Diablo Immortal Will Keep Removing Legendary Essences — Players Want Reworks Instead

Diablo Immortal has accumulated a lot of Legendary Essences. Four years of updates have given every class an increasingly enormous library of skill modifiers, forgotten experiments, old meta pieces and niche interactions that somebody, somewhere, probably still loves. Blizzard thinks that library has become too large. The solution is not merely to stop adding more. Legendary Essences will continue to be permanently retired from the game.

Blizzard first removed a wave of Essences in June, then admitted that it had done a poor job explaining why. An August Developer Diary was intended to provide the missing context, and the message is now very clear: retirement is a long-term design strategy. Blizzard plans to gradually reduce the total number of Essences until every class reaches what the developers consider a healthier and more stable pool. New Essences will continue arriving, but an old Essence disappearing does not necessarily mean another one will replace it one-for-one.

The community response has been equally clear. Many players understand the problem Blizzard is trying to solve. They simply think deleting old builds is the wrong solution.

Blizzard Wants a Smaller, Healthier Essence Pool

The developer's argument makes sense on paper. Every time Diablo Immortal adds another batch of Legendary Essences, the drop pool becomes larger, new players have more effects to understand, and individual additions have less impact because they are competing with years of existing options. Blizzard wants future updates to produce more noticeable changes instead of adding another collection of items that disappears into an increasingly crowded catalogue.

According to the Systems and Design team, Essences will not be retired simply because they are old. Blizzard says it will consider usage rate, build ecosystem health, gameplay diversity, design goals, upcoming content and the amount of useful design space an Essence occupies. The intended end state is a stable pool where each class still has meaningful build choices but does not carry every experimental Legendary modifier ever released.

That is a reasonable maintenance problem for a live-service ARPG. Diablo Immortal cannot add another dozen modifiers to every class forever without eventually creating something resembling a spreadsheet with combat animations attached. The controversial part is what happens to the player who built around the Essence Blizzard decides no longer deserves a chair.

Retired Essences Do Not Simply Stop Dropping

“Retired” is stronger than “removed from the loot pool.” Blizzard's August 12 retirement wave removed the affected Legendary items from future drops and rendered their Essences inactive. If you already had one unlocked, you did not get to keep using the old version indefinitely. A loadout built around that modifier could simply stop functioning as designed after the update.

That distinction is central to the backlash. Several players say they would be much less concerned if retirement meant removing old Essences from the general drop pool while preserving them for accounts that had already unlocked them. Others have suggested moving obsolete effects into an archive, legacy system or optional support slot. Blizzard instead wants the live build ecosystem itself to evolve, which inevitably means some existing builds will die.

Community Manager Jadai was unusually direct when challenged on that point. Responding to a player who argued that future retirement waves would continue breaking builds, Jadai essentially confirmed that both things are true: existing builds will break, and new builds will be created as new Essences arrive. Blizzard sees that turnover as part of an evolving game rather than a failure of the system.

Players Say That Is Forced Change, Not Build Diversity

This is where Blizzard and a large part of the community seem to be using the word “diversity” differently. Blizzard wants fewer but more meaningful options, with new Essences having enough room to change how classes play. Critics argue that removing old options cannot create diversity by definition. It narrows the number of possible combinations and forces players toward whatever Blizzard has decided should remain viable.

One player in the Developer Diary discussion described losing a build that relied heavily on the retired Wiltbloom Essence. Rather than discovering an exciting new option, they say the retirement destroyed the playstyle they preferred and pushed them toward changing class. Another response summarized the problem more broadly: releasing an interesting new Essence can tempt somebody into trying a new build; removing their old Essence forces them to.

Those are very different kinds of experimentation. One begins with curiosity. The other begins with opening your Armory and discovering that part of the build has been administratively deceased.

This Hits Harder in Diablo Immortal Than a Normal Balance Nerf

Live-service games change builds constantly. A skill loses damage. A cooldown increases. A Legendary Gem gets adjusted. Players complain for three days and eventually move numbers around. Essence retirement is more disruptive because it can remove the interaction itself. You are not necessarily dealing 8% less damage with the same build. You may no longer have the build.

That matters particularly in Diablo Immortal because character setups are connected to a much larger investment structure. Players collect Essences, Legendary equipment, Set pieces, Runes, Eternal Magic attributes and Legendary Gems around a specific playstyle. Some of those systems involve significant time investment, and for paying players they may involve significant money as well. Reconstructing a replacement setup is therefore more complicated than changing one skill point.

We saw a smaller version of that frustration in our recent look at the Wizard player who lost 46 million PvE damage after the August balance patch. That build still existed after the change; it simply performed worse. Essence retirement can go one step further and remove the mechanical piece that made the setup work in the first place.

Blizzard Says Low Usage Is Not the Only Factor

One fear in the community is that anything unpopular could eventually disappear. Blizzard says the process is more nuanced than that. Usage rate matters, but retirement decisions also consider whether an Essence contributes something healthy to the class, whether it overlaps too heavily with another effect, whether its design restricts future additions and whether Blizzard believes the gameplay itself should continue existing.

That opens the door to another solution players keep suggesting: rework weak Essences instead of deleting them. If an old modifier has extremely low usage because its numbers are poor or its slot competes with a mandatory damage option, move it, buff it or redesign it. Blizzard has already indicated that this can happen in individual cases. During the retirement discussion, Jadai responded to criticism of one Crusader effect by saying the design might work better as a support Essence in another slot and that the team wanted to bring that functionality back in a different form.

That response is important because it proves retirement and rework do not have to be mutually exclusive. Blizzard can identify a useful gameplay idea trapped inside an outdated Essence and preserve it somewhere better. Many players simply want that philosophy applied more broadly.

The August 12 Wave Made the Policy Real

The Developer Diary was not hypothetical. Blizzard followed it with another retirement wave on August 12, publishing a class-by-class list of Legendary equipment whose Essences would become inactive after the update. As an acknowledgement of the negative reaction surrounding the earlier June removals, Blizzard also mailed players five Legendary Crests as a thank-you for their feedback.

Free Crests are free Crests. Nobody is likely to throw them back.

They also do not reconstruct a deleted loadout.

One player in the continuing discussion explained that after an Essence disappeared, their saved Armory setup was left with a blank slot and no easy way to remember exactly which item, Gem, Rune and stats had previously occupied it. They ended up relying on handwritten notes to rebuild something close to the old configuration. That is a very specific quality-of-life problem Blizzard could address even if it refuses to reconsider retirement itself.

Blizzard Is Not Planning Separate PvE and PvP Retirement Rules

The Developer Diary FAQ also contains an important detail for players hoping their niche PvE setup might be protected simply because it causes no competitive problems. Blizzard currently has no plan for completely separate PvE and PvP Essence-retirement rules. Future updates may target different gameplay directions, but the retirement system itself is intended to manage the overall Legendary ecosystem.

That makes the policy particularly relevant after the recent balance controversies. The August 26 patch already demonstrated how difficult it is to make one Essence work across Battlegrounds, raids and tournament PvP. We covered that from another angle when players worried the Warlock nerf would simply push the competitive meta toward Demon Hunter. Essence retirement gives Blizzard a much more permanent tool: instead of endlessly balancing an unhealthy modifier across every mode, the team can eventually decide that the game would be healthier without it.

From a systems-design perspective, that flexibility is attractive. From the player's perspective, it means no existing niche build can assume its key Essence will remain available forever simply because it is harmless outside one activity.

Could Blizzard Remove Essences From Drops Without Deleting Them?

One of the strongest compromises suggested by players would separate loot-pool management from build availability. Blizzard's complaint that too many Essences dilute drops is valid, but permanent deactivation is not the only way to solve that. Old Essences could move into a Legacy collection after they are extracted. New players could unlock them through a separate vendor or archive system, while standard Legendary drops remain focused on the current pool.

That would allow Blizzard to keep the active loot table manageable without destroying every old build. It could even create a rotating system where retired Essences occasionally return, much like live-service games rotate older cosmetics or seasonal content back into availability.

The obvious downside is maintenance. Every Essence preserved forever remains something Blizzard must consider when designing future items, skills and balance changes. A supposedly “legacy” interaction can still combine with a new Essence three years later and create something deeply unreasonable. Blizzard's desire to reclaim design space is therefore not solved entirely by hiding old modifiers from the drop table.

Diablo Immortal Has a Four-Year Accumulation Problem

This may be the larger issue behind the entire policy. Diablo Immortal was never designed to stop receiving content. New Legendary Essences arrive repeatedly, and every batch increases the number of interactions the developers must test against every future batch. The game is now old enough that the cost of never removing anything is becoming visible.

Traditional Diablo games largely avoid this problem because their item pools eventually stabilize. Diablo Immortal behaves more like an MMO. Its classes are expected to continue evolving indefinitely, which means Blizzard eventually has to choose between permanent accumulation and some kind of rotation.

The question is not whether an infinitely growing Essence pool eventually becomes awkward. It obviously does. The question is whether Blizzard's solution should feel like pruning a tree or replacing the garden while somebody is still sitting in it.

New Essences Do Not Necessarily Replace the Old Ones One-for-One

Another source of anxiety is that retirement does not guarantee numerical replacement. Blizzard says future updates may simultaneously remove old Legendary affixes and introduce new ones, but retiring one does not mean one new Essence automatically appears in the same slot or fills the same gameplay role.

That gives Blizzard freedom to reduce the total pool gradually until it reaches the desired size. It also means a class can temporarily lose more options than it gains during a particular wave. For players already skeptical of retirement, this is probably the least reassuring sentence in the FAQ.

The long-term promise is quality over quantity: fewer Essences, but each one should create more meaningful gameplay differences. Whether Blizzard can deliver enough genuine build diversity inside that smaller pool is the part we cannot evaluate yet.

Reworks Would Make Retirement Much Easier to Accept

The community is not universally demanding that every forgotten 2022 Essence remain immortal. Some modifiers really are obsolete. Some have been power-crept beyond relevance. Others occupy valuable equipment slots despite offering effects almost nobody would intentionally choose. Cleaning those up can make the game easier to understand.

The strongest criticism is therefore not “never change anything.” It is that retirement should be the final option after Blizzard has considered updating, combining or relocating the useful parts of an Essence. If an effect supports a genuinely distinct playstyle, preserve that playstyle even if the original item disappears. If an Essence is simply an inferior numerical version of something newer, retirement becomes far easier to justify.

That approach would also make Blizzard's stated goal of build diversity easier to believe. Players care less about the name printed on an old Legendary than they care about what it lets their character do.

Blizzard Has Chosen Evolution Over Preservation

The most important thing in the Developer Diary is not the exact list of Essences being removed next. It is that Blizzard has now clearly chosen a philosophy. Diablo Immortal's class systems will not preserve every build forever. The Legendary ecosystem is intended to change, shrink and replace itself over time.

Blizzard knows that means some builds will stop working. The developers have acknowledged the friction and say the decision itself was made months ago and is not being reversed simply because the first retirement waves were unpopular. What Blizzard says it can improve is communication: earlier warnings, clearer reasoning and more transparency about what is disappearing and why.

That is better than waking up to a broken Armory loadout without explanation. It does not solve the underlying disagreement.

Players asking for reworks are essentially saying that a live-service RPG should evolve by adding possibilities. Blizzard is saying that after four years of accumulation, meaningful evolution sometimes requires removing them too.

Both positions make sense.

Only one of them gets to choose what remains in the game.

For now, that means Diablo Immortal players should probably stop treating every Legendary Essence as permanent property.

Some of them are apparently renting.

Sources

Blizzard Systems and Design Team: Dev Diary — Retiring Essences and the Future

Blizzard: Legendary Essences Retired on August 12

Reddit: Community Discussion of Essence Retirement

```

Read More

Diablo 4 Player Says Boss Loot Is Going Straight to the Stash

Diablo IV has spent years teaching players a very simple ritual: kill boss, watch loot explode across the floor, inspect glowing items and discover that most of them are not quite as exciting as the beam suggested. Now one player is reporting a considerably stranger variation. In several endgame activities, the boss appears to die normally, but some of the expected loot never appears on the ground at all. Instead, the game's Lost Items notification appears on the Stash immediately after the kill, suggesting the rewards may be getting routed directly into storage before the player ever has a chance to pick them up.

The report is extremely fresh — posted late on August 28 — and currently has very little independent confirmation, so this is not something we can describe as a widespread Season 14 bug. But the player says they have seen the same behaviour in multiple activities, including Kurast Undercity, Lair Bosses and The Pit, and specifically notes that no loot filters were enabled. If reproducible, it would be a very odd inversion of Diablo IV's normal Lost Items system. That system is supposed to rescue important loot you failed to collect. It is not normally supposed to intercept the drop before you see it.

The Stash Notification Appeared the Moment the Boss Died

The clearest example comes from Kurast Undercity. According to the report, the player killed the boss and immediately noticed the familiar exclamation mark appearing on the nearby Stash. That notification normally means the Lost Items tab has recovered something valuable left behind elsewhere in Sanctuary. The unusual part is that the player says the expected boss loot had never appeared on the floor in the first place.

They report seeing similar behaviour after Lair Bosses and Pit encounters, which makes the issue more interesting than one strange Undercity reward event. There is still a large gap between “one player reproduced this in several places” and “Diablo IV is automatically mailing boss loot to everyone,” but the multi-activity pattern is exactly the sort of thing worth documenting while more reports either confirm or contradict it.

A second forum user immediately asked the obvious diagnostic question: does everything disappear, leaving nothing visible on the ground as though a loot filter had hidden it? That distinction matters because Diablo IV's filtering systems can intentionally suppress large amounts of visible loot. The original report explicitly says loot filters were turned off, which is why the Lost Items notification became suspicious.

The Lost Items Stash Is Supposed to Catch Loot You Miss

Blizzard has supported automatic recovery for important equipment since launch. Legendary items left behind — including loot missed because of a disconnect — can be sent to a special Lost Items section in the player's Stash. Later patches expanded the concept to other valuable drops such as Scattered Prisms, Resplendent Sparks and Scrolls of Escape.

The purpose is obvious and useful. Diablo produces a lot of loot, and players should not permanently lose an important Legendary because it landed behind scenery or because the game disconnected two seconds after the boss died. The Lost Items tab acts as insurance.

But insurance normally requires something to have gone wrong first.

The current report suggests the game may sometimes be deciding that loot has been “missed” almost instantly, before the normal ground-drop interaction has occurred. If that is what is happening, the system designed to prevent missing loot could itself be hiding the loot.

This Could Be a Display Problem Rather Than a Reward Problem

There are several possible explanations, and right now none of them is confirmed. The safest interpretation is not that bosses are failing to generate rewards entirely. If the items truly appear in Lost Items, then the reward may still have been created correctly. The bug could instead sit somewhere between the server deciding what dropped and the client deciding what should appear on the ground.

That would make this more of a presentation or loot-routing bug than a traditional “boss dropped nothing” problem. The distinction matters. Receiving a Mythic directly in the Stash is much less serious than never receiving the Mythic at all. It is still confusing, particularly when players rely on the visible loot explosion to understand what an activity rewarded.

There have been separate Season 14 reports where bosses genuinely appear to provide too little or no loot, including Ultimate Nemesis encounters. Those should not automatically be merged with this new report. One issue may involve missing rewards. The other may involve rewards being generated but routed somewhere unexpected.

Diablo 4 Has Already Had Some Very Strange Loot Problems This Season

Season 14 has produced an unusual amount of discussion around the relationship between loot and the activities that award it. We recently covered how Nemesis portals can still disappear while players are dealing with the loot from the boss they just killed. In that situation, the game effectively creates the opposite problem: the loot is definitely on the ground, but spending too long inspecting it can cost you access to the next encounter.

This new report would be almost comically convenient by comparison. No need to spend 90 seconds comparing boots. Blizzard has apparently already taken them home.

That joke only works if the Lost Items system reliably preserves everything important, though. The Stash recovery tab has limited capacity, and players are used to emptying it precisely because they do not want new recovered items competing with old ones. A hidden system routing more boss rewards there than intended could therefore create problems of its own.

It Would Also Undermine the Actual Loot Moment

Even if every item arrives safely, there is a less technical problem. Diablo is built around seeing things drop. The color beam, the sound, the item name and that tiny pause before checking whether the thing is useful are part of the reward. Blizzard has spent years tuning loot rarity and reward presentation precisely because the moment an item hits the ground matters.

That is especially relevant during the current debate over whether Diablo IV still has enough genuinely exciting chase loot. As we discussed in our article about players asking for truly rare items beyond the increasingly accessible Mythic system, one of the community's recurring concerns is that loot should occasionally create a moment of surprise rather than simply appear as another progression resource.

A truly rare item materializing silently in the Stash would technically solve the inventory problem while completely murdering the celebration.

Imagine finally getting the drop you wanted after 200 boss kills and discovering it later between two forgotten Legendaries because a small exclamation mark appeared in town.

Efficient.

Not especially Diablo.

Loot Filters Are the First Thing Blizzard Would Need to Rule Out

The report's explicit claim that no filters were active is important because Diablo IV's increasingly sophisticated loot filtering can make large categories of equipment disappear from normal view. A misconfigured filter could easily create the impression that nothing dropped while the game continued tracking valuable filtered items through other systems.

If Blizzard investigates the report, reproduction would therefore need to start with every filter disabled and an empty Lost Items tab. Kill a known boss. Record the expected loot. Check whether the Stash notification appears immediately. Then repeat across Undercity, Pit and Lair Boss encounters.

If items consistently skip the ground under those conditions, the behaviour becomes much harder to dismiss as a filter issue. If it only occurs with particular filter configurations, the bug may lie in how the new loot presentation interacts with Lost Items.

Torment Difficulty Already Converts Some Loot Automatically

There is another system that can make Diablo IV's drops look different from earlier versions of the game. At Torment difficulty, lower-quality items that would have dropped can instead be automatically converted into crafting materials. Blizzard introduced that change specifically to reduce screen clutter and keep irrelevant Normal, Magic and Rare items from filling the ground at endgame.

That is intended behaviour, but it should not explain important Legendary, Unique or Mythic rewards being routed directly into Lost Items. Those are exactly the items the recovery system was built to preserve.

The current report does not specify every item rarity that appeared in the Stash afterward, so we should be careful not to infer more than the player actually observed. The important evidence is the immediate Lost Items notification combined with the absence of expected visible boss loot.

There Is Not Enough Evidence Yet to Call This Widespread

This is one of those stories where the date matters almost as much as the report. The thread was created at 11:49 p.m. on August 28. As of the morning of August 29, it consists of the original report and an early follow-up question. There is no large pile of “same here” replies yet, and Blizzard has not publicly acknowledged the behaviour.

That means the headline needs to remain exactly what it is: a Diablo IV player says this is happening. Not “Diablo IV now sends boss loot directly to your Stash.” Not “Season 14 broke boss drops.” We simply do not have enough evidence for either claim.

But fresh bug reports are worth watching when they describe something this specific. Undercity is particularly useful because the Stash can be visible in the boss area, making the notification timing easy to observe. If more players reproduce the same thing today, the report could become much more significant very quickly.

For Now, Check Lost Items If a Boss Seems Suspiciously Empty

Until the behaviour is better understood, there is at least one useful takeaway. If a Pit, Undercity or Lair Boss suddenly looks unusually stingy, check your Stash before assuming the rewards disappeared entirely. The Lost Items tab may contain something the floor never showed you.

That is hardly an ideal workaround because the whole point of killing the boss is normally to receive the loot where the boss died. But it is much better than concluding the game deleted the reward and walking away.

And perhaps tomorrow another player will confirm the entire thing was an obscure filter interaction. That would be fine too. Bugs are considerably more enjoyable when they stop being bugs.

For now, though, Diablo IV may have discovered a very modern solution to loot clutter:

Don't drop the loot.

Send it home.

Sources

Diablo IV Forums: Loot Going Straight to Stash Without Dropping

Blizzard: Diablo IV Lost Items Stash Explained

Blizzard: Additional Lost Items Stash Changes

Diablo IV Forums: Separate Ultimate Nemesis Lair Loot Reports

```

Read More

Diablo Immortal Wizard Player Loses 46 Million PvE Damage After Balance Patch

Diablo Immortal's August 26 balance patch was announced just before Bout of Realms, so most of the immediate conversation naturally focused on PvP. Warlock changed. Wizard changed. Several other classes changed. Teams suddenly had new compositions to think about. But one Wizard player has now highlighted the awkward side effect of balancing skills that exist in both competitive and PvE content: their one-minute Boss Dummy damage dropped from 760 million to 714 million after the update.

That is a loss of roughly 46 million damage, or just over 6%, in a test the player says was performed against the same target using the same PvE setup before and after the Disintegrate changes. One player's dummy test is not enough to declare that every Wizard in Diablo Immortal has lost exactly 6% of its raid damage. Builds, equipment, Resonance and skill combinations vary enormously. But the result adds substance to a complaint Wizard players have been making for months: changes aimed at controlling the class elsewhere can keep removing pieces from PvE builds that were not dominating anything to begin with.

Blizzard Changed Searing Judgement on August 26

The relevant change involves the Wizard Legendary Essence Searing Judgement. It modifies Disintegrate so the beam channels Fire and applies a stacking Burn. Under the revised version, that Burn can now stack to five before being consumed for additional damage. Blizzard also reduced the beam's distance and increased the maximum number of stacks, meaning the bonus damage triggers less frequently. The developer says the damage of that trigger was increased specifically to help compensate for the lower frequency.

On paper, that is not simply a raw damage nerf. Blizzard reduced one part of the mechanic and increased another. The intent appears to have been to alter how the beam performs rather than simply delete damage. The problem is that the player testing the finished patch says the compensation did not compensate enough for their PvE setup.

Before the change, their Wizard produced 760M damage in one minute against the Boss Dummy. After the patch, the same test produced 714M. That works out to approximately 46M less total damage during the minute, which is substantial enough to notice in a build constructed around sustained raid DPS.

This Is Not the First PvE Damage Loss the Same Player Has Documented

The frustration becomes easier to understand when you look at the player's previous reports. On August 12, the same Wizard player documented another significant PvE decline after Blizzard removed the Chaosrupture essence. Their one-minute dummy result reportedly fell from more than 600M to more than 540M, and they described a longer progression in which the same general Wizard raid setup had moved from above 700M to around 600M and then into the 540M range following successive essence and set changes.

That history is why the new 46M loss is being treated as more than an isolated numerical adjustment. From the player's perspective, the problem is cumulative. A PvE build gets assembled around one interaction, that interaction changes or disappears, another build takes its place, and then the replacement gets hit by a later balance pass. Eventually the frustration is not that one patch reduced damage. It is that rebuilding the same class begins to feel like seasonal maintenance.

We have seen a similar conflict from the PvP side of this exact update. Our look at the Warlock nerfs and the fear that Demon Hunter would simply inherit the PvP meta showed how difficult it is to change one dominant interaction without moving pressure somewhere else. Wizard illustrates the other half of the problem: a balance adjustment can make sense competitively while still creating collateral damage in PvE.

Blizzard Says These Changes Were Not Made Specifically for Bout of Realms

There is an important clarification here. Because the balance patch was announced immediately before Bout of Realms, it would be easy to describe the Wizard change as a tournament nerf that accidentally escaped into PvE. Blizzard has explicitly said that is not what happened. Community Manager Jadai clarified that the changes were not created specifically for Bout of Realms; they are normal permanent balance changes that also affect the tournament.

Blizzard announced them early because competitive teams needed additional time to reconsider compositions, equipment and strategy before the event. That means Searing Judgement was always intended to change across the broader game, including PvE. The question is therefore not whether a PvP-only adjustment mistakenly leaked into raids. The question is whether one version of an Essence can be balanced satisfactorily across very different activities.

The Reduced Range Is Part of the Complaint Too

Damage is only one side of the Wizard feedback. Blizzard also reduced Disintegrate's beam distance, and players had already raised concerns about that change before it went live. One forum thread pointed out that Wizard has existing Disintegrate Essences designed around ranged play and argued that shrinking the beam pushes an archetypal ranged class closer to enemies at exactly the moment many other classes have gained strong mobility, immunity or ranged-pressure options.

That complaint is more subjective than a dummy number, but it connects to a broader identity problem. If Wizard's ranged options are repeatedly shortened or weakened while its defensive tools remain limited, players can feel they are being encouraged to play closer to enemies without receiving the durability expected of a melee-oriented class. Whether Blizzard agrees with that diagnosis is another question, but it helps explain why a 46M dummy loss has generated more frustration than the percentage alone might suggest.

A 6% Loss Is Not the Same as “Wizard Is Dead”

It is worth applying some brakes here. A reduction from 760M to 714M does not make the build unusable. The Wizard still dealt more than 700 million damage during the test. We also do not have controlled measurements from a large sample of Wizard players using different Searing Judgement setups, so the result should not be treated as a universal class-wide coefficient.

Boss Dummy results can also be sensitive to rotation, proc timing and short-term variance. Even when a player performs the test carefully, one minute is a relatively small window in a game full of conditional bonuses. The useful conclusion is therefore narrower: this particular established PvE Wizard build produced measurably less damage after the August 26 Disintegrate adjustment.

That is still worth discussing because Blizzard's own developer note says the increased damage was supposed to help offset the less frequent Burn trigger. For this setup, the net result remained negative.

PvE and PvP Probably Need More Separation

This brings Diablo Immortal back to a problem shared by almost every live-service RPG with competitive modes. A skill can be too frustrating in PvP without being too strong in PvE. The obvious solution is separate tuning, and Diablo Immortal already uses mode-specific scaling in various parts of its combat system. Expanding that philosophy would let Blizzard reduce problematic range, crowd control or burst behavior against players while preserving the damage profile that keeps a PvE raid build functional.

There are complications. Maintaining multiple versions of every Essence can become a balancing nightmare, and players already have enough tooltips to read without adding a small legal contract explaining what their beam does in six different activities. But the alternative is exactly what Wizard players are complaining about now: a build that is not considered a PvE problem can lose damage because an interaction needed adjustment somewhere else.

The same patch demonstrates how many competing goals Blizzard is trying to satisfy at once. It arrived alongside the new Bout of Realms format with its brutal six-match opening stage, while also changing Warlock, Crusader, Druid, Monk, Tempest and Wizard. A single balance pass has to serve casual PvE, raids, Battlegrounds and Diablo Immortal's most competitive tournament. That is a lot of jobs for one set of numbers.

The Frustration Is Really About Rebuilding the Same Class Again

The strongest part of the Wizard complaint is not “46 million damage is unacceptable.” It is the sense that PvE players keep needing to rebuild around disappearing pieces. The same player says previous raid setups were weakened by changes to Terminus-related builds, Endwinter and Chaosrupture before the current Fire Disintegrate setup took another hit. Even if every individual change can be defended in isolation, repeated disruption eventually makes class investment feel temporary.

That matters more in Diablo Immortal than it would in a game where changing builds is free and instant. Players invest in Essences, Legendary Gems, Eternal Magic attributes, gear and sometimes real money around particular class setups. When an important interaction changes, the damage number is only the visible part of the cost. The player may also have spent weeks building equipment around the thing that no longer performs the same way.

That is particularly uncomfortable when another class appears capable of producing better raid results without receiving equivalent reductions. The forum claim that Demon Hunter and Blood Knight outperform Wizard in raids is player opinion rather than an official Blizzard ranking, and we should treat it as such. But perceptions of relative power matter. A 6% nerf feels very different when you believe you were already behind.

Blizzard May Have Achieved the Intended Balance Change — Just Not for This Build

There is also a perfectly plausible explanation that does not involve Blizzard forgetting PvE exists. Searing Judgement may simply have been outperforming Blizzard's intended overall power budget once its range, Burn timing and other interactions were considered together. Increasing the five-stack payoff while reducing how often it occurs may produce healthier results across a wider collection of content even if one optimized dummy setup loses several percent.

That is what broader balance passes do. They are not designed to preserve every existing build's exact benchmark. The problem is communication. If Wizard PvE is expected to lose damage because Blizzard believes the Essence was too strong everywhere, say so. If PvE was supposed to remain roughly neutral, the 760M-to-714M test becomes useful feedback that the compensation may need another look.

One Dummy Test Has Turned Into a Much Bigger Wizard Argument

The forum thread itself is small, but it plugs into a much larger Wizard conversation. Other recent Wizard feedback complains about reduced mobility, long cooldowns, lack of sustain and a gradual push toward shorter-range gameplay. The August 26 balance thread also contains Wizard players arguing that the class feels increasingly irrelevant compared with newer or more durable alternatives.

None of that proves the class is objectively weak in every mode. Communities are rarely calm laboratories of controlled testing immediately after a patch. But repeated feedback around the same themes is useful. Players are not only asking for more damage. They are asking Blizzard to decide what Wizard is supposed to be good at.

If it is a fragile ranged damage dealer, ranged tools should probably feel rewarding. If Blizzard wants Wizard fighting closer to enemies, survivability may need to reflect that. And if a PvP adjustment costs an established raid build another measurable chunk of damage, players understandably want to know what they are getting in return.

For Now, the Number Is 46 Million

The August 26 patch has only been live for a few days, so broader testing may reveal Wizard setups that compensate for the changes more effectively. Players may adjust rotations. Different Essences may emerge. Blizzard may decide the current numbers are exactly where it wants them. Or enough PvE data may show that Searing Judgement needs another pass.

For now, we have one unusually clean before-and-after example: 760M before, 714M after, same player's one-minute Boss Dummy test. That is not enough to sentence the entire Wizard class to death, but it is enough to demonstrate that the latest balance changes were not PvE-neutral for everybody.

And for Wizard players who already rebuilt after the last PvE loss, that is probably the part that hurts most.

The spell still works.

The build still works.

It just works 46 million damage less than it did on Tuesday.

Sources

Blizzard: August 26 Diablo Immortal Balance Changes

Diablo Immortal Forums: Wizard Player's 760M vs. 714M Boss Dummy Test

Diablo Immortal Forums: Earlier Wizard PvE Damage Loss After Chaosrupture Removal

Diablo Immortal Forums: Searing Judgement Range and Wizard Design Feedback

```

Read More

Diablo 2 Players Are Still Fighting Over Teleport After 25 Years

Diablo II has changed quite a lot since 2000. New runewords arrived. Synergies reshaped builds. Terror Zones changed endgame farming. Sunder Charms attacked immunities. Diablo II: Resurrected added entirely new content, and Reign of the Warlock somehow managed to introduce another class to a game old enough to rent a car without additional insurance. Through all of it, one argument has remained remarkably healthy: Teleport is ridiculously good. The Sorceress skill lets players ignore walls, monsters, corridors and large portions of Diablo II's level design, while Enigma eventually gives the same privilege to almost everyone else. Twenty-five years later, players are once again debating whether Teleport should finally be changed — and whether touching it now would improve Diablo II or simply make an old game more annoying.

Teleport Is Not Just Another Movement Skill

The basic problem is difficult to deny. Teleport provides something no ordinary Faster Run/Walk setup can realistically match. A Sorceress can jump directly across walls, rivers, doors and enemy packs, allowing experienced players to turn areas that take other characters several minutes to traverse into short sequences of rapid casts. That advantage matters everywhere, but it becomes particularly important in activities based around repetition: Mephisto runs, Countess farming, Andariel, Baal, Terror Zones and the early Ladder economy. Being able to reach the target faster means more runs per hour, which means more chances at items, which means more wealth. Teleport is therefore not simply convenience. In a loot game, movement speed eventually becomes economic power.

That is why Sorceress remains such an obvious Ladder starter for many players. The class does not have to wait for Jah and Ber before gaining elite mobility; one hard point in Teleport plus enough +Skills and Faster Cast Rate gets the machinery running. Other classes can eventually acquire Enigma, but by then the Sorceress has often spent the opening phase of the economy farming the very wealth required to make one. The relationship between Ladder speed and character choice is particularly relevant now because Diablo II: Resurrected has settled into very short reset cycles. As we recently explored in our article on whether three-month Ladder seasons are simply too short for ordinary Diablo II players, slowing early progression becomes considerably more controversial when the entire economy may reset again roughly three months later.

The Latest Idea Is to Make Teleport Require More Investment

Several active community discussions are proposing variations on the same principle: Teleport should remain powerful, but perhaps it should stop giving almost everything it has to offer for a single skill point. One proposal would make distance, cooldown or mana efficiency scale with investment, creating a real choice for Sorceress players. Want maximum damage synergies? Keep Teleport functional but less efficient. Want the near-instant mobility Diablo II currently provides? Invest more hard points into the skill and sacrifice part of your damage tree.

That is more interesting than simply adding a giant cooldown. Teleport's strange design has always been that additional skill levels mostly make it cheaper. The fundamental capability — instantly ignoring the map — arrives immediately. A Fireball Sorceress with one point in Teleport moves through the world in fundamentally the same way as one that invested twenty. Players suggesting a rework argue that mobility should have a progression curve just like damage does.

Other Players Want a Much Simpler Nerf

A separate Teleport discussion posted on August 28 proposes turning the skill into something closer to a short-range Blink. The suggested version would limit travel distance, require line of sight and dramatically increase the mana cost of consecutive casts. Other players in the thread are more conservative, suggesting anything from a one-second cooldown to a slightly harsher mana curve. The goal is broadly the same: keep Teleport useful for repositioning while making it less effective as a button that removes most of the journey between Waypoint and boss.

The resistance to that idea is immediate and predictable. A one-second cooldown sounds tiny until you remember how Diablo II actually feels at high Faster Cast Rate. A properly equipped Sorceress does not calmly Teleport once, admire the scenery and Teleport again. The movement is rhythmic and extremely fast. Insert a one-second delay into every cast and you are not gently adjusting Teleport; you are changing one of the game's most familiar forms of movement into something completely different.

And Many Players Simply Want Blizzard to Leave It Alone

This is the strongest argument on the other side: Diablo II is twenty-five years old. Teleport is not an accidental balance issue discovered last Thursday. Players have built farming routes, Ladder strategies, economies and muscle memory around it for decades. Enigma itself became one of the most iconic runewords in the entire franchise precisely because it solved mobility for classes that lacked Teleport. At some point, a mechanic stops being merely overpowered and becomes part of the identity of the game.

Several replies to the latest proposals essentially say exactly that: accept that Diablo II has Teleport. One player argues that raising mana costs would achieve little beyond making the skill feel worse, while another points out that introducing significant movement nerfs during short modern Ladder seasons would simply make the repeated early-game grind slower. That criticism deserves more weight now than it might have in an era of much longer Ladder cycles.

Enigma Makes the Argument Much Harder

Any serious Teleport rework immediately runs into Enigma. The Jah-Ith-Ber runeword grants +1 to Teleport, effectively turning one of the Sorceress's defining advantages into an endgame equipment property available to other classes. That has enormous consequences for build balance. Hammerdins can reposition perfectly. Summon Necromancers can place their entire army exactly where they want it. Barbarians can teleport directly between elite packs. Javazons can move through awkward maps without spending half the evening negotiating with doorways.

Some players therefore want Sorceress Teleport nerfed while leaving Enigma untouched, arguing that Enigma is an expensive endgame reward and should remain extraordinary. Others think that would produce the opposite of balance: instead of reducing Diablo II's dependence on Teleport, it would make the most expensive armor in the game even more mandatory. If natural Sorceress Teleport becomes significantly worse while Enigma continues to provide the familiar version, players have not escaped Teleport dominance. They have merely moved it behind Jah and Ber.

There Is Also a Class-Identity Argument

Another camp wants the exact opposite: preserve Sorceress Teleport but weaken the Enigma version. Their argument is that classes should retain meaningful advantages. Sorceress having unparalleled magical movement is fine because that is part of being a Sorceress; every Paladin, Necromancer and Barbarian eventually acquiring the same movement through one armor arguably homogenizes endgame play.

That philosophy appears elsewhere in current Diablo II discussions. Players have been debating how much one class should inherit from another through equipment, including Battle Orders from Call to Arms, auras from runewords and various proc-based skills. The newly added Warlock has reopened similar questions because its modern toolkit includes movement and summon-control options that older classes never received. We recently saw that tension when Necromancer players began asking for some of the Warlock's modern summon-control technology. Diablo II's classes were designed around asymmetry. The question is how much of that asymmetry should survive once endgame items start sharing everybody's best tricks.

Teleport Also Lets Players Skip Most of Diablo II

The philosophical criticism is broader than class balance. Teleport allows players to bypass enormous amounts of content. The Durance of Hate becomes a map-reading exercise rather than a dungeon. The Forgotten Tower becomes five staircases separated by brief flashes of blue light. Worldstone Keep can be crossed without fighting almost anything until the player reaches the Throne of Destruction. If modern ARPG designers introduced a new skill that let one class ignore walls and nearly every enemy while travelling at extreme speed, somebody in the balance meeting would probably cough loudly.

But skipping is also part of Diablo II's farming culture. Players are not necessarily entering Durance Level 2 because they desperately want to experience the architecture for the 14,000th time. They want Mephisto. Efficient farming is the endgame for a huge part of the community, and Teleport transforms procedural maps into something experienced players can read and exploit. Removing that efficiency could make players engage with more monsters, but “engage with more monsters” and “spend longer getting to the content I actually want” can be the same sentence viewed from different chairs.

Maybe the Better Answer Is Buffing Everyone Else

One of the more constructive suggestions in the current debate is to stop asking how to make Teleport worse and instead ask how to make other movement options better. Paladin already has Charge and Vigor. Barbarian can reach impressive Faster Run/Walk speeds. Assassin has Burst of Speed. Druid's Feral Rage offers movement for specific builds. Warlock has its own limited mobility tools. Amazon and Necromancer remain much more dependent on basic movement until Enigma arrives.

Adding carefully designed mobility to slower classes could reduce the enormous gap without rewriting the most famous movement skill in Diablo II. An Amazon dash, improved Necromancer repositioning or stronger non-Enigma movement options would not match unrestricted Teleport, but perhaps they do not need to. The goal could simply be making “I don't have Teleport yet” feel less like a temporary disability.

Season 15 Makes Radical Changes Less Necessary

There is also a practical reason Blizzard may have little appetite for major Teleport surgery. Diablo II: Resurrected is currently in Season 15, and Blizzard has shown that it is willing to adjust old systems, add items and even introduce entirely new content. But changes that fundamentally alter the rhythm of classic Diablo II carry far more risk than adjusting drop rates or buffing a weak skill. The current Ladder population is already something players debate regularly, as we covered in our look at the arguments over Season 15's active player base. A controversial nerf to the most widely used mobility skill in the game would be one hell of an experiment to run on that audience.

Blizzard has not announced any Teleport rework. The current conversation is entirely community-driven, and the range of proposals alone demonstrates why the developer might prefer to leave it that way. One player wants a short-range Blink. Another wants a one-second cooldown. Another wants scaling mana costs. Another wants Sorceress untouched and Enigma nerfed. Another wants Enigma untouched and Sorceress changed. And a large group would like everybody involved to stop touching the 25-year-old electrical wiring.

Teleport Is Probably Broken — And Diablo II May Be Better With It

This is what makes Teleport such a perfect Diablo II argument. In purely modern balance terms, the skill is absurd. One point gives access to movement that can dominate farming efficiency, Ladder starts and endgame positioning. Enigma then spreads that power to the rest of the roster and becomes one of the most important pieces of equipment in the game largely because it contains that single skill.

Yet Diablo II is not a newly released competitive game waiting for its first balance pass. Teleport has spent a quarter-century becoming part of how people understand Diablo II. Players know how to read maps around it. They price items around it. They choose starting classes around it. They build Hammerdins around eventually acquiring it. Removing or radically slowing it might create a more balanced game on paper while producing a version of Diablo II that many long-time players simply enjoy less.

There may be room for smaller changes. Making hard-point investment slightly more meaningful is interesting. Giving slower classes better mobility is probably even safer. But anyone proposing a major Teleport nerf should remember the first rule of renovating an old house: sometimes the crooked wall is the thing holding the roof up.

Teleport may be broken.

After 25 years, Diablo II may also be broken around it.

Sources

Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: Teleport Rework Ideas

Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: Nerf Teleport by Distance and Mana Cost

Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: Teleport and Other Legacy Mechanic Debate

Blizzard: Diablo II: Resurrected Ladder Season 15 and Patch 3.3

```

Read More

Diablo 4 Players Ask: Is Tower Ranking Skill — Or Just Better RNG?

Diablo IV finally has the kind of leaderboard many endgame players spent years asking for. The Tower lets you push a build as far as possible, compare your results with other players and chase weekly ranking rewards that become increasingly exclusive the higher you climb. There is just one uncomfortable question hanging over the competition: how much of your rank comes from playing better, and how much comes from getting luckier?

A high-ranking Barbarian player has reignited that debate after comparing hundreds of hours of Season 14 farming with the Transfiguration bonuses used by competitors above them. Their argument is not that Diablo should stop being random. This is Diablo. Randomness is practically an architectural feature. The problem, they say, is allowing one of the game's most extreme layers of RNG to have such a large influence over a public leaderboard with rank brackets, titles and unique rewards.

A Rank 41 Barbarian Says the Difference Is Bigger Than Skill Can Fix

The player behind the current discussion says they have accumulated roughly 8,000 hours in Diablo IV since launch, including around 570 hours in Season 14. Their Whirlwind Barbarian has cleared Tower 146 and was sitting around rank 41 when they wrote the post. That is not somebody discovering Transfiguration after three attempts and deciding the system is unfair because the Cube hurt their feelings.

Their problem is much more specific. After hundreds of hours deliberately looking for useful Physical Transfigurations, they say their character has accumulated around 60% multiplicative Physical damage from those bonuses. Other Whirlwind Barbarians near the top of the leaderboard reportedly sit around 100–160%, with one inspected character at roughly 152% despite having a similar amount of seasonal playtime.

That creates a gap the lower-ranked player cannot simply solve by executing the Tower better. You cannot position more intelligently and make a Physical Transfiguration drop. You cannot manage cooldowns more efficiently until the Horadric Cube rewards you. You cannot group monsters perfectly enough to generate another 50% multiplicative damage roll. Eventually you need the item to appear, the correct Transfiguration to roll and the value to be good enough.

That distinction is the entire argument: Tower execution is skill. The ceiling of your Transfiguration rolls is luck.

Transfiguration Can Be More Important Than the Item Underneath It

This is not the first time Season 14 players have questioned how much power Transfiguration carries. Earlier feedback argued that an extraordinary Transfiguration can matter more than finding a beautifully rolled three- or four-Greater-Affix item in the first place. We have already seen the uglier side of that system when players described premium 4GA items being effectively bricked by terrible Transfiguration outcomes.

Another current feedback thread makes the same point from the opposite direction: why spend enormous amounts of time hunting the perfect base item if a mediocre item with an exceptional Transfiguration can become substantially stronger? One player summarizes the current incentive as mass-producing ordinary items, throwing them into the Cube and hoping one emerges with the right combination of Item Quality and offensive multipliers.

That can be acceptable in the broader loot game. Diablo has always allowed luck to produce absurd gear. The issue becomes more complicated once that gear determines whether one player finishes rank 10 and another finishes rank 11.

The Tower Is No Longer Just a Personal Build Test

One counterargument is that Blizzard has historically described the Tower as a place to discover how far your character can push rather than a perfectly standardized esports environment. That was easier to accept when Tower and Leaderboards were still in Beta. Season 14 changed the equation.

Blizzard officially moved Tower and Leaderboards out of Beta and attached weekly rewards to performance. Players can earn rewards for reaching Tower 100 and for finishing inside the Top 1,000, Top 500, Top 100, Top 10 or rank #1. Those rewards include Halo cosmetics, Prestige Titles and gear caches, with better placement increasing the rewards. Blizzard also introduced season-to-season Emblems displaying the highest leaderboard rank achieved.

Once that happens, the leaderboard is not merely a private measuring stick anymore. A public ranking with exclusive cosmetic rewards naturally becomes competition, whether Blizzard calls it an esport or not.

We have already looked at the wider problem of enormous damage gaps between Diablo IV builds inside the Tower. Transfiguration adds another question on top of class balance: even when two players choose the same class and roughly the same build, are they competing with comparable tools?

The Proposal Is Not to Remove Transfiguration From Diablo

The current suggestion is actually fairly conservative. The player does not want Transfigurations deleted from Diablo IV. They do not want every item handed out with identical stats, and they are not asking Blizzard to remove the pleasure of finding something absurdly powerful.

Instead, they propose one of two solutions specifically for leaderboard Tower runs: disable Transfigurations inside Tower, or normalize their values while the player is inside. Everywhere else, your ridiculous Cube-created item would continue working exactly as it does now.

That would turn Tower into something closer to a test of build construction and execution while preserving the full loot chase in the rest of Sanctuary. Positioning, monster grouping, cooldown management, defensive timing, route choice and damage uptime would still matter enormously. The part Blizzard would remove is the possibility that Player A enters with 60% Physical Transfiguration damage while Player B walks in with 150% because the Cube happened to like them more.

More Damage Can Also Buy You More Defense

The power gap is not limited to the damage number itself. At extreme Tower levels, having far more damage from Transfiguration can indirectly create additional survivability. If your gear already provides enough offensive power to beat the timer, you can afford to replace damage elsewhere with Maximum Resource, defensive affixes, utility or other forms of consistency.

That means the lucky character does not merely hit harder. The extra damage may free enough item budget to become tougher as well. Two characters that look superficially similar can therefore have very different build flexibility before the run even starts.

This is one reason the argument becomes much more relevant near the top of the leaderboard than during ordinary progression. At lower tiers, almost any sufficiently powerful build can overwhelm the content. At Tower 140+, small differences become the difference between completing the floor and running out of time.

But Diablo Without Gear RNG Would Be a Strange Competition

Not everyone agrees that normalization would improve the Tower. One response in the current thread argues that the entire point of an ARPG is that your character's equipment represents the work and luck accumulated during the season. If Blizzard removes extreme gear differences from the leaderboard, the Tower starts looking less like Diablo and more like a standardized arcade challenge.

There is something to that argument. A Diablo leaderboard probably should reward character building. Farming better equipment is part of the skill set, even when luck influences the result. Knowing which activities to farm, understanding which affixes matter, efficiently acquiring materials and making intelligent decisions about which items deserve further investment all distinguish experienced players from beginners.

The difficult question is where character-building skill ends and uncontrolled lottery results begin. If a player farms intelligently for 500 hours and another player farms intelligently for 500 hours, but one ends up with twice the relevant multiplicative Transfiguration bonus, it is difficult to describe the difference entirely as better preparation.

Random Maps Create the Same Problem

Another response points out that Transfigurations are not even the Tower's only source of competitive randomness. Maps and monster layouts are also randomized. One player can receive a favorable layout with dense packs and efficient routes while another receives awkward monster placement and a worse map.

That raises an even broader fairness question. If Blizzard genuinely wants the leaderboard to compare player execution, perhaps ranked attempts should use standardized maps and enemy compositions during each weekly reset. Every competitor would face the same Tower seed, which would make route execution and efficiency directly comparable.

That would be a much larger philosophical change than normalizing Transfigurations, though. Diablo has traditionally embraced procedural content. Removing random maps and random equipment simultaneously could make the Tower fairer while also making it feel considerably less like Diablo.

The Better Answer May Be Targetable Transfigurations

There is a middle ground that does not require the Tower to ignore gear. Blizzard could simply give players more control over Transfiguration itself. Current Season 14 criticism consistently focuses on the number of RNG layers stacked on top of one another: find the right item, get the right affixes, hopefully get Greater Affixes, Temper it, Masterwork it, farm the Transfiguration materials, then pull another lever and hope the final modification is useful.

A detailed Season 14 feedback post from a player who says they have transfigured thousands of items argues that undesirable outcomes such as Indestructible appear far too often while the desirable offensive rolls remain painfully inconsistent. Their suggestion is not to make every result perfect, but to introduce mechanisms that respect the amount of investment already made in the item.

That issue also appeared repeatedly during the Season 15 PTR. As we noted in our Season 15 PTR feedback roundup, players praised several of the upcoming systems while still complaining that Transfiguration represents RNG stacked on top of existing RNG.

If players could target a category such as Physical, Critical, Resource or Defense while the exact value remained random, Tower characters would still differ. The difference would simply be less dependent on whether the correct affix category appeared at all.

There Is a Difference Between a Loot Race and a Skill Leaderboard

This may ultimately come down to what Blizzard wants the Tower to measure. If the answer is the strongest character you managed to build during the season, then extreme Transfiguration RNG belongs there. Your luck is part of your character's history, just like finding an exceptional Unique or Greater Affix.

If the answer is who can play and optimize their build best, the current system becomes harder to defend. A leaderboard cannot cleanly separate execution from luck when two otherwise similar characters may enter with enormous differences in multiplicative power that neither player can directly control.

Neither version is inherently wrong. The problem is trying to be both at the same time while attaching exclusive rewards to the final number.

Season 14 Has Made the Tower Competition Real

When Tower was a Beta, these arguments were easier to treat as feedback for later. Season 14 is later. The system now has rewards, persistent seasonal recognition and distinct SSF leaderboards. Blizzard clearly wants players to care about rankings.

And they do care. A player with roughly 570 hours in one season is not complaining because the Tower lacks engagement. They are complaining because it has enough engagement that the difference between rank 41 and the people above them matters.

That is actually a good problem for Blizzard to have. Players want the leaderboard to mean something.

Now Blizzard has to decide what it means.

Does rank #1 identify the player who executed the best Tower run?

The player who built the strongest character?

The player who farmed the most efficiently?

The player who received the best Transfiguration rolls?

Right now, the answer is probably:

A little bit of all four.

Whether that is Diablo's charm or the Tower's biggest competitive flaw depends entirely on what you think a leaderboard is supposed to measure.

Sources

Diablo IV Forums: Tower Should Disable or Normalize Transfigurations — RNG Is Not Skill in a Leaderboard

Diablo IV Forums: Season 14 Transfiguration Feedback

Diablo IV Forums: Current Transfiguration Is Not Good for Overall Game Health

Blizzard: Season 14 Tower and Leaderboard Rewards

```

Read More

Blizzard Says Diablo Immortal’s New Boon of Plenty Is Better — Players Aren’t Convinced

Blizzard has changed Diablo Immortal's Boon of Plenty with a very specific promise: more value, same price. The monthly service has been reworked as part of the August 26 update, replacing some of its old recurring rewards with Telluric Pearls while increasing the number of selectable 2-Star Legendary Gems available during the 30-day period. On paper, Blizzard sees that as an upgrade. Some of the people who actually buy Boon of Plenty have started doing the arithmetic, however, and the answer is not quite as unanimous.

The disagreement is not really about whether Telluric Pearls are useful. They are. Pearls remain one of Diablo Immortal's most flexible long-term resources because they eventually allow players to craft specific 5-Star Legendary Gems instead of relying entirely on Elder Rift luck. The argument is whether receiving more access to Pearls is worth giving up rewards that low and moderate spenders were already using every month. For a product literally sold on recurring value, that distinction matters quite a lot.

Blizzard Says the Goal Was More Value Without a Price Increase

In the official August update notes, Blizzard describes the change under “Monthly Card Optimization.” The stated goal is to increase the value of Boon of Plenty without changing the price. Blizzard says normal Gems and Crests are being replaced with Telluric Pearls, while the number of selectable SR Gems is being increased. The same update also introduced major PvP and tournament changes, including the new Bout of Realms format that can eliminate teams after only six opening matches.

There is a logical argument behind Blizzard's decision. Telluric Pearls are difficult to accumulate quickly, useful across many builds and eventually translate into something much more valuable than another ordinary Crest. If you already have enough Normal Gems and primarily care about long-term Legendary Gem development, turning part of the monthly reward track into Pearls could genuinely be an improvement.

The problem is that Boon of Plenty has never been purchased by one universal type of player. What constitutes “better value” depends heavily on what part of Diablo Immortal's progression system you are trying to improve.

Some Players Miss the Old Crests More Than Blizzard Expected

The strongest criticism comes from players who valued the old monthly supply of Crests. Community discussions immediately focused on the loss of roughly 30 Rare Crests from the traditional Boon structure, because Rare Crests are not simply small Elder Rift bonuses. They also contribute Telluric Fragments over time and are useful during events and other progression loops. For players who have built their low-spending routine around that steady stream, replacing them with a relatively small number of Pearls does not automatically feel like an upgrade.

One Reddit discussion summarizing the new rewards quickly turned into a disagreement over exactly what had disappeared. Some initially believed both the old Crest supply and all Normal Gems were gone, while other players examining the in-game reward packs pointed out that Normal Gems still appear to be distributed in grouped packages rather than completely removed. That correction matters. The current criticism is therefore strongest around the loss of Crests and reduced choice, rather than a simple claim that every old Gem reward vanished.

Which is a useful reminder whenever Diablo Immortal changes a paid bundle: the patch-note description and the actual 30-day reward screen need to be compared carefully before declaring something either a massive buff or a catastrophic nerf.

The New Boon May Be Better If You Specifically Want Pearls

There is a perfectly reasonable group of players who look at Telluric Pearls and immediately prefer the new system. Forty Pearls can eventually be used to craft a selected 5-Star Legendary Gem, meaning every Pearl contributes toward deterministic progress in a game famous for asking the player to negotiate with probability. For someone working slowly toward Blood-Soaked Jade or another important 5-Star, that is real value.

It also fits a broader design direction in Diablo Immortal. Blizzard has increasingly added methods that let players accumulate progress toward specific Legendary Gems instead of making every upgrade depend entirely on a lucky Crest run. Pearls are slow, but slow and predictable is often considerably more attractive than fast and imaginary.

The disagreement starts when Blizzard describes that preference as universally higher value. A player who wants Pearls may agree immediately. A player using Rare Crests for fragments, event preparation and regular Elder Rift activity may look at the same monthly card and see flexibility being removed.

The 30-Day Product Apparently Runs Out of Major Rewards Early

Another complaint is simpler. Boon of Plenty is sold as a 30-day service, but players examining the revised track say the major scheduled rewards appear to finish around day 25. One purchaser on Blizzard's forums specifically questioned why a 30-day Boon does not appear to have a meaningful reward waiting on day 30, especially now that the traditional daily structure has been changed.

That does not mean the entire service stops functioning on day 25. Boon of Plenty also includes quality-of-life benefits beyond the scheduled reward milestones. But presentation matters. When somebody buys a 30-day package and reaches the final visible reward several days early, it creates the strange impression that the monthly card has finished before the month has.

There is an easy psychological lesson here: if you are selling thirty days of abundance, perhaps put something nice on day thirty.

War Herald Added Another Layer of Confusion

The rollout also produced an unfortunate communication problem. Blizzard's original patch notes said the selectable SR Gem pool in Boon of Plenty would expand and specifically stated that War Herald would be added. Players then opened the relevant selection chests and discovered War Herald was not there.

Community Manager Jadai subsequently clarified that the original announcement was incorrect. War Herald will not enter the Boon of Plenty pool at this time, although Blizzard says it will rotate in at some unspecified later point. That does not completely change the value of the revised Boon, but it certainly does not help when players are already scrutinizing whether the new reward package is better than the one it replaced.

If you announce “more value” and then one of the advertised additions is immediately removed from the calculation, people tend to reopen the spreadsheet.

This Is Really About Choice

The most sensible community suggestion may be the simplest: why replace the old rewards at all? Several players have argued that Blizzard could have added Telluric Pearls as a selectable alternative rather than removing Crests from the equation. Give the player a choice between the resource they previously received and the new long-term resource Blizzard believes is more desirable.

That would preserve the value of Telluric Pearls without deciding on behalf of every subscriber which progression path matters most. Diablo Immortal already uses selectable reward chests elsewhere, so the idea would hardly be foreign to the game. If one player needs Pearls and another needs Crests, there is no obvious reason both must receive the same answer.

It would also avoid one of the recurring frustrations with live-service “improvements”: something is technically made stronger in one direction while becoming less useful in another. Blizzard can honestly say Pearls have high value. A player can honestly say the old Crest supply was more useful to them. Both things can be true.

Low Spenders Notice These Changes More Than Whales

Boon of Plenty occupies an important position in Diablo Immortal's economy because it is one of the purchases commonly recommended to people who spend a little without wanting to enter the game's much more expensive end. For those players, monthly value matters more precisely because they are not simply purchasing additional bundles whenever a resource runs low.

A player spending heavily can compensate for a missing resource elsewhere. A low spender structures progression around recurring systems like the Battle Pass and Boon of Plenty. Changing what those systems provide therefore has a disproportionately large effect on the people most likely to calculate every part of the package.

That is also why recent Diablo Immortal balance discussions have become so sensitive to the relationship between money and progression. We have already seen similar frustration around the August 26 balance changes and fears that the PvP meta will simply migrate from Warlock toward Demon Hunter. When players are investing months of resources into characters and Gems, even small systemic changes can alter what those investments feel worth.

The New Boon Is Not Obviously Worse Either

It would be equally misleading to declare the redesign a straightforward downgrade. Telluric Pearls are genuinely valuable, selectable 2-Star Gem rewards remain useful for players developing those Gems, and the Normal Gem situation appears more nuanced than the first angry reactions suggested. Some subscribers will absolutely prefer the revised reward structure.

The problem is Blizzard's wording. “We changed the reward mix” would be difficult to argue with. “We increased its value” invites players to calculate an objective improvement, and Diablo Immortal has a community with several years of experience converting every resource into approximate progression value.

Once those calculators come out, marketing language tends to have a difficult afternoon.

A Better Boon Should Probably Let Players Decide What Better Means

The easiest solution would be more choice. Keep Telluric Pearls as an option, preserve access to some of the old Crest rewards and allow subscribers to decide which monthly progression route fits their account. That would make Blizzard's “increased value” claim considerably easier to defend because the improvement would come from flexibility rather than substitution.

For now, the new Boon of Plenty sits in an awkward position. Blizzard says the same price now buys something better. Some players agree because Pearls are exactly what they wanted; others say they have lost a monthly resource stream they valued more, and at least one advertised Gem addition was already corrected after release.

The Boon may indeed contain more theoretical value. The problem with theoretical value is that players cannot spend it.

They can only spend the rewards actually useful to their account.

Sources

Blizzard: Cross-Server Bout of Realms Returns — Monthly Card Optimization

Diablo Immortal Forums: Player Discussion of the New Boon of Plenty

Reddit: Community Breakdown of the Revised Boon Rewards

Blizzard Community Manager Clarification on War Herald

```

Read More

Diablo 2’s PS5 Offline Hitching Bug Finally Appears to Be Fixed

Deckard Cain can identify your items again.

Without briefly freezing time.

For months, Diablo II: Resurrected players on PS4 and PS5 have been reporting annoying micro-freezes in offline play whenever the game performs certain item transactions or save-related actions.

The most reliable trigger was wonderfully ordinary:

Ask Deckard Cain to identify several items.

The game would pause for roughly 0.2–0.3 seconds.

Cube some gems?

Hitch.

Buy something while gambling?

Hitch.

Move through certain portals or trigger an autosave?

Potentially another hitch.

Now, following the August 18 Patch 3.3 rollout, the players who spent months documenting the problem say something remarkable has happened.

It appears to be fixed.

The Problem Started With Reign of the Warlock

The PlayStation issue was repeatedly linked by affected players to the 3.0 update that launched alongside Reign of the Warlock.

According to detailed reports, the problem affected:

• Native PS5 versions
• PS4 versions running through PS5 backward compatibility
• Reign of the Warlock characters
• Normal core-game characters
• Offline single-player specifically

That final point was important.

This did not behave like ordinary online latency.

Players could reproduce it while playing completely offline.

And several insisted that the same consoles had run Diablo II: Resurrected smoothly before update 3.0.

Deckard Cain Was the Easiest Way to Reproduce It

The most famous version became the Cain identification test.

Pick up several unidentified items.

Return to town.

Talk to Deckard Cain.

Choose Identify Items.

The items become identified.

And the game briefly locks.

Usually only for a fraction of a second.

That does not sound catastrophic.

But Diablo II is an action game where tiny interruptions become much more noticeable when they happen repeatedly.

Especially when the same hitch also appears around ordinary gameplay events.

And especially in Hardcore.

Hardcore Players Had a Good Reason to Be Nervous

A quarter-second freeze while standing safely next to Cain is irritating.

A quarter-second freeze while teleporting into a dangerous area is something else.

Players reported similar stalls while entering portals, moving between areas and during autosaves in active gameplay.

For a normal character, that can mean taking unnecessary damage.

For a Hardcore character?

There is no appeal process.

Your Level 94 Sorceress does not care that the save system was having a difficult afternoon.

She is still dead.

Gambling Made the Underlying Problem Even More Obvious

By August, one player had found an even better demonstration of the issue.

Gambling.

Normally, you can rapidly buy gambling items from vendors.

Purchase.

Purchase.

Purchase.

Discover that none of them are useful.

Continue anyway.

After the problem appeared, each purchase could produce a visible delay before the game accepted the next input.

The player described items entering the inventory in a choppy sequence, with repeated button presses sometimes failing to register until the previous transaction had finished.

What should have been rapid inventory destruction became:

Buy.

Pause.

Buy.

Pause.

Question your life choices.

The Same Hitch Appeared Across Multiple Systems

That gambling test helped demonstrate that Cain probably was not the actual problem.

He was simply the easiest person to blame.

The same interruption was reported when:

• Manually identifying items
• Using Cain identification
• Buying and selling at vendors
• Gambling
• Transmuting Horadric Cube recipes
• Moving items into the Cube
• Entering portals
• Changing zones
• Triggering autosaves

One player even captured a normally invisible message during the freeze:

“Waiting For Confirmation Of Transaction.”

That suggested the visible hitch might be connected to some broader transaction, validation or save process rather than one specific NPC interaction.

Patch 3.3 Arrived on August 18

Then Season 15's update began rolling out.

Blizzard's official Patch 3.3 notes do not specifically say:

Deckard Cain will no longer temporarily stop time when identifying your equipment.

The relevant official patch note is much broader:

“Various stability and performance improvements.”

Normally, that is the sort of patch-note sentence you read and immediately forget.

In this case, it may have hidden one of the most welcome console fixes in the entire update.

The Original Reporter Tested It Immediately

On August 18, the player who had documented the issue extensively installed the new patch and started testing.

Portal into Tristram.

No hitch.

Return to town.

Talk to Cain.

Items identify instantly.

Cube items.

No chop.

Visit Gheed.

Gamble.

Still smooth.

After months of assuming each new update would leave the problem untouched, their conclusion was basically disbelief:

It appears to be fixed.

Another PS5 Player Confirmed the Fix

The following morning, another player who had previously reproduced the problem on both PS5 and PS5 Pro tested the new version.

They confirmed the same thing.

The hitching was gone.

That is still community verification rather than an explicit Blizzard statement identifying this exact bug.

But it is strong evidence.

The same players who could reliably reproduce the problem before Patch 3.3 can apparently no longer reproduce it afterward.

That is usually what you want from a bug fix.

Season 15’s Patch Notes Barely Mention Performance

What makes the fix slightly strange is how little Blizzard said about it.

Patch 3.3 contains a long list of item changes, Terror Zone adjustments and bug fixes.

We've already looked at how the update reduced Ancient Statue drops and made the Colossal Ancient grind more painful for some single-player fans.

The console hitching improvement receives no dedicated bullet point.

Instead, it appears to be contained inside that wonderfully mysterious line:

Various stability and performance improvements.

Which, apparently, can mean anything from:

We adjusted something nobody will ever notice.

to:

We may have fixed the bug people have been posting about for half a year.

Not Every PlayStation Problem Is Fixed

There is an important caveat.

The transaction and autosave hitch appears to be resolved.

That does not mean Diablo II: Resurrected now has zero PlayStation issues.

A separate PS4 report posted after the patch says general performance is significantly smoother than before, with faster loading and better gameplay.

But that player still experiences crashes during very long sessions, particularly when changing Acts or loading towns.

So Patch 3.3 appears to have made meaningful console improvements without necessarily solving every stability problem.

That distinction matters.

“Cain no longer freezes the game” is supported by player testing.

“Every console problem is fixed” definitely is not.

The Fix Matters More Than 0.3 Seconds Sounds

It is easy to look at a 0.2–0.3 second hitch and wonder why anyone cared this much.

Because it happened constantly.

Diablo II is built around tiny repetitive interactions.

Pick up items.

Identify them.

Sell them.

Cube gems.

Gamble.

Change zones.

Repeat.

A tiny pause inserted into one of those actions may not matter once.

Inserted into hundreds of them?

The entire game starts feeling wrong.

It is the difference between a door opening instantly and a door sticking every single time you walk through it.

Eventually, you begin to hate the door.

Offline Players Were Particularly Frustrated

The reports also came from a group that often receives less attention than Ladder players.

Offline single-player.

These players are not dealing with server queues.

They are not participating in the Ladder economy.

Many deliberately play offline because they want a stable, permanent version of Diablo II they can return to whenever they want.

When an update introduced noticeable stuttering into that experience, they could not simply blame network conditions.

The game itself had changed.

That is why so many reports emphasized the same before-and-after comparison:

It was smooth before 3.0.

Then it wasn't.

Season 15 May Finally Have Given PlayStation Players Their Old Game Back

The ironic part is that Season 15's most appreciated PlayStation change may not be one of the things Blizzard actually advertised.

New Ladder.

Item changes.

Better Herald drops.

Updated Sunder Charm rules.

And somewhere inside:

Deckard Cain can identify your inventory without freezing reality.

Wonderful.

It should never have taken months.

But after a long stretch of forum reports, videos, reproduction steps and increasingly exhausted players testing every patch, the main offline hitching problem finally appears to be gone.

Cain has returned to his traditional role.

Identifying items.

Telling stories.

And making you stand there slightly longer than necessary.

But now, at least, the game keeps moving while he does it.

Sources

Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: PS4/PS5 Offline Hitching — Players Confirm Patch Fix

Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: Offline PS4/PS5 Hitching During Autosaving

Blizzard: Diablo II: Resurrected Season 15 and Patch 3.3 Notes

Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: Remaining PS4 Long-Session Crash Reports

```

Read More