implementation occasionally responds by asking them to go farm Baal for three hours first.

Season 15 Is Good Enough That the Friction Stands Out

There is an important detail buried inside many of the complaints: players actually like Season 15.

The most popular discussion about the Splinter grind begins by saying exactly that. The anniversary secrets, returning bosses, hidden Runewords, enormous list of hidden discoveries and new progression systems have given players plenty to chase.

That may be why the Prime Evil switching problem is attracting attention.

People want to interact with the system more than the system currently allows.

That is considerably easier to fix than having a seasonal mechanic nobody cares about.

Diablo IV has given players three different Prime Evils, three progression tracks and a reason to change between them depending on what they are doing.

Now it just needs to stop making changing your mind feel like another endgame activity.

Diablo 4 Players Are Maxing Their Prime Evil Powers, but the Final Upgrade Stays Locked

2026-09-27T11:39:36.823-07:00

Diablo IV Season 15 asks players to make a fairly serious commitment to one of Sanctuary's three Prime Evils, grind thousands of reputation points in that demon's name and eventually unlock the strongest power on the entire progression track. There is only one small problem. A growing number of players are reaching Rank 24 and the full 20,000 reputation, watching Deckard Cain's table place a reassuring green checkmark beside the final reward, and then opening the Prime Evil Powers screen to discover that the capstone ability still says “Not Yet Unlocked.”

The issue has now been reported across several separate Blizzard forum threads, with players affected by more than one Splinter. Fever of Malice from the Hatred path and Thrill of Ruin from Destruction are among the final powers players specifically report being unable to equip despite completing the corresponding reputation track. Earlier powers such as Cold Blood and Consuming Blaze have also appeared in reports, suggesting this may be a broader synchronization problem between Deckard's reputation board and the actual Prime Evil Power interface rather than one broken ability.

Rank 24 Says Complete. The Power Screen Disagrees.

The most consistent version of the bug is wonderfully simple. Players reach Rank 24. Deckard's table displays the final reward as automatically claimed. The green completion mark appears exactly where it should. There are no remaining seasonal quests to finish.

Then they open the power menu.

Grey icon.

Red text.

Not Yet Unlocked.

One Blizzard forum report describes exactly that situation with Fever of Malice after reaching Rank 24 on the Splinter of Hatred track. Another dedicated thread reports the same thing with Thrill of Ruin after completely finishing Deckard Cain's reputation progression and the Season 15 questline.

Several players have tried relogging, changing difficulty, switching zones, disabling cross-play and changing Splinters without reliably solving it.

Apparently twenty thousand points of loyalty to a Prime Evil are not enough. The bureaucracy of Hell remains undefeated.

This Hits the Core Season 15 Progression System

That makes the problem more significant than a broken side reward. Prime Evil Powers are one of the defining mechanics of Season of Hell's Legacy. Our Diablo, Baal and Mephisto Splinter guide explains how each path changes both your character and the activities around Sanctuary.

Diablo's Splinter affects Helltides and Infernal Hordes. Baal focuses on The Undercity and Lair Bosses. Mephisto modifies The Pit and Nightmare Dungeons. Each track gradually unlocks additional Prime Evil Powers while reputation climbs toward Rank 24.

The final power is therefore not some decorative reward players discover after the meaningful progression has already ended. It is supposed to be the payoff for finishing the entire track.

Getting there and discovering that the last ability remains greyed out is roughly equivalent to completing a skill tree and finding somebody forgot to connect the final node.

Some Players Are Missing More Than the Power

A few reports make the situation even stranger. Players have also described reaching the final reputation tier without receiving other expected Rank 24 rewards, including Resplendent Sparks in earlier reports. Blizzard already addressed one separate Resplendent Spark problem through Hotfix 4, but the Prime Evil Power unlock issue continues to appear independently.

Other players report that changing to another Splinter and leveling that reputation track did not repair the missing capstone. One player maxed multiple Prime Evil paths and still found the final power locked.

There has been at least one community report where leveling another character eventually caused the missing unlock to appear on the original character too. That is interesting, but it is not consistent enough to call a workaround. Creating and leveling another character in the hope that a seasonal progression flag becomes embarrassed into functioning is probably not the official solution Blizzard intended.

Patch 3.2.2 Does Not List a Fix

This week's Patch 3.2.2 contains another substantial round of Season 15 repairs. Blizzard is fixing Worldstone Chamber progression, Lester's Farm, Chamber of Bone rewards, several Runeword problems, Nihlathak teleporting outside his arena and Henri's Perquisition crafting.

The Prime Evil Power unlock problem is not included in the published fix list.

That does not mean Blizzard cannot address it separately through a hotfix, and the absence of a line in the patch notes is not proof that the developers are ignoring the reports. But players stuck at Rank 24 should not currently assume that installing 3.2.2 will automatically unlock their missing power.

The Bug Also Makes Switching Splinters Less Attractive

This arrives at an awkward time because the entire Splinter system encourages experimentation. Players can eventually switch between Diablo, Baal and Mephisto depending on which activities they want to enhance. Those Splinters are also central to other Season 15 secrets, including the route toward Uber Tristram and the Hellfire Torch.

A progression system built around trying different Prime Evil paths becomes considerably less inviting when players are unsure whether finishing the next reputation board will actually provide its final reward.

Season 15 has been at its best when it asks players to experiment.

This bug encourages the opposite.

For Now, There Is No Reliable Fix

As of September 27, there is no broadly reproduced workaround that reliably unlocks the missing Prime Evil capstone. Restarting the client, changing difficulty, switching Splinters and revisiting Deckard's table have all failed for affected players.

If your reputation track shows Rank 24 complete while the final power remains unavailable, the safest move is probably to avoid repeatedly changing progression states in an attempt to force it. The problem appears to be server-side progression failing to synchronize correctly with the power interface, and community experimentation has not produced a dependable cure.

Blizzard has already spent the first two weeks of Season 15 fixing portals, Sparks, Runewords, Cube recipes and progression blockers.

Now some players have reached the absolute end of the Prime Evil reputation grind.

The game has congratulated them.

Deckard's table has checked the box.

The Prime Evil apparently forgot to sign the paperwork.

Diablo 2 Season 15 Is Forcing Some Chronicle Hunters Onto Ladder

2026-09-26T00:25:31.534-07:00

Diablo II players have always been collectors. Some collect high runes. Some collect perfect Uniques. Some attempt the Holy Grail and spend several years discovering that Tyrael's Might has apparently taken their existence personally. Reign of the Warlock finally turned that obsession into an official system with the Chronicle, which records the Uniques, Sets and Runewords players discover and even remembers where and when they found them. There is just one small complication in Season 15: some of the items Chronicle hunters need are only available in their updated form on Ladder.

The issue surfaced again this week when a Non-Ladder player trying to finish the Chronicle asked why Pluckeye stubbornly refused to appear. The answer is hiding in Patch 3.3. Blizzard changed Pluckeye for Season 15 by adding 25% Increased Attack Speed, but the updated version is explicitly restricted to Reign of the Warlock Ladder. For somebody whose entire endgame currently consists of putting checkmarks beside increasingly obscure pieces of equipment, that is a rather important footnote.

The Chronicle Was Built for Diablo II Collectors

The Chronicle is one of Reign of the Warlock's smartest quality-of-life additions because it formalizes something Diablo II players have been doing outside the game for decades.

Blizzard describes it as an in-game record of every Unique, Set and Runeword you have collected. It tracks when and where an item was found and provides rewards for completing portions of the collection. In other words, the spreadsheet has finally been absorbed into Diablo itself.

That works particularly well for Non-Ladder players. Those characters are often years old. Their stashes contain equipment from several seasons, abandoned builds and objects kept for reasons nobody can remember anymore. Reign of the Warlock gave those permanent characters a new long-term project that does not disappear when the Ladder resets.

We looked at that tension recently when Season 15 players began asking why the Ladder population felt quieter. One possible reason is simply that Non-Ladder now has considerably more to do.

The Chronicle is a large part of that.

Which makes it slightly awkward when the collection tells you to go play Ladder.

Patch 3.3 Changed Several Old Items

The confusion comes from two different Season 15 item changes happening simultaneously.

First, Blizzard moved several previously Ladder-exclusive Runewords into Non-Ladder for Reign of the Warlock. We covered that when Season 15 unlocked eight older Ladder Runewords for permanent characters. That was good news for players who prefer building long-term collections rather than restarting every season.

But Patch 3.3 also updated several older Unique and Set items.

Those newly changed versions remain Ladder-only.

The list includes:

Bloodletter with 20% Faster Run/Walk
The Battlebranch with lower item and character level requirements
Rogue's Bow with Amazon skill bonuses
Pluckeye with 25% Increased Attack Speed
Bane Ash redesigned around Faster Cast Rate
Gravenspine with 10% Faster Cast Rate
Blinkbat's Form with improved Faster Run/Walk and Mana After Each Kill
The Ward with a socket
Manald Heal with 10% Faster Cast Rate
new bonuses for Angelic Raiment

Blizzard's wording is unusually clear: the changed versions are available only on Ladder in Reign of the Warlock.

Pluckeye Exposed the Chronicle Problem

The current discussion began with something delightfully Diablo II in nature.

A player was trying to finish the Chronicle.

Everything was going reasonably well.

Except Pluckeye would not drop.

The player wondered whether the original version could still satisfy the Chronicle on Non-Ladder, because old Pluckeyes obviously existed long before Season 15. Other players went back to Blizzard's Patch 3.3 notes and pointed out the restriction: the changed Season 15 Pluckeye exists only on Reign of the Warlock Ladder.

That means anyone hunting the current Chronicle entry tied to that version cannot simply remain permanently on Non-Ladder and wait for RNG to become cooperative.

RNG is innocent this time.

The item is somewhere else.

This Is Not the Same as Saying Pluckeye No Longer Exists on Non-Ladder

There is an important distinction here.

Old versions of these Diablo II items did not suddenly disappear from history. Existing Non-Ladder copies remain existing copies, and the older item definitions still belong to other Diablo II eras and rulesets.

What Season 15 restricts is the newly modified Reign of the Warlock version.

That distinction already caused confusion when Patch 3.3 launched. We covered it in our article about which Season 15 items actually moved to Non-Ladder. Players saw Blizzard announcing that previous Ladder items were becoming available permanently and reasonably assumed Season 15 was opening the gates.

It was.

It was also building another gate immediately beside them.

Blizzard Is Using Ladder to Test Item Changes

The design itself is not especially mysterious. Ladder has always given Blizzard a contained environment for new economies and new items. Season 15 appears to be applying that philosophy to balance experiments.

Pluckeye gaining Increased Attack Speed is not going to destroy the Diablo II economy. Neither is Blinkbat's Form becoming slightly less embarrassing. But Blizzard can introduce these updated versions to a fresh Ladder environment first, watch how players use them and later decide whether they should become permanent.

That is similar to how Runewords historically moved from seasonal exclusivity into the wider game.

As a development strategy, it makes sense.

As a collector staring at one empty Chronicle slot, development strategy is probably less comforting.

The Chronicle Makes Ladder Exclusivity More Noticeable

This is the interesting part.

Ladder-exclusive equipment is not new to Diablo II. For years, the entire point of Ladder was partly access to things Non-Ladder characters could not make or find.

The Chronicle changes the psychology.

Before Reign of the Warlock, a Non-Ladder player could simply decide they did not care about the latest seasonal item. Their permanent character had its own economy, gear and goals.

Now the game itself provides a collection interface encouraging them to complete everything.

An empty Chronicle entry is different from knowing some Ladder item exists somewhere theoretically. The missing space sits there quietly judging you.

Diablo II has discovered achievements.

This was probably inevitable.

It Also Complicates Diablo II’s New Three-Month Rhythm

The situation becomes more interesting alongside Blizzard's changing seasonal schedule. Beginning with Season 15, patches arrive shortly before the new Ladder starts, and Blizzard has indicated future seasons will follow a similar rhythm.

We have already seen players questioning whether modern Diablo II Ladder seasons are becoming too short, particularly now that Reign of the Warlock has added longer-term systems such as Chronicle and Colossal Ancients.

Collectors may increasingly face an odd choice.

Stay on Non-Ladder where the permanent collection lives comfortably.

Or restart on Ladder because Blizzard placed the newest version of one obscure level-five bow over there.

For competitive players, that is not a problem. Starting from nothing is why Ladder exists.

For Chronicle completionists, it can feel more like administrative travel.

The Good News Is That Ladder Items Eventually Have Somewhere to Go

There is at least a natural route back.

When a Ladder season ends, characters become Non-Ladder characters and their equipment follows them. That means a player can collect the seasonal versions while the Ladder is active and eventually bring those items into their permanent environment.

The changed Season 15 items therefore are not necessarily trapped forever inside the season.

But if the goal is to discover them personally for Chronicle credit, collectors need to pay attention to exactly how Blizzard handles discovery status across characters, seasons and future item migrations. Reign of the Warlock is still young enough that players are working out some of those boundaries in real time.

The safest rule right now is simple:

If an item received a new version in Patch 3.3 and your Chronicle insists you have not discovered it, do not spend another hundred hours farming Non-Ladder before checking whether Blizzard put that particular version on Ladder.

Diablo II Has Somehow Made Collecting More Complicated

That is almost impressive.

The Chronicle was supposed to simplify Diablo II collecting.

No spreadsheets.

No handwritten Holy Grail lists.

No trying to remember whether the Bonesnap in mule number seven was found in 2024 or bought from somebody called xXBaalkillerXx.

The game now records it all.

Unfortunately, Diablo II remains Diablo II.

So naturally one of the first things players discovered is that completing the collection requires understanding which version of a twenty-six-year-old Unique exists in which seasonal ruleset.

The spreadsheet may be gone.

The archaeology survives.