Diablo 2 Resurrected Changes Coming With Ladder Season 1 - New Rune Words, Class Balance Updates

Diablo 2 Resurrected Changes Coming With Ladder Season 1 - New Rune Words, Class Balance Updates | Patch 2.4

12/21/2021 4:10:56 PM

Tag: Items Guide Beginner Guide

The massive Diablo 2 Resurrected changes are coming with first ladder season - that will introduce new exclusive content like rune words, new Horadric Cube Recipes, set item changes as well as class balance changes and mercenary changes. The ladder rank play will also be launched. Here’s everything about the D2R ladder season patch 2.4 update.

Diablo 2 Resurrected Changes Coming In New Ladder Season - Patch 2.4 Update

All the D2R updates will be available for testing on an upcoming PTR or test server in early 2022 and the devs are very open to all the feedback you'll want to give. No start date yet for the PTR, but there will be two phases: first the test for the server fixes, then another test for the balance changes and seasonal content. And the devs may provide something like template level 99 characters in order for players to properly test the content. At the end of a season, once your ladder characters become non-ladder, with the shared stash, items that were in your ladder shared stash will be added to a new withdrawal only stash tab. That will last four months until the end of the next season.

At the end of the season the new ladder, only rune words will be available for non-ladder and single-player, not just the items themselves but the rune words, you can now use those rune words in non-ladder and single player. And then the following season will introduce more new rune words though they clarify that they're not committing to adding new rune words every season in perpetuity. The new rune words are being designed in combination with the balance changes to allow them to complement each other. As for the balance changes themselves, their general philosophy was to expand build diversity while retaining class fantasy and specialty.

Here's all the Diablo 2 Resurrected changes & updates coming with Ladder Season 1:

Diablo 2 Resurrected Ladder Rank Play

The battle of ladder ranking will be launched at the beginning of next year. With reference to Diablo 2, there will be four different ladder modes, including Standard Ladder with four acts and Standard Expansion Ladder with "Lord of Destruction" expansion content, Hardcore Ladder with 4 acts and Hardcore Expansion Ladder with Lord of Destruction" expansion content.

The development team pointed out that at that time, players will have the opportunity to unlock a series of new runewords through the ladder system. These runewords are brand-new affixes that have never appeared in the series of works, but they can not be used in non-ladder battles like the ladder specific runewords of the original game of Diablo 2. At the end of the ladder season, players who have successfully produced these runes will transfer their ladder game characters to the "non-ladder" game version. At the beginning of the next ladder season, players need to create new ladder characters and accumulate new rewards from scratch. In addition, the R & D team initially planned that the Ladder season would last four months, but it would still make a final decision with reference to the player's feedback.

Diablo 2 Resurrected 2.4 Class Balance Updates

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They're improving melee skills, passive and magic skills and underperforming bow and crossbow skills. For instance, impale will now slow on hit and it no longer relies on attack rating it just hits. Fenn's animation is faster, the casting delay on Valkyrie’s has been improved, exploding arrow and immolation arrow are having their end game damage scaling improved.

Assassin

Martial arts are being buffed, the combo finishers will now just use one charge instead of all three. Shadow disciplines are being revised. Mostly quality of life fixes to buff durations and casting delays. Underused trap skills are being improved, fire traps is getting more damage synergies and blade skills are getting a handful of improvements to make them more viable.

Barbarian

The devs are trying to achieve greater diversity in combat skills, so leap and leap attack are going to move a lot faster, throwing skills will be enhanced, throwing mastery will be given a chance to pierce enemies, war cries being buffed. One notable skill that is not being touched is whirlwind, it's not being reworked, the devs feel that whirlwind needs a much bigger change and they want to start off slow with the changes, they don't want to completely rework melee in the first set of balance changes. But it's a possibility for future ladder seasons, they want to have too much of a system shock all at once.

Druid

Druids are getting the most changes which are great since they fall behind relative to other classes in terms of max power potential, fire skills are getting buffed, arctic blast is being made less clunky while also being buffed, improvements to twister are coming, shape-shift improvements like being able to cast elemental buffs while in shapeshift which is a huge quality life improvement. Werewolf skills are getting attack rating improvements, wherebear is getting damage improvements to make it viable at higher difficulties. The less viable summons are being made, more viable and each type of summon is getting a stronger identity. For instance, spirit wolves now deal cold damage instead of physical.

Necromancer

Underused summons are being buffed like skeletal mages, blood golem and fire golem are being improved and the iron golem's thornzora will scale better. In fact, thorns overall is just a game mechanic seems to be getting reworked entirely to scale better, it currently deals the percentage damage and they're looking to change that to a scaling flat amount. Bone skill synergies are being improved for better late-game performance, bone armor scaling is being improved to give players a reason to invest more than one point into it. Weakness being improved with new damage reduction scaling.

Paladin

The Paladin will have its underused combat skills improved, holy bolt and fist of the heavens are being improved and his offensive auras like holy fire will receive better scaling for higher difficulty.

Sorceress

Her cold armor skills are being reworked to allow for more diversity in which cold armor is selected, some lightning and fire skills are being buffed, inferno is receiving better player controls, blaze is getting a run walk speed buff, the casting delay on fire hydras is being improved and nova will scale better.

Diablo 2 Resurrected Mercenaries Updates

Underused mercenaries are also being buffed to promote greater diversity. The act 1 rogue will get new ranged aoe skills, the act 3 mercs will have their core stats improved and they're getting more elemental utility skills. The act 5 mercenaries now have battlecry which lowers enemy defense and damage. And they also have their life and defenses buffed as for act 2 mercenaries they needed no buffs, but they are getting a quality of life update in the form of being able to hire all six different aura types on nightmare in hell rather than having to swap difficulties to hire the one that you want.

Diablo 2 Rune Words Updates

Some of these new rune words will complement some of the mercenaries really well. In addition to some of the class skill changes, no new runes are being added but underused runes like cham and zod will appear in the new rune words and the two rune words they were willing to reveal were two that have actually existed in the Diablo 2 game files for years. But for whatever reason were never activated.

New runewords coming in ACNH ladder season

Plague and Pattern: These rune words may be tweaked a bit, but the spirit of the rune words will likely stay the same. Plague is a three socket weapon rune word that focuses on debuffing in enemies, poison resistance and casting poison novas. And pattern is a three socket claw rune word for martial arts assassins.

Diablo 2 Set Items For Ladder Season

The devs are also rebalancing underused set items and set bonuses like Bul-Kathos' Children and Naj's Ancient Vestige. They explicitly said they are not giving these sets the D3 treatment of adding 6000% damage multipliers, they're also adding new cube recipes specifically the ability to upgrade sets to higher tiers just like you can do with unique. They're also taking some existing zones in hell difficulty and turning them into level 85 zones to allow for more variety in end-game farming locations, Arachnid Lair and the Ruined Temple are two zones that are being upgraded to have level 85 monsters. Throughout all of this, the only kind of nerf that seems to be happening is to speed runs, in order to enter the Durance of Hate in act 3, players will need to first smash the compelling orb.