In a developer live update that was broadcast today October 10th, we can see that the Season Of Blood is going to feel like a completely different game. 

The developers went over the rework to Critical Strike Damage and Vulnerable Damage, Changes made to how Diablo 4 calculates Elemental Resistances, and gave some other tidbits about Season 2 and even changes from the Season 2 mid-patch. Here’s everything you need to know. 

Critical Changes

The scaling effect of Vulnerable and Crit were way overpowered since the game started. This meant that players only had one real path to do the most damage possible and all the other builds just fell behind. This means that in addition to understanding the significance of the change, you also need to prepare a large amount of Diablo 4 Gold to adjust your build.

Here’s how damage worked before. The individual multipliers in a bucket were additive. Buckets were then multiplied by each other to get your total bonus multiplier.  

In the Season of Blood, it appears that the base multipliers of these buckets will be multiplicative and any further bonuses will be additive after the calculation is completed. This is quite a large nerf to how this worked before, meaning the ceiling is going to be much lower. 

However, the developers did mention that they’re adjusting overall monster power, and we shouldn’t notice much of a difference. And the intended goal of the patch is to bring all builds closer together in terms of power. We’ll just have to wait and see and judge the difference for ourselves on October 17th. 

Elemental Resistances Evolution

Elemental Resistances have also been reworked before they followed a formula that used inverse multiplication. As you stacked a resistance, they had diminishing returns and would never be able to reach 100%. 

In the rework, Elemental Resistances will be additive, but there will now be a maximum cap of 70%. 

Elixirs have been updated to increase this cap along with the resistance they gave before. Accessories are also being changed to give all resistance. 

Therefore, you’ll be able to reach some sort of minimum as long as you keep your accessories updated. 

They also mentioned that the unique farm bosses are going to use abilities with elemental damage, meaning Elixirs could be important for extra survivability. 

The developers decided to release what uniques drop from what boss, which is really nice to know before going into Season 2. 

So, now if you want to farm Tempest Roar, you know that you’re going to be aiming for Duriel King of Maggots. Duriel is also going to be dropping some new unique Diablo 4 Items that were teased during the live stream. 

It was mentioned that the drop tables and all of the other changes would be posted on the official Diablo 4 website. 

Also Read: Major Changes Coming To Diablo 4 Season 2 - In Depth Community Discussion

Mid-Season Patch Bonanza

In the mid season patch, we’re finally going to be getting the ability to reset our paragon board. This has been asked for since Diablo 4 launched back in June. It’s going to be much easier to try out different builds without having to one-by-one reset our paragon boards. 

Another change coming in the mid-season patch is we’re getting access to training dummies. I really didn’t expect this quality of life change, especially when bosses like Uber Lilith still aren’t really fixed.   

With the Training Dummies, we’ll be able to choose between different mob types like normal monsters and bosses. 

Item & Node Overhauls

The other things mentioned in the live stream were changes to uniques and paragon nodes. 

They said that almost every unique item has changed in some way, some more than others. And to make up for the difference in damage, some paragon nodes have received broad multiplicative bonuses than they had before. 

Apparently, Overpower builds in the Season of Blood are going to be in a really good spot compared to before. So, they’re expecting to see more players using Overpower Druid and Blood Necro in Season 2.