Diablo Immortal’s Winds of Fortune Is a Very Good Week to Farm Normal Gems

Diablo Immortal's Winds of Fortune is back, which normally means the game spends 24 hours throwing extra Gold, Experience and Legendary Items at you while hoping you remember that the timer continues ticking when you go to sleep. This September version has the same broad reward boost, but one part of the event remains considerably more valuable than the rest: Normal Gem farming in a four-player party.

Winds of Fortune runs from September 3 through September 10 at 3:00 a.m. local server time. During that window, every player can activate a special 24-hour buff that duplicates several reward types and increases returns from a long list of normal activities. Most of that is useful. The Normal Gem rule, however, makes this one of the better weeks to deliberately organize some group farming rather than simply allowing the buff to decorate your UI while you do dailies.

Four-Player Normal Gem Drops Are Doubled

Blizzard says the four-player party Normal Gem bonus drop is doubled during Winds of Fortune. More importantly, those bonus drops are unaffected by the normal daily cap.

That combination is the real headline.

Normal Gems are one of Diablo Immortal's longest progression grinds because higher ranks consume increasingly ridiculous quantities of lower-rank gems. We recently covered why losing even one high-rank Normal Gem can represent an enormous amount of accumulated progression. Anything that temporarily accelerates that process deserves considerably more attention than another pile of yellow equipment.

If Normal Gems are currently one of your account's bottlenecks, spend at least part of the Winds buff in a full party.

Only the First 12 Common Gems Are Tradable

There is an important economic limitation.

Blizzard says only the first twelve Common Gems earned each day are tradable. Additional Common Gems obtained through the event can still improve your character, but you should not build a farming plan around dumping every doubled gem onto the Marketplace.

That distinction matters depending on why you are farming.

If you want personal secondary-stat progression, the extra bound gems remain extremely useful.

If you are primarily farming Normal Gems to sell, your interesting part of the day ends considerably earlier.

Sanctuary is generous this week. It has not completely abandoned monetary policy.

Do Not Activate the 24-Hour Buff Before Bed

The easiest way to waste Winds of Fortune remains exactly the same as when we warned about the event's real-time timer in July.

The buff lasts 24 hours of real time.

Not 24 hours logged in.

Once activated, the clock continues while you are offline, asleep, working or explaining to somebody why four strangers running dungeons together is an economically rational use of Saturday morning.

Ideally, activate it at the beginning of a period where you can fit two useful sessions inside the window. A Saturday morning activation, for example, can cover most of Saturday and another session before the same time Sunday.

A midnight activation shortly before logging off covers an excellent eight-hour sleep build.

What Else Does Winds of Fortune Double?

Normal Gems may be the strongest target, but the event duplicates a broad set of rewards. Blizzard lists:

• Gold
• Experience
• Battle Pass Points
• Normal Gems
• Legendary Items

The duplicate effect also applies to rewards from activities including Horadric Bestiary turn-ins, Challenge Rifts, Bounties, Fishing, Dungeons, Purge the Depths, Accursed Towers, Hidden Lairs, wilderness farming and Codex activities.

That means there is no need to spend 24 straight hours inside one dungeon until the tileset becomes a recurring dream. Build the farming day around whatever else your character needs and prioritize full-party play when chasing Normal Gems.

Battle Pass Rewards Themselves Are Not Doubled

There are several pieces of fine print that are very easy to mentally translate into “everything is doubled.”

Everything is not doubled.

Battle Pass Points can be earned in duplicate quantities, but the rewards you claim from the actual Battle Pass track are not duplicated. Blizzard also says the normal weekly limits on Battle Pass Points and Normal Gems remain in place.

The special four-player party Normal Gem bonus is specifically given its own exception from the daily cap, which is why that mechanic deserves so much attention.

Duplicate rewards also have individual event limits. Once you reach the limit for a particular reward type, you stop receiving the doubled amount. Blizzard directs players to the in-game event screen for the exact remaining allowances.

So check the menu occasionally before spending another three hours farming something whose duplication counter has quietly reached zero.

Bonus XP Still Depends on Your Current Modifier

Experience is another useful bonus, especially for players still catching up, but Blizzard notes that the extra XP remains affected by your current experience modifier.

That means Winds of Fortune does not magically flatten Diablo Immortal's usual catch-up and progression calculations. It duplicates the reward within the rules your character is already operating under.

For established accounts, Normal Gems will therefore often offer more meaningful long-term value than simply maximizing XP during the event.

A Simple 24-Hour Winds of Fortune Plan

If Normal Gems are the priority, the most efficient approach is fairly simple.

Activate the buff when you know you have a productive play window ahead of you. Begin with any daily or weekly activities you already intended to complete, then move into four-player farming while the Normal Gem bonus is active. Use Hidden Lairs, Dungeons and wilderness farming according to what your group needs rather than chasing one activity exclusively.

Keep an eye on your tradable Common Gem count if Marketplace value matters to you, and check the event screen as duplicate-reward limits begin filling.

Then make sure you fit another useful session into the 24-hour window before it expires.

That is essentially it.

Winds of Fortune is not complicated. The only real trick is avoiding the temptation to activate it immediately and then spend half the timer doing absolutely nothing.

September 10 Is the Final Deadline

The current Winds of Fortune event ends on September 10 at 3:00 a.m. local server time. If you have not manually activated your 24-hour buff within the final 24 hours of the event, Blizzard says it will automatically activate it for you. Unclaimed event rewards are also automatically delivered the next time you log in.

That prevents players from losing the buff entirely.

It does not prevent them from wasting most of it while offline.

For general players, Winds of Fortune means more of whatever you were already doing.

For anyone trying to push Normal Gems, though, this is the important bit:

find three other players and make the 24 hours count.

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Diablo 4’s Toughness Number Doesn’t Mean What You Think Against Lilith

Diablo IV introduced Toughness to answer a very reasonable question: how difficult am I to kill? Unfortunately, Echo of Lilith has apparently decided that this question requires several follow-up forms.

A growing community discussion began with a player entering the Torment 8 Lilith fight with around 1.2 million Toughness and still being effectively deleted after accumulating encounter stacks. The resulting debate has now grown beyond one frustrated boss attempt and into a much more useful discussion about what Diablo IV's Toughness number actually tells you.

The short version is simple:

Toughness is useful.

It is not a promise that every dangerous mechanic can be tanked.

What Diablo 4’s Toughness Stat Actually Measures

Blizzard introduced Toughness as part of Diablo IV's defensive-system overhaul. Armor and Resistances became rating-based systems with diminishing returns, while Armor began reducing both physical and non-physical damage.

Toughness was added as a way to combine those defensive layers into something players could understand more easily. Blizzard describes it as the amount of raw incoming damage you can survive after your mitigation sources are taken into account.

The game also provides more detailed values for individual damage types when you inspect the stat.

That sounds like exactly the number you should use when deciding whether a boss can kill you.

Mostly, it is.

The problem is that boss mechanics are not always ordinary damage calculations.

1.2 Million Toughness Still Didn’t Save This Player

The current Lilith discussion started with a player reporting approximately 1.2 million Toughness on Torment 8 while still dying after building up stacks during the encounter.

Several responses immediately pointed out that the headline Toughness value should not be treated as a universal survivability rating.

A character may have impressive overall mitigation while still having weaknesses in maximum Life, Barrier uptime, a specific Resistance or conditional Damage Reduction. Conversely, certain unusual defensive setups can survive extremely well despite displaying a Toughness number that looks surprisingly unimpressive.

That makes Toughness a little like Diablo IV's old Attack Power statistic.

Useful at a glance.

Less useful once the build starts doing something clever.

Lilith Is Also Applying Her Own Rules

Lilith makes the problem more obvious because her fight contains mechanics designed specifically to stop players from simply building enough defense and standing still.

Players in the current discussion distinguish between genuinely lethal mechanics and attacks that become effectively lethal after mistakes accumulate. The important part is that repeated failures can apply encounter-specific penalties that make subsequent damage increasingly dangerous.

At that point, your character sheet has not necessarily become “wrong.”

The fight has changed the conditions.

A Toughness value calculated from your normal defensive layers cannot neatly communicate:

• how many dangerous encounter stacks you have accumulated
• whether Barrier or another conditional defense is currently active
• whether a specific mechanic bypasses or overwhelms ordinary mitigation
• how much damage the next failed mechanic will actually deal

So 1.2 million Toughness may be entirely accurate under normal combat conditions.

Lilith is simply no longer offering normal combat conditions.

The Bigger Problem Is That More Damage Often Solves Everything

This is where the discussion becomes less about the stat sheet and more about Diablo IV's boss design.

Multiple players give essentially the same practical advice:

do more damage.

If Lilith dies quickly enough, you spend less time accumulating dangerous stacks, see fewer mechanics and reduce the number of opportunities the fight has to punish you.

One player in the thread describes killing higher-Torment Lilith with a relatively modestly rated build simply because the damage was sufficient to bypass most of the encounter.

That creates a slightly strange incentive.

A player who invests heavily into defense can still spend a long time interacting with dangerous mechanics.

A sufficiently powerful offensive build may simply erase the phase before those mechanics become relevant.

Sometimes the best Damage Reduction is apparently reducing the boss to zero health.

This Is Why One-Shots Feel So Strange in Diablo 4

We recently looked at why Diablo IV players increasingly argue that the real problem with one-shots is understanding what actually killed them.

Toughness adds another layer to that problem.

If the character sheet says you are enormously durable and the next encounter removes your entire health bar, the natural reaction is not necessarily:

“Ah yes, clearly my effective health calculation failed to account for this boss-specific debuff stack.”

It is usually:

“What?”

Better death information would help considerably here. Showing the source of the killing damage, its damage type and relevant encounter modifiers would make defensive failures easier to diagnose.

Was your Fire Resistance insufficient?

Did a stack amplify incoming damage?

Did Barrier fall off?

Was this an actual lethal mechanic?

At the moment, players frequently have to work backward from the corpse.

Toughness Is Still Useful — Just Don’t Build Around One Number

None of this means Toughness is worthless.

Blizzard introduced it because Diablo IV's defensive systems had become difficult to evaluate through Armor, Resistances, Life, Barrier, Fortify and multiple conditional modifiers independently. A summary number is genuinely useful when comparing gear or identifying an obvious defensive weakness.

The mistake is treating it as the final answer.

For difficult boss content, players should still look at the actual components underneath it:

• Maximum Life
• Armor
• individual Resistances
• Barrier and Fortify availability
• conditional Damage Reduction
• mobility and defensive cooldowns

And then there is the stat Diablo IV does not put under Toughness:

knowing the fight.

No character-sheet number can compensate indefinitely for standing in the mechanic designed to make you stop standing there.

Lilith Exposes Diablo 4’s Defensive Communication Problem

The irony is that Blizzard created Toughness precisely because it wanted defensive gearing to become easier to understand.

That was a good goal.

But once Diablo IV introduces boss-specific stacking penalties, conditional defenses and lethal encounter mechanics, one enormous number can create more confidence than clarity.

This matters even more as Diablo IV continues pushing toward extreme endgame scaling. We have already discussed how the game is moving toward faster progression, larger power spikes and increasingly scalable difficulty. As those numbers grow, Blizzard needs to make sure the numbers players actually see still mean something useful.

1.2 million Toughness sounds extremely sturdy.

Against most of Sanctuary, it probably is.

Lilith just has several opinions that are not included on the character sheet.

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Diablo 4’s Horadric Gem Repair Cost Bug Is Still Here Months Later

Diablo IV has many respectable ways to lose millions of Gold. You can reroll affixes, Masterwork an item repeatedly, craft expensive gems or make several increasingly optimistic visits to the Occultist. Apparently, you can also achieve the same result by dying while wearing particularly fancy rocks.

A long-running repair-cost problem involving socketed Horadric Gems has resurfaced again in September, with a new player reporting that their repair bill jumps from roughly 64,000 Gold per death to around 22 times that amount when the gems are equipped. The original bug report dates back to June, while similar player testing appeared even earlier in May.

In other words, this is no longer a curious launch-week interaction that disappeared during one of Lord of Hatred's many cleanup patches.

Players are still reporting it nearly four months later.

Flawless Horadric Gems Can Make Repairs Extremely Expensive

The current PC bug report originally appeared on June 13. The player noticed the problem after equipping Flawless Horadric Gems and said their total repair cost increased from a few hundred thousand Gold to more than 15 million.

The suspected explanation is fairly straightforward. Diablo IV appears to be incorporating some or all of the socketed gem's value when calculating how expensive the parent item is to repair, even though the gem itself does not have durability that needs repairing.

That means your Blacksmith may effectively be charging you for repairing the sword, armor and incredibly expensive magical pebble sitting inside them.

The pebble, for the record, was not damaged.

A New September Test Says the Problem Is Still Happening

The bug thread became active again on September 4, when another player tested several socketables and reported dramatically different repair-cost values depending on what was installed.

Their reported figures included roughly:

• Rune: 1,547 Gold
• Grand Gem: 2,933 Gold
• Horadric Gem: 220,000 Gold
• Flawless Horadric Gem: 550,000 Gold

The exact final repair bill naturally depends on the player's equipment and how much durability has been lost, but the relative difference is the important part. The player says a death costs around 64,000 Gold without the expensive gems, while keeping them socketed increases that bill by approximately 22 times.

That is not a rounding error.

That is a mortgage with sockets.

We Actually Saw This Problem Months Ago

This will sound familiar to regular Diabloz readers because we already investigated the bizarre relationship between socketed gems and repair costs back in July.

At the time, player testing showed a repair bill dropping from roughly 2 million Gold to just 39,000 after gems and runes were temporarily removed from the equipment before visiting the Blacksmith.

That workaround was funny when it looked like a temporary oddity.

It is rather less funny now that another player is reproducing essentially the same behaviour in September.

The newer report also reinforces the earlier suspicion that the game's repair calculation is using an item's value after socketed components are included rather than calculating durability repair from the base equipment alone.

Horadric Gems Are Expensive Enough Before the Repair Bill

The irony is that Horadric Gems already represent one of Diablo IV's more expensive long-term progression systems.

We previously looked at how demanding a complete set of Flawless Horadric Gems can become. Crafting one requires a significant chain of lower-tier gems, and fully equipping a character turns that into a substantial fragment and farming commitment.

Another player calculation put the fragment requirements for high-end Horadric Gems into the millions.

That cost at least has an understandable purpose.

You are creating stronger equipment.

Paying enormously higher repair fees because those gems happen to be sitting inside the equipment is considerably harder to justify.

The Temporary Workaround Is Ridiculous but Effective

If you are affected, the player-discovered workaround remains the same:

remove the expensive gems before repairing your equipment.

Then repair everything.

Then put the gems back.

There are few things that capture the majesty of being Sanctuary's chosen hero quite like stopping outside the Blacksmith and emptying your pockets because he charges extra when he sees jewelry.

Of course, this is not a particularly acceptable permanent solution. Players should not have to unsocket part of their build every time durability drops simply to avoid a disproportionately large repair bill.

It also becomes especially irritating in high-end content where deaths are expected. Pit pushing, difficult bosses and experimental builds naturally involve failed attempts. A repair system that multiplies the punishment because a character has progressed far enough to use expensive gems effectively taxes the players most likely to be repeatedly testing difficult content.

There Is Still No Documented Fix in the Current Patch Notes

Blizzard has fixed a large number of Lord of Hatred problems since May. The expansion has received repeated passes over Horadric Cube interactions, itemization, crafting, socket behaviour and progression bugs. At one point Blizzard even fixed an issue where socketed Runes or Gems could be lost when a Unique was recycled through the Horadric Cube.

But the current public patch notes do not document a fix for Horadric Gems inflating equipment repair costs.

And the September 4 player report strongly suggests the underlying behaviour is still live.

That makes this a slightly different story from when we covered it in July.

Then, it was a bizarre repair trick players had discovered.

Now it is a months-old issue still being reproduced after multiple patches.

Your Gems Should Make You Stronger, Not Your Blacksmith Richer

Diablo IV's economy needs Gold sinks. Without them, currencies eventually become decorative numbers that everyone owns by the billion and nobody thinks about.

Repair costs can reasonably be one of those sinks.

But repair costs should reflect damaged equipment.

A socketed Flawless Horadric Gem has no durability bar, does not become chipped when a demon hits you and does not require the Blacksmith to lovingly reconstruct it with a miniature hammer.

It is simply sitting there.

Four months after players first started noticing the problem, that apparently remains enough to make the repair bill explode.

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Diablo 4’s Warlock May Be Completely Dominant in Season 15

Diablo IV's Warlock did not exactly spend its first few seasons behaving like the mandatory new class Blizzard might have expected. It was powerful, occasionally spectacular and capable of filling a screen with enough demonic administration to concern the local authorities, but it never completely pushed every other class out of the room.

Season 15 may be different.

PTR players are reporting Pit 150 clears in roughly three minutes, enormous Hellfire interactions and Warlock builds producing damage numbers that have stopped looking like mathematics and started resembling telephone numbers. One popular forum discussion has already declared Season 15 “the season of Warlock,” while other testers are asking whether Blizzard should bring the remaining classes up to the same level rather than simply cutting Warlock back down.

PTR numbers are not launch numbers. Blizzard still has time to change everything.

But if the current balance survives, Warlock may enter Season 15 in a league of its own.

Players Are Reporting Three-Minute Pit 150 Clears

The most striking example comes from a Season 15 PTR discussion where a player reports clearing Pit 150 in around three minutes with Warlock.

That immediately brings back memories of Spiritborn at the launch of Vessel of Hatred, when the new class briefly operated according to a different interpretation of Diablo IV's damage system than everyone else.

Other testers in the thread describe Warlock builds dealing hundreds of trillions — and in some cases even higher — through combinations involving Hellfire, Metamorphosis and rapidly triggered abilities. One player describes a one-button setup where the entire screen effectively detonates while automated casts continue feeding the damage loop.

These are player-tested PTR results, not official Blizzard benchmarks. But they match what we already saw in our broader Season 15 PTR evaluation, where Warlock interactions stood out as one of the clearest examples of the enormous gap that can emerge between ordinary builds and whatever the current spreadsheet has discovered.

Blizzard Gave Warlock a Lot of Direct Buffs

This performance did not appear from nowhere.

Blizzard's official 3.2.0 PTR notes contain an unusually long list of Warlock buffs. The Destruction Demon version of Metamorphosis now applies Burning whenever any type of skill is cast, while its Hellfire bonus rises from 4% to 6%. Dark Prison's Calamity variant jumps from 30% damage to 200%. Doomfire Ritual increases from 175% to 250%. Infernal Breath and several of its variants receive substantial increases, while Ravenous Jaws pushes Eviscerate damage from 125% to 500%.

The class mechanic receives similar attention. Command Abodian's bite goes from 155% to 245% base damage, and several Vanguard demon attacks are multiplied dramatically. Lesser Demon Eviscerate damage rises from 200% to 1,000% of their damage.

Then come the Uniques.

Hellhound's Sabatons can grant Abodian 200–280% increased damage while automatically triggering non-Archfiend Hellfire Skills. Gauntlets of Sheol can stack up to 600–750% additional Fiend of Abaddon damage. Scepter of the Three allows all base Ultimate Skills to be equipped simultaneously and adds up to 170–250% Ultimate Skill damage.

There is buffing a class.

And then there is giving several demons access to industrial machinery.

This Is a Very Different Warlock From Season 13

The contrast is especially interesting because Warlock did not dominate immediately after Lord of Hatred launched.

Back in May, we looked at how the new Warlock class was failing to completely dominate the early Season 13 meta. Rogue, Barbarian and Sorcerer were still competing comfortably at the top, and the result felt surprisingly healthy for a brand-new expansion class.

Warlock was good.

It just was not mandatory.

Season 15 appears to be Blizzard's answer to players who felt the new class never received the traditional honeymoon period where everything it touched briefly became illegal.

That may be fun.

It may also create another balance problem.

Sorcerer Shows the Other Side of the Season 15 Problem

The issue becomes clearer when Warlock is compared with classes receiving more conventional improvements.

Blizzard has given Sorcerer a major global Intelligence-scaling increase for Season 15, something we covered when Sorcerer players argued that bigger numbers still do not fix weak skill design. The class is stronger on paper, several abilities have been improved and Blizzard is clearly trying to increase its overall performance.

But a percentage increase to baseline damage feels very different from a Warlock ecosystem where multiple skill variants, demon attacks, Uniques and automated interactions can multiply one another into extreme Pit performance.

That is the danger.

The balance question is not simply whether Sorcerer receives 20% more damage.

It is whether that matters when another class has found an interaction that produces 200 times as much.

Should Blizzard Nerf Warlock or Buff Everyone Else?

The community response is already split along the most predictable line imaginable.

Some players assume there is no chance this version of Warlock reaches live servers unchanged. If one class can comfortably destroy Pit 150 while others struggle much lower, the obvious solution is to reduce the offending multipliers.

Others want Blizzard to do the opposite.

The original forum discussion argues that Season 15 should simply let every class reach a similar level of ridiculousness. Warlock feels powerful and fun, therefore Blizzard should raise Barbarian, Sorcerer, Necromancer, Rogue, Druid and the rest rather than removing that power.

That debate connects directly to the question we asked yesterday: is Diablo IV slowly turning back into Diablo III?

Diablo III eventually embraced seasonal absurdity. Builds exploded entire screens. Difficulty existed mainly to provide another number large enough to survive the explosions. Strong seasonal metas rotated regularly, and being outrageously powerful was often the point rather than a balance failure.

Season 15 Warlock looks very comfortable in that philosophy.

The PTR Exists Specifically So Blizzard Can Change This

There is one enormous reason not to start deleting every non-Warlock character yet.

This was the PTR.

Blizzard explicitly describes the test realm as a place to gather feedback, adjust balance and eliminate problems before the season launches. Season 15 also contains content deliberately withheld from public testing because Blizzard wants to reveal more at BlizzCon.

Warlock therefore has plenty of opportunities to change before the final patch arrives.

A broken interaction may be fixed.

A Unique multiplier may be reduced.

Other classes may receive buffs.

Or Blizzard may decide that Season 15 is allowed to be the season where Warlock finally gets to be stupidly powerful.

After several seasons of being merely good, some Warlock players would probably consider that overdue.

Season 15 May Finally Give Warlock Its Main-Character Season

The most interesting takeaway from the PTR is not that one build cleared Pit 150 in exactly three minutes.

PTRs are laboratories. People deliberately search for disgusting interactions because finding them before launch is the entire point.

What matters is how many different parts of Warlock's Season 15 kit are being pushed upward simultaneously.

Hellfire is stronger.

Demon attacks are stronger.

Several weak skill variants are dramatically stronger.

Old Uniques are being rewritten around much larger multipliers.

And players are already turning those pieces into builds capable of trivializing content that is supposed to sit at the extreme end of Diablo IV.

If Blizzard leaves most of that intact, Season 15 may finally give Warlock the launch season it never really had.

The only question is whether everyone else will still be playing the same difficulty curve.

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Diablo 1 Will Be Playable at BlizzCon — And the Remaster Rumor Just Got More Interesting

A few days ago, the idea of a Diablo 1 remaster was mostly being held together by a suspicious Twitch badge, Diablo's 30th anniversary and the traditional pre-BlizzCon willingness to treat metadata like ancient Horadric prophecy. Now there is something considerably more tangible to add to the pile: the original Diablo will apparently be playable on the BlizzCon 2026 show floor.

The newly published BlizzCon floor map includes a legacy Diablo demo area in Hall A featuring Diablo, Diablo II and Diablo III. By itself, that could simply be Blizzard celebrating three decades of the franchise by allowing visitors to play through its history. That would be completely reasonable.

Unfortunately for anyone trying to stop the remaster speculation, it also fits almost perfectly with all the other strange little clues Blizzard has been leaving lying around.

The Original Diablo Is Getting Its Own Place on the Show Floor

According to a new examination of the BlizzCon floor map, Hall A contains playable stations for all three legacy Diablo games. Diablo sits alongside Diablo II and Diablo III, while the wider legacy area also includes games such as Warcraft III and Heroes of the Storm.

That matters because Blizzard is putting an unusually strong emphasis on its older catalogue this year. BlizzCon also includes sessions titled Custodians of Legacy Games and Classic Game Deep Dive, so classic Blizzard is clearly not being treated as something to display behind glass while everyone politely remembers 1998.

The obvious explanation is anniversary nostalgia.

The original Diablo turns 30 this year. Putting it on the show floor next to its sequels is exactly the sort of thing you would expect at a large anniversary celebration.

But then there is the rest of the evidence.

We Already Had the Strange Diablo Twitch Badge

Earlier this week, we covered the unusual new Twitch badge attached specifically to the original Diablo category.

That detail stood out because an earlier Diablo anniversary badge had explicitly been associated with Diablo IV. The new BlizzCon badge instead uses the plain Diablo category.

Again, there are innocent explanations.

“Diablo” is also the name of the franchise. Blizzard could simply be using broader branding for BlizzCon. The badge also depicts the titular Prime Evil, so it could be pointing toward Diablo himself returning somewhere else in the series rather than a rerelease of the 1996 game.

But we have now moved from:

“There is a weird badge.”

to:

“There is a weird badge, and Blizzard has specifically placed the original Diablo on the BlizzCon show floor.”

Conspiracy boards generally become more interesting when somebody starts supplying actual thumbtacks.

Blizzard Is Still Hiding Parts of BlizzCon

The timing becomes even more suspicious because Blizzard has openly acknowledged that the currently published BlizzCon information does not reveal everything.

In its official Know Before You Go guide, Blizzard says several areas of the show floor remain under wraps and will only be revealed after the Opening Ceremony.

We already ran into the same problem when examining the enormous mysterious “Immortal Event” block on the Diablo Stage schedule. Blizzard has created a convention programme where some information is deliberately vague because the announcements are apparently meant to come first.

That makes almost every strange Diablo detail slightly harder to dismiss.

A Remaster Is Still Far From Confirmed

This is the point where we should remove the ceremonial tinfoil helmet for a moment.

There is still no announcement of Diablo Remastered.

No release date.

No screenshots.

No store listing.

No official statement saying Blizzard has rebuilt the cathedral.

The playable Diablo stations could simply be running the existing PC version. Blizzard has every reason to showcase the original game during its 30th anniversary regardless of whether a modern version exists.

It may also be part of a broader effort to celebrate the company's older games. Diablo II: Resurrected has already received the extraordinary Reign of the Warlock expansion this year, and Blizzard appears unusually willing in 2026 to revisit things previously considered finished.

That is interesting context.

It is not confirmation.

What Would a Modern Diablo 1 Release Even Look Like?

A full Diablo II: Resurrected-style remaster is only one possibility.

Blizzard could release a relatively conservative enhanced version of Diablo with modern resolution support, controller controls, Battle.net integration and quality-of-life improvements while leaving the underlying game almost untouched.

It could produce a console version.

It could bring Diablo and Hellfire directly to Battle.net.

It could create a larger anniversary collection containing multiple classic Diablo games.

Or the BlizzCon surprise could have absolutely nothing to do with rereleasing Diablo 1.

We have previously argued that the original Diablo does not desperately need a remaster. The game remains playable today, and community projects have done impressive work preserving it on modern systems.

But “does it need one?” and “would Blizzard make one during the franchise's 30th anniversary?” are not the same question.

There is still considerable appeal in reopening Tristram with modern presentation while keeping the slow, claustrophobic structure that makes the original game so different from its descendants.

BlizzCon’s Legacy Focus Makes This Even More Interesting

The larger pattern may ultimately be more important than any individual badge or demo station.

Blizzard is dedicating real BlizzCon space to its legacy catalogue.

Diablo II received major new content this year.

The original Diablo is returning to the show floor.

Classic-game panels are part of the official programme.

And portions of the convention remain deliberately hidden until Opening Ceremony.

That is an unusually fertile environment for some form of classic Diablo announcement.

It could be modest.

It could be a remaster.

Or Blizzard could simply be assembling the most elaborate possible 30th birthday party for a game we can already play.

The Remaster Theory Has One More Piece of Evidence

For now, the responsible conclusion has not changed very much.

A Diablo 1 remaster remains a rumor.

What has changed is the amount of circumstantial evidence sitting around it.

Earlier this week we had a suspicious Twitch badge and a major anniversary.

Now we know the original game itself is being placed back in front of BlizzCon attendees as part of Blizzard's unusually prominent legacy-game presence.

There are still plenty of ordinary explanations for all of that.

But if Blizzard does announce a modern version of Diablo during Opening Ceremony, we are rapidly reaching the point where everyone will look back at these clues and wonder how subtle they were actually supposed to be.

The cathedral will be open at BlizzCon either way.

The only question is whether Blizzard has been renovating it.

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Is Diablo 4 Slowly Turning Back Into Diablo 3?

Diablo IV launched in 2023 looking almost determined to prove that Blizzard remembered Diablo II existed. The world was darker. Progression was slower. Great items were genuinely difficult to find. Level 100 felt distant, the endgame was comparatively restrained and the game seemed slightly embarrassed by the screen-filling speed and astronomical power levels Diablo III had eventually embraced.

Three years later, some players are beginning to ask a slightly uncomfortable question: did we just take the scenic route back to Diablo III?

A community discussion asking exactly that has now grown past 160 replies, with players arguing over increasingly fast progression, easier access to powerful gear, enormous damage multipliers and the expectation that every serious build should eventually bulldoze the hardest content. Season 15 has become the latest focus because Blizzard is once again adding substantial character power while making some of Diablo IV's rarest rewards considerably more predictable to acquire.

The comparison is not entirely fair.

It is also becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Diablo 4 Has Removed a Lot of the Friction It Launched With

The clearest difference between launch Diablo IV and the current game is not one specific system. It is the accumulation of dozens of changes designed to remove frustration. Leveling became faster. Helltides became more rewarding and more consistently available. Bosses became easier to target farm. Mythics gained deterministic acquisition paths. Tempering became less punishing. Seasonal progression became faster. Build-changing items became something Blizzard increasingly expects ordinary players to actually see rather than read about on Reddit.

Many of those changes were improvements.

Launch Diablo IV could confuse inconvenience with depth. Spending dozens of hours without seeing a meaningful upgrade did not automatically make the eventual upgrade spiritually important. It sometimes just meant your helmet had remained suspiciously adequate since level 71.

But there is a cumulative effect when every source of friction gets sanded down. One player in the current discussion summarizes Diablo IV's development as a repeating loop of adding friction, receiving community backlash, reverting the change and then making the grind easier than before.

Eventually, convenience stops being a collection of quality-of-life improvements and becomes the design philosophy.

Season 15 Pushes Even Further Toward Predictable Power

Season 15 is a perfect example because several of its best ideas deliberately make character progression easier to control.

Blizzard is changing Mythic crafting so an upgraded Unique can become the Mythic version of that same item rather than disappearing into another random roll. We previously called this one of Season 15's most sensible Mythic changes, because upgrading an item should probably not resemble throwing it into a raffle.

Legacy Uniques are bringing Stone of Jordan, Leoric's Crown, The Furnace and other familiar items into Diablo IV. Soul Splinters provide enormous seasonal bonuses, including substantial multiplicative damage increases attached to various trade-offs. Rebirth removes the need to recreate the same seasonal character manually. New crafting systems give players more direct routes toward the equipment they want.

None of these systems is individually “Diablo III.”

Together, however, they continue moving Diablo IV away from “maybe you will find the thing” and toward “here is the path to the thing.”

The Rare-Item Argument Is Really the Same Argument

We saw exactly this tension last week when players started asking Blizzard to introduce truly rare items again. Mythics were originally so scarce that many players could complete an entire season without seeing one. The community hated that. Blizzard gradually introduced target farming, Resplendent Sparks, crafting recipes and eventually Mythic 3.0.

Now some players complain Mythics are too accessible.

There is something wonderfully Diablo about finally receiving exactly what you asked for and immediately missing the suffering.

But the concern is legitimate. An ARPG needs something beyond completing a checklist. If every important item has a predictable acquisition path, the loot hunt risks becoming less about discovery and more about assembling the expected equipment in the expected order before optimizing Greater Affixes afterward.

Diablo III eventually leaned heavily into that philosophy. Seasonal sets could establish an entire build remarkably quickly, after which the real game became increasing numbers, finding Ancient and Primal versions and climbing Greater Rifts.

Diablo IV is not there yet.

But the philosophical distance is shrinking.

The Pit Has Become Diablo 4’s Greater Rift Problem

The comparison becomes even harder to avoid when progression is measured through The Pit.

Diablo III had Greater Rifts. Diablo IV has The Pit. Both provide escalating numerical difficulty and inevitably become a public measuring stick for whether a class or build is “good.”

That creates a particular kind of balance pressure. If one build clears dramatically higher Pit tiers than another, the weaker build can feel broken even if it comfortably handles almost every other activity in the game. The target gradually shifts from “does this build work?” to “how far can this build push?”

The current forum discussion explicitly points toward this mentality, with players describing Pit 150 as the benchmark around which builds are increasingly judged. Once players expect the upper end of scalable content to be realistically attainable, Blizzard has to provide enough character power to make that expectation possible.

Then the numbers get bigger.

Then the monsters get tougher.

Then the multipliers get bigger again.

Diablo III veterans may recognize the architecture.

But Diablo 3 Becoming Faster Was Not Necessarily a Failure

Here is the inconvenient part for anyone hoping to use “Diablo III” purely as an insult:

lots of people really liked Diablo III.

Not necessarily launch Diablo III with its auction house and peculiar economic experiment, but the later seasonal game that knew exactly what it wanted to be. You created a character, assembled a powerful build quickly, filled the screen with enemies, watched increasingly unreasonable numbers appear and then pushed as far as you wanted before returning next season.

One player in the current debate simply argues that there is nothing wrong with Diablo IV following that direction because Diablo III became a highly polished modern ARPG. That position deserves more consideration than “D3 bad.”

Fast seasonal progression fits how many people actually play Diablo now. They arrive when a season launches, build something ridiculous, enjoy it for a few weeks and leave. Asking those players to spend two months hoping one required Unique appears does not necessarily create longevity. Sometimes it just means they leave sooner.

Diablo 4’s Problem Is That It Still Seems Unsure Which Diablo It Wants to Be

This is where the argument connects directly to our wider Season 15 criticism. The biggest concern is not that Diablo IV resembles Diablo III. It is that Blizzard still appears to be negotiating with itself about what kind of game Diablo IV should become.

Players who want a Diablo II-style loot hunt ask for genuinely rare items and meaningful long-term progression.

Players who treat seasons as six-week power fantasies want reliable builds, accessible Mythics and less wasted time.

Competitive players judge classes by maximum Pit performance.

More casual players want to finish a build without needing an external economics degree.

Blizzard keeps attempting to accommodate all of them.

That may explain why Diablo IV can simultaneously feel too generous and too grindy, too easy and too punishing, too deterministic and buried beneath RNG.

The game is trying to serve audiences whose definitions of “Diablo” are separated by twenty-five years of completely different games.

Maybe Season 15 Should Stop Apologizing for What Diablo 4 Has Become

There is a version of this story where Diablo IV slowly becoming more like Diablo III is not evidence that Blizzard has lost its way.

Maybe it is evidence that the game has finally discovered what most of its current audience actually enjoys.

Season 15's Soul Splinters look fun precisely because they offer immediate, dramatic power with interesting drawbacks. Legacy Uniques are exciting because players will actually get to use them. More deterministic Mythic crafting respects the time invested in an item instead of destroying it for another spin of the wheel. Rebirth removes pointless seasonal administration.

Those are good changes.

The danger is what comes next.

If every season needs to be faster, more powerful and more generous than the last, Diablo IV eventually runs into the same escalation problem Diablo III did. Damage grows. Difficulty grows. New progression tiers appear to contain the damage growth. Then players demand access to those tiers, requiring more damage.

At some point, the numbers stop describing combat and become astronomy.

Diablo IV does not need to become Diablo II again.

It does not need to be ashamed of borrowing from Diablo III either.

It just needs to decide which lessons from both games are worth keeping before “more power” becomes the only answer it has left.

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Diablo 4’s 25% XP and Gold Boost Ends Tomorrow — Here’s What It Stacks With

Diablo IV players have one final day to take advantage of the latest Mother’s Blessing before Lilith remembers that generosity was never really her defining personality trait. The current event ends on September 5 at 7:00 PM CEST, removing the temporary 25% bonus to both Experience and Gold that has been active since the beginning of the month.

If you still have an alt to finish, some Paragon progression to squeeze out of Season 14 or simply an expensive habit involving Masterworking and rerolls, this is therefore the moment to do it.

And unlike several Diablo IV progression systems, maximizing this one does not require a spreadsheet.

Mother’s Blessing Gives 25% More XP and Gold

Blizzard’s current Mother’s Blessing runs from September 1 through September 5 and applies across Seasonal and Eternal Realms as well as every World Tier.

While active, all players receive:

• +25% Experience
• +25% Gold

You can confirm that the event is active by looking for the Mother’s Blessing icon beside your potion count.

We had another Mother’s Blessing only a few weeks ago, so this is hardly Diablo IV’s rarest event. But boring bonuses become considerably more attractive when they arrive immediately before everyone mentally moves into the next season.

The XP Bonus Stacks With Elixirs and Urn of Experience

The most useful detail is that Mother’s Blessing is stackable.

Blizzard specifically recommends pairing the event with Elixirs and the Urn of Experience to increase your total XP gains further. That makes the final day particularly useful if you are actively leveling rather than simply farming Gold in the background.

If you have an unfinished character sitting at an awkward level, this is probably a better use of the remaining event window than simply running content on a character that has already reached every progression goal you care about.

The bonus can also help with Battle Pass progression and the Season Journey, although the value there naturally depends on how much Season 14 you still have left to complete.

This Is Probably Season 14 Cleanup Time

The timing is almost more important than the percentage.

Season 15 is approaching, Blizzard is preparing major BlizzCon reveals, and parts of the next season were deliberately kept out of the PTR. The community has already moved most of its attention toward what happens next.

That makes Mother’s Blessing an excellent excuse to clean up whatever you abandoned in the current season.

Finish an alt.

Push a few remaining levels.

Build up some Gold.

Complete Season Journey objectives you have been politely ignoring for several weeks.

Or simply use the extra XP while testing a build before Season 15 rearranges the furniture again.

Don’t Grind Just Because the Bonus Exists

There is one important counterpoint.

If you are already completely finished with Season 14, a 25% bonus does not magically create interesting content. We just looked at players questioning whether Reliquary progression is keeping them online after the season itself feels finished. Mother’s Blessing should not become another reason to manufacture homework for yourself.

The bonus is useful because it makes something you already wanted to do faster.

If you did not want to do it in the first place, 25% more efficiency is still 100% of an activity you were tired of.

Mother’s Blessing Ends September 5

The current Mother’s Blessing ends September 5 at 10:00 AM PDT / 7:00 PM CEST.

After that, normal XP and Gold rates return.

So if there is one final Season 14 character, Paragon push or suspiciously expensive crafting project still sitting on the list, tonight and tomorrow are the best time to deal with it.

Mother is feeling generous for roughly one more day.

History suggests we should take the Gold before she changes her mind.

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Diablo 4 Players Say the Paid Reliquary Grind Is Starting to Feel Like a Second Season

There is a peculiar moment in every live-service game where playing stops feeling like something you decided to do and starts feeling like something your purchase would very much like you to finish. Some Diablo IV players believe the current Reliquary system is getting uncomfortably close to that line.

A new player discussion argues that the Premium Reliquary grind has become noticeably heavier over the last two seasons. The original poster has played Diablo IV since launch, says they have completed every previous season and Battle Pass, and estimates that they can normally get what they want from a season in roughly 20 hours. Their complaint is that finishing the paid Reliquary now feels like another 20–30 hours of progression on top of that.

The numbers are one player's estimate, not a universal completion time. Other players in the same discussion strongly disagree and point out that a Diablo season lasts around three months. But the disagreement raises a much more useful question than whether one person plays quickly:

How much additional playtime should a Battle Pass require after you have already paid for access to it?

The Reliquary Replaced Diablo 4’s Old Battle Pass

Blizzard replaced Diablo IV's traditional linear Battle Pass with the Reliquary system in Season 8. Instead of climbing one fixed reward track, players gain access to several themed collections and spend Favor Tokens to unlock the rewards they actually want.

The idea itself is fairly sensible. A player interested in weapon cosmetics can prioritize those instead of waiting for 37 unrelated rewards to pass by first. Premium Reliquaries can be purchased individually or accessed through the Premium Battle Pass bundle, while the season also includes a free Reliquary.

Favor is earned through normal gameplay by slaying monsters and completing quests. Blizzard allows players to hold up to 99 Favor Tokens at once, and those tokens can even be carried into later seasons.

So far, so flexible.

The pressure arrives from the other half of the system: the Reliquaries themselves expire. Blizzard explicitly warns that any rewards left unclaimed when a Reliquary ends disappear with it.

That means paying for access does not buy the cosmetics.

It buys the opportunity to spend enough time earning them before the clock runs out.

One Player Says the Grind Now Adds Another 20–30 Hours

The current forum discussion comes from a longtime player who says Diablo IV works best for them as a relatively short seasonal experience. They can jump in, complete the new content over roughly 20 hours and leave satisfied until the next season.

The problem, they argue, is that the paid progression now continues considerably beyond the point where the actual season has stopped giving them reasons to play.

According to their estimate, completing the Premium Reliquary requires another 20–30 hours.

That creates a strange inversion.

The seasonal content becomes the first half of the season.

The Battle Pass becomes the second.

The player says Season 14 may therefore be the first time they simply stop buying the Premium Reliquary.

Other Players Think That Is Exactly How a 90-Day Pass Should Work

Not everyone considers this a problem.

One response points out that Diablo IV seasons run for roughly 90 days. From that perspective, expecting to complete both the season and its entire reward system in only a few days may be unreasonable. A Battle Pass is supposed to provide progression across the season rather than immediately disgorge every cosmetic after the campaign is finished.

That argument has merit.

If Favor arrived so quickly that players could empty every Reliquary during their first weekend, Blizzard would effectively have replaced the old Battle Pass with a shop containing several unusually complicated checkout buttons.

There should be progression.

The difficult question is what that progression is supposed to accomplish.

If players are continuing because they enjoy Nightmare Dungeons, War Plans, boss farming or experimenting with another build, Favor arrives naturally in the background. The Reliquary gives them additional rewards for gameplay they already wanted to do.

If the seasonal gameplay has already run its course and players are now repeating activities primarily because a paid cosmetic track remains unfinished, the system starts feeling very different.

The Problem Is Not Necessarily the Number of Hours

This is where the debate becomes more interesting than simply arguing over whether 20 hours is too much or too little.

Different Diablo players have wildly different seasonal habits. One person plays 150 hours across three characters. Another reaches the endgame, finishes the seasonal objectives and disappears after a weekend. Designing one universal Battle Pass duration around both groups is impossible.

The more useful question is whether Reliquary progression matches Diablo IV's actual seasonal progression.

We recently looked at how quiet Diablo IV has become on Steam late in Season 14. Some decline is completely normal as players finish their goals and wait for the next reset. Diablo is fundamentally seasonal now. People leave. Then Blizzard rings the loot bell and everyone comes running back.

A Battle Pass that meaningfully outlasts the content those players came back to complete can therefore create an awkward incentive: continue playing after you feel finished because otherwise part of the thing you purchased disappears.

That is not technically forcing anybody to play.

FOMO rarely arrives carrying a weapon.

It generally carries a countdown timer.

Diablo 4 Already Has a Better Solution Sitting Inside the Reliquary System

The frustrating part is that Reliquaries already contain several ideas that could make this less annoying.

Players choose their rewards.

Favor can be saved.

Premium collections are separated by theme.

The system is considerably less rigid than Diablo IV's original Battle Pass.

We recently discussed another possible evolution when Diablo IV players asked Blizzard to follow Overwatch and bring old Battle Pass rewards back. A permanent or rotating archive of old Reliquaries would immediately reduce much of the pressure attached to finishing everything during one specific three-month window.

You could still reward active seasonal play without turning every unfinished cosmetic into permanently lost content.

Blizzard has already proven that the Battle Pass is not sacred. It replaced the entire thing once.

It can adjust it again.

Season 15 Will Be an Interesting Test

This discussion arrives at an especially useful moment because Season 15 is almost here. Blizzard is introducing Soul Splinters, Legacy Uniques, Rebirth and several new endgame systems, while deliberately saving additional seasonal content for BlizzCon.

If Season 15 gives players considerably more reasons to remain active throughout the full season, the Reliquary grind may feel much less noticeable. Favor will simply accumulate while people are doing things they already wanted to do.

But if players once again finish the meaningful seasonal content and discover that the paid reward system has another few dozen hours left on the clock, this complaint will probably return.

A Battle Pass should encourage you to keep playing.

It probably should not be the main reason you still are.

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Diablo Immortal Players Report Huge Resource Stacks Disappearing After Recent Updates

Diablo Immortal players spend an impressive amount of time collecting crafting materials that are deliberately designed to accumulate slowly over months and years. Naturally, this makes it rather alarming when the number suddenly becomes zero.

A new bug report says more than 700,000 Reinforced Scrap — possibly close to one million — disappeared from a player's account this week. The materials have reportedly remained missing for several days across both PC and Android. It is not the only recent report either: another player said their entire stack of Enchanted Dust vanished immediately after a late-August update.

There is currently no confirmation from Blizzard that the reports share the same cause, nor that Diablo Immortal has a widespread material-deletion bug. But when long-term resource stacks begin disappearing around a major client transition, it is worth keeping an eye on.

More Than 700,000 Reinforced Scrap Apparently Vanished

The newest report was posted on September 3 by a player on the Eternal Conflict server. According to the bug report, the player attempted to enchant new attributes and discovered they no longer had enough materials available.

That was surprising because they say they had accumulated at least 700,000 Reinforced Scrap and possibly considerably more. The player rarely used the material and believed the stack was approaching one million before it disappeared.

They tested the account on both PC and a Samsung Galaxy S24 Android device, installed available updates and waited several days.

The materials did not return.

For somebody who has spent years allowing crafting resources to quietly accumulate in the background, that is approximately the Diablo equivalent of opening your bank account and discovering the gold counter has developed philosophical objections to ownership.

An iOS Player Recently Lost Their Entire Enchanted Dust Stack

The Reinforced Scrap report would be easier to dismiss as an isolated account problem if there were not another very similar complaint from August 27.

In that technical support report, an iOS player said their entire collection of Enchanted Dust disappeared after installing the latest game update.

The player said they had not salvaged the material, upgraded equipment or performed another action that should have consumed it. They simply logged back in after updating and found the resource balance sitting at zero.

They could not provide an exact amount but described the lost stack as substantial.

Again, there has been no public confirmation that this incident and the Reinforced Scrap disappearance are related.

They involve different resources.

They happened on different platforms.

And they occurred on different dates.

That makes them evidence of multiple player reports, not evidence of one confirmed system-wide bug.

Is the New Engine Update Responsible?

The September player suspects Diablo Immortal's ongoing engine update may be involved.

That is possible.

It is not established.

Blizzard announced in August that Diablo Immortal is receiving a substantial engine overhaul this September, including new lighting, shadows, material rendering and visual-effect changes across nearly 100 Legendary Affixes. Players were allowed to begin preparing the updated client from August 24 and receive 10 Legendary Crests for doing so.

Importantly, Blizzard's community team later clarified that the update was being rolled out in different chunks, with some behind-the-scenes changes appearing before the more visible September launch.

That means players may indeed have received technical changes around the same time these reports appeared.

It still does not establish causation.

There are hundreds of things happening inside a live-service client during an update, and “it disappeared after the patch” is not the same thing as “the patch deleted it.”

Other Missing-Item Reports Are Appearing Too — But They Have Different Causes

The timing is made slightly more uncomfortable by several other recent support threads involving missing items and Legendary Gems. Some of those reports appear to involve very different circumstances, including Armory loadouts and account-authentication issues, so they should not be bundled into one grand inventory-wipe theory.

That distinction matters.

We recently made the same point when Diablo Immortal players reported spending thousands of Orbs on Wing Customization without new unlocks. Multiple unhappy players can reveal a system worth investigating without proving that every complaint has one technical cause.

The safest conclusion here is therefore fairly narrow: at least two Diablo Immortal players have recently reported large crafting-material stacks disappearing unexpectedly after updates.

Whether Blizzard finds a common cause is the part we still do not know.

Long-Term Materials Are Not Easy to Replace

The scale of the newest report is what gives this story weight.

Reinforced Scrap is not a temporary event currency that expires next Tuesday. Players accumulate enormous quantities through routine play, salvaging and progression over long periods. Rebuilding a 700,000+ stack would represent an extraordinary amount of repeated farming.

The same applies to large Enchanted Dust reserves.

That makes restoration considerably more important than simply fixing whatever display or inventory problem may have occurred.

Diablo Immortal can always give players another monster to kill.

Convincing someone to farm the same 700,000 pieces of scrap twice may be slightly harder.

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Diablo 4’s Hidden Season 15 Content May Be Sending Us Back to Westmarch

Blizzard has already admitted that the Season 15 PTR did not show everything coming in Diablo IV’s next season. That alone was enough to start the usual pre-BlizzCon archaeology. Now a fresh round of community speculation is pointing in a much more specific direction: Kingsport, Westmarch and possibly a renewed connection to Malthael.

Before anyone starts pre-ordering boat tickets to Sanctuary’s western coast, this needs to be said as clearly as possible: none of that has been officially confirmed by Blizzard. What we have are player discussions, references to previously circulated datamined material, and a cluster of lore-adjacent clues that seem to be orbiting the same part of the Diablo universe. That is enough for an interesting theory. It is not enough for a confirmed Season 15 destination.

Blizzard Has Already Told Us Season 15 Is Incomplete on the PTR

The most important part of the story is also the least glamorous one. In Blizzard’s official 3.2.0 PTR overview, the developers explicitly said the PTR had a different feature offering by design. They explained that they had more to share at BlizzCon and did not want all of Season 15 to be available before they had the chance to talk about it.

That matters because it changes the way every suspicious little clue gets interpreted.

If Blizzard had presented the PTR as the full Season 15 package, then most of this speculation would be considerably easier to dismiss. But Blizzard did the opposite. It effectively told players, “Yes, there is more, and no, you cannot see all of it yet.”

That is how you end up with the community staring at maps, item names, lore references and forum posts as though Deckard Cain personally hid patch notes under the floorboards.

Why Players Keep Talking About Kingsport and Westmarch

The current wave of discussion comes from a September 3 forum thread that revived earlier community theories around Kingsport, Westmarch and Tristram. The basic idea is that the still-hidden part of Season 15 may push Diablo IV toward the western side of Sanctuary’s map, above Skovos Isle, where some players believe the geography lines up neatly with areas associated with Westmarch.

That theory did not appear out of nowhere. An earlier August discussion claimed that players would be “landing in Kingsport” to retrieve Messerschmidt’s Reaver and continue hunting Malthael. The same post also mentioned Seraziel, Corrupted Reaper saying “He is coming,” together with a more cryptic line about “that old man” feeling familiar.

If you are noticing that this all sounds less like a normal seasonal teaser and more like somebody dropped half a lore puzzle into a blender, you are not alone.

Still, the names are not random. Kingsport and Duncraig are tied to Westmarch in Diablo lore, and Malthael’s Reaper campaign left a great deal of historical misery in precisely that region. If Blizzard wanted to build a season around death, legacy, corrupted angels and old Diablo history, Westmarch would not be a particularly strange place to start.

Malthael Is the Most Interesting Part of the Theory

The geography is one thing. Malthael is the part that makes the theory genuinely interesting.

Diablo IV has spent much of its post-launch life circling old Diablo ideas in new ways. Legacy Uniques, callbacks to earlier eras and a steadily stronger interest in franchise history have all been part of the broader mood. We touched on that recently when looking at the growing Diablo 1 anniversary speculation ahead of BlizzCon. Blizzard is clearly not in an anti-nostalgia phase.

Malthael would also fit the current timing rather neatly. If Season 15 is being positioned as something a little larger, moodier or more lore-driven than a normal mechanical refresh, then bringing back the Angel of Death’s shadow over Westmarch would be one way to make that land. It would also give Blizzard a villainous thread that feels different from simply rotating back toward the Prime Evils again.

That does not mean Malthael is confirmed for Diablo IV.

It means the community has found a theory with enough internal logic to survive more than ten minutes on the forums, which is already better than average.

Messerschmidt’s Reaver May Be the Bridge Between Diablo Eras

One of the more curious pieces in the theory is Messerschmidt’s Reaver. The item description quoted in the earlier discussion describes a weapon that cut through demon-infested catacombs beneath the old Zakarum cathedral in Tristram and asks whether it could have been used by Aidan to defeat Diablo.

That is a strikingly deliberate bit of flavor if it ends up mattering in Season 15.

It links Diablo IV not only to Westmarch and Malthael, but also to Tristram and the original game’s oldest imagery. In other words, it ties together exactly the sort of historical Diablo references Blizzard would be foolishly tempted to bring onstage at BlizzCon during the franchise’s 30th anniversary year.

We have already seen Blizzard use BlizzCon as the place to hold back key Diablo IV reveals. As we noted in our preview of the “Diablo IV: What’s Next” panel, Blizzard has reserved convention space specifically to explain what the PTR did not show.

If there is a moment to officially connect Diablo IV’s next season to old cathedral bloodstains and the Angel of Death, that would be it.

This Could Still Be a Small Region, Not a Giant Expansion

One useful corrective from the community discussion is that even players who believe the Westmarch theory are not necessarily expecting some vast new expansion zone. Several of the arguments point instead toward a smaller added region, enough to support seasonal content, mood, side progression and a stronger lore hook without pretending Blizzard is about to bolt an entire extra game onto Season 15.

Frankly, that sounds far more believable.

Diablo IV does not need a surprise continent every season. It needs seasonal themes with enough identity that players feel they are walking into something other than another renamed power loop. We made a similar point in our recent editorial on Season 15’s promising ideas and familiar underlying problems. New mechanics are useful. A stronger sense of place would be useful too.

Westmarch could provide that, even if it only arrives as a compact destination rather than a giant new sandbox.

What We Actually Know Right Now

At the moment, the hard facts are fairly simple.

Blizzard officially says the Season 15 PTR did not include everything coming in the season.

Players are actively circulating theories that point toward Kingsport, Westmarch, Tristram and Malthael.

Some of those theories reference earlier datamined or community-discovered strings involving Messerschmidt’s Reaver, Seraziel, Corrupted Reaper and the phrase “He is coming.”

None of that is a confirmation.

But it is enough to say that if Blizzard wanted to send Diablo IV back toward one of the franchise’s most haunted regions, it has already planted just enough smoke to make people look for fire.

Season 15 may not just be hiding mechanics. It may be hiding a destination.

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Diablo 2’s Magic Warlock Can Apparently Melt Players 8 Baal in 30 Seconds

Diablo II: Resurrected's Warlock has spent most of 2026 discovering new ways to make old demons regret surviving for 25 years. The latest example comes from a Season 15 player running a Magic Warlock built around Abyss and Miasma Chain, who reports killing Players 8 Baal in roughly 30 seconds while using a setup they describe as merely “mediocre.”

That claim comes from one player's current build rather than a controlled community benchmark, so we are not declaring a new mathematical king of Diablo II. But the numbers are interesting. The player reports approximately 4,000 damage per second from each Miasma Chain and says the 125% Faster Cast Rate breakpoint allows roughly 12 chains to be layered onto a target at once.

Baal, traditionally quite fond of wasting everyone's time, apparently gets considerably less.

Abyss Clears — Miasma Chain Deletes the Big Things

The basic idea is familiar to anyone who has been following Warlock development. Abyss provides excellent area damage and crowd control, while Miasma Chain becomes the concentrated single-target tool against bosses, Heralds and enemies that survive the initial magical unpleasantness.

That combination became considerably more interesting after Patch 3.3. We previously looked at how one seemingly minor Miasma Chain bug fix made Abyss Warlock builds dramatically more effective. Blizzard removed an issue where the projectiles could collide with friendly and neutral units, meaning more chains actually reach the monsters they were intended to murder.

The current Season 15 report looks like the mature version of that idea.

The player says they repeatedly cast Abyss → Chains → reposition, then use Sigil: Death and repeat the sequence. Against a stationary boss, multiple Chains can remain layered around the target while their damage continues ticking.

At Players 8, that is apparently enough to make Baal's health bar behave rather nervously.

The Build Hits the 125% FCR Breakpoint

The current equipment setup is surprisingly conventional:

• Weapon: Heart of the Oak
• Shield: Spirit
• Armor: Enigma
• Gloves: Magefist
• Belt: 20% Faster Cast Rate Gheed's Belt
• Rings: Two Nagelrings
• Boots: War Traveler
• Swap: Call to Arms + Spirit

The important target is 125% Faster Cast Rate. The player says that breakpoint helps make it practical to build the large stack of Chains required for the extreme single-target damage.

They are not even using Void, despite describing it as an enormous offensive upgrade. Hoto and Spirit are being kept because the additional survivability feels more useful than squeezing every possible point of damage out of the build.

There is also no Warlock Torch and no Sunder Charm in the current setup.

Which is an inconvenient detail for anyone hoping the build only works after depositing the entire Ladder economy into one character.

The Build Uses Far More Than Two Skills

Perhaps the nicest part of the player's report is that the character does not simply press Abyss until the monitor becomes embarrassed.

The player says they actively use 11 different skills, including Abyss, Miasma Chain, Teleport or Blade Warp, Summon Defiler, Sigil: Lethargy, Bind Demon, Sigil: Death, Consume and Hex: Siphon alongside Battle Orders and Battle Command.

That makes the build feel considerably more like old Diablo II than a one-button damage engine. Different tools handle positioning, crowd control, mana, survivability and specific enemy types.

It also demonstrates why Warlock has become such an interesting addition to the game. The class was originally presented as a mixture of demonic binding, eldritch magic and resource manipulation, and Season 15 players are now combining those systems in ways that were much harder to predict when Reign of the Warlock launched.

Baal Wave 2 Is the Build’s Awkward Problem

There is, naturally, a catch.

Magic damage becomes considerably less impressive when the monster in front of you has the discourtesy to be Magic Immune. Baal's second wave therefore creates one of the build's most noticeable problems.

The player initially invested in a Fortitude-equipped Act II mercenary but found that this was not enough by itself. Their eventual solution involved adding another bound ally with Fanaticism, allowing the physical damage dealers to handle the Magic Immune targets while Sigil: Lethargy helps control the encounter.

That is also where Bind Demon continues to give Warlock builds some wonderfully strange solutions. As we covered in our guide to the hard-point requirements for capturing Diablo II's strongest demons, Warlocks can turn carefully selected monsters into permanent pieces of the build rather than treating every demon as something that needs immediate removal.

Sometimes the correct answer to a difficult monster is another difficult monster.

This Is Not Yet Proof That Magic Warlock Is the Best Build

There are several reasons to keep the result in perspective.

The roughly 30-second Players 8 Baal kill is one player's report. We do not have standardized comparisons against fully optimized Javazons, Nova Sorceresses, Hammerdins or other established high-player-count builds. Boss fights also suit Miasma Chain particularly well because the player can stack repeated effects around one predictable target.

Earlier Warlock discussions were much less unanimous about the build. Before the Patch 3.3 collision fix, some players described Miasma Chain as clunky and inconsistent, while others already considered Abyss one of the class's strongest tools.

Patch 3.3 appears to have moved that argument considerably.

Season 15’s Magic Warlock Is Looking Very Hard to Ignore

The most interesting thing about the current build is therefore not whether Baal dies in exactly 28, 30 or 35 seconds.

It is how little optimization apparently remains necessary before the character becomes comfortable in Players 8 games.

The player says they can clear high-level Terror Zones, handle full-player-count areas and babysit Baal runs while other players remain in town. Other current Abyss Warlock discussions similarly describe the combination as exceptionally strong in higher player counts, particularly against Heralds and bosses.

And this is happening without Void, without a Warlock Torch and without an elaborate collection of perfect gear.

We already suspected Patch 3.3 had quietly created one of Season 15's strongest Warlock setups.

Players are now starting to show us what happens when that setup grows up.

Baal apparently gets about 30 seconds to think about it.

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Diablo 4’s Echoing Elites Trophy Is Still Making PS5 Players Grind Three Times Longer

Diablo IV has spent the last four months patching Lord of Hatred, adjusting drop rates, fixing classes and generally trying to stop Sanctuary's newest systems from biting one another. One PlayStation 5 problem, however, appears to have survived the entire cleanup operation: the Echoing Elites trophy still seems to count bosses while ignoring the elites explicitly mentioned in its own description.

The bug was first documented in May. The thread became active again on September 2, with another PS5 player saying the issue remains unfixed and estimating that PlayStation users may need around 50 Echoing Hatred runs compared with roughly 15 on other platforms.

That is quite a lot of additional demon murder caused by one word in a trophy description apparently not doing its job.

Echoing Elites Says Bosses and Elites Should Count

The Echoing Elites trophy asks players to kill 1,000 bosses or elites in Echoing Hatred. On paper, that should be relatively straightforward once you can consistently survive deep runs of the activity.

Echoing Hatred is one of Lord of Hatred's major endgame additions, an escalating survival challenge where increasingly unpleasant waves of enemies continue arriving until your build, concentration or graphics card finally objects. We covered how Echoing Hatred works alongside Diablo IV's wider endgame overhaul before the expansion launched.

The PS5 trophy appears to have a different interpretation of the assignment.

In the original May bug report, the player initially suspected that certain categories of elite enemy were failing to count. After eventually completing the trophy on May 17, they reached a much stranger conclusion: only boss kills appeared to be progressing it.

The player reported averaging around 21–23 boss kills per run and finally earning the trophy after approximately 44–50 runs. If ordinary elites were included as the description suggests, they estimated it should instead take roughly 15–20 runs.

Players on PC and Xbox Report Much Faster Unlocks

Another player in the same thread provided a particularly useful comparison because they play Diablo IV across PC, Xbox and PlayStation 5. According to their report, the achievement unlocked normally on PC and Xbox after roughly 15 runs, while the PS5 version remained locked after nearly 30.

Other PS5 players later reported unlocking it after roughly 35–42 runs, again describing boss kills as the only reliable source of progress.

That does not establish an exact universal number because Echoing Hatred runs can produce different numbers of bosses depending on how far a build progresses. But the pattern across the reports is remarkably consistent: PlayStation players are doing substantially more runs for the same trophy.

And as of September 2, they are apparently still doing them.

The Trophy Has Another Problem: Getting Into Echoing Hatred

Grinding 40 or 50 runs would be less irritating if Echoing Hatred were something players could simply select from a menu.

It is not.

Access depends on finding a Trace of Echoes, and that item has generated its own long-running complaints. We previously covered players reporting more than 90 hours without seeing a Trace of Echoes drop, effectively locking them out of the activity entirely.

Blizzard has since increased the drop rate for Echoing Hatred keys, which certainly helps. The current patch notes specifically list an increased key drop rate from Elites and Champions. But a better supply of keys does not fix a trophy that apparently ignores most of the enemies players kill after using them.

It merely makes the broken arithmetic more accessible.

This Has Been Reported Since May

The original PS5 report dates to May 14 and contains detailed observations about the trophy's behaviour. Additional confirmations appeared throughout May and June. A July update said it remained unfixed. Another arrived in August.

Then, on September 2, a player returned to the thread with exactly the same complaint.

They estimate that PS5 players are still looking at around 50 runs compared with approximately 15 elsewhere and argue that the combination of incorrect tracking and relatively limited Echoing Hatred access turns the trophy into an unnecessarily long grind.

There has been no indication in Blizzard's current public patch notes that the specific PS5 Echoing Elites tracking issue has been corrected. The company has certainly been fixing plenty of other Lord of Hatred problems; Patch 3.0.2 alone was an enormous cleanup pass across the expansion's systems.

This one has apparently learned to hide.

The Trophy Is Obtainable — Just Much More Annoying Than It Should Be

The important distinction is that Echoing Elites does not appear to be completely unobtainable on PS5. Multiple players have eventually earned it.

You simply may need to kill enough Echoing Hatred bosses to satisfy a counter that appears to have forgotten half of its own requirement.

For completionists, that is arguably worse than an obviously broken trophy. An impossible trophy tells you to stop.

This one smiles politely, lets you continue for another 30 runs and insists everything is perfectly normal.

Four months later, PlayStation players would probably just like the elites in Echoing Elites to count.

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