Diablo Immortal’s Dead Druthers Buff May Be Ignoring Necromancer Summons

Necromancer builds in Diablo Immortal are built around a fairly simple professional relationship: you summon the dead, the dead do the work, and everyone agrees not to ask too many questions about employment law. A fresh September 8 Android bug report suggests one particular Bone Armor combination may be breaking that arrangement. The player says Dead Druthers correctly increases their own Attack Speed and Movement Speed while Bone Armor is active, but the same buff does not appear to reach Necromancer summons when Bone Armor has been transformed by Estranged Patron's Ward Armor essence. The player tested Spectral Mages, ordinary Skeletal Mages, Command Golem and Skeletons and says none showed the expected Attack Speed increase.

This is currently one player's controlled testing rather than a confirmed Blizzard bug, so it would be premature to declare Dead Druthers universally broken. The report is nevertheless interesting because Blizzard's own description of Dead Druthers is unusually explicit: while Bone Armor is active, the Movement Speed and Attack Speed of you and your summons are increased. Estranged Patron, meanwhile, changes Bone Armor into a warding circle that follows the Necromancer and grants nearby allies a protective shield. The September tester receives their own Dead Druthers bonus while that modified Bone Armor is running. Their summons apparently do not. (September 8 bug report)

Dead Druthers Is Specifically Designed for Summon Builds

Dead Druthers is a Necromancer Pants essence introduced as part of an older essence update and designed very clearly around minion-heavy setups. Blizzard originally described the effect as increasing both the player's and summons' Movement and Attack Speed by 10% while Bone Armor remains active. Essence progression can raise that value, which is why the September tester reports a current bonus of 19% rather than the original baseline. That distinction matters: 19% Attack Speed across an entire Necromancer army is not a small decorative bonus. Skeletal Mages, Skeletons and Golems all convert increased attack frequency into additional damage over the duration of an encounter, which means a missing speed bonus can affect the practical output of the entire build rather than one isolated animation. (Blizzard's Dead Druthers description)

It is also exactly the kind of essence Necromancer players tend to build around because summon builds work best when several mechanics amplify the same army. A single bonus affecting four different summon types is far more attractive than an effect helping only the Necromancer's own Primary Attack. If one essence turns Bone Armor into a better party-support skill while another makes Bone Armor accelerate every summon, combining the two sounds perfectly sensible. Diablo buildcraft has always been about finding two tooltips that look good separately and discovering they become mildly irresponsible when placed together.

Estranged Patron Changes Bone Armor Into Ward Armor

Estranged Patron complicates that interaction by fundamentally altering how Bone Armor behaves. Blizzard describes the Chest essence as making Bone Armor conjure a warding circle that follows the Necromancer. Allies inside that circle receive a shield that protects against total loss of control and knockback. The September player calls this Ward Armor and reports that party members standing nearby correctly receive the shield, while their summons do not show the same shield effect. More importantly for Dead Druthers, the player's own speed bonus remains active, confirming that Diablo Immortal still considers the modified skill sufficiently “Bone Armor” for Dead Druthers to affect the Necromancer.

The question is therefore what the game thinks the summons are doing. Dead Druthers does not say “summons protected by Bone Armor gain Attack Speed.” It says the player and summons gain the bonus while Bone Armor is active. If that wording is taken literally, the summons should not need their own shield or individual Bone Armor buff to qualify. Bone Armor is active on the player, Dead Druthers is active on the player, and the player's army should inherit the listed speed bonus. According to the fresh test, it does not.

The Player Tested Multiple Summon Types

The September report is more useful than a simple “my damage feels lower” complaint because the player tested several different Necromancer minions. Spectral Mages were checked. Normal Skeletal Mages were checked. Command Golem was checked. Skeletons were checked. The reported result was consistent: the Necromancer receives Dead Druthers' Attack Speed increase with Ward Armor running, while the summons do not appear to attack faster. The tester says they are less certain about Movement Speed because that is harder to measure visually, so the strongest claim is specifically about Attack Speed. (full player test)

That caveat is worth preserving. Diablo Immortal contains enough animation differences, summon AI and attack wind-ups that eyeballing small percentage changes can be misleading. A proper frame-by-frame test or combat-log comparison would be stronger evidence. But a 19% Attack Speed bonus is large enough that an experienced player should normally see a meaningful difference across repeated attacks, particularly when several summon types all appear unchanged. More independent testing would tell us whether the interaction fails universally or only under specific essence combinations.

The Ward Armor Shield May Be a Separate Clue

The same player notes that Ward Armor's visible shield does not appear on their summons either, while nearby human party members do receive it. That may be connected to the missing Dead Druthers bonus, but we should be careful here. Blizzard's Estranged Patron wording says “allies” rather than explicitly saying “you and your summons,” and games do not always classify pets and summons as normal allies for every support effect. Dead Druthers is different because Blizzard explicitly names summons in the essence description. The missing Ward Armor shield may therefore be intended while the missing Dead Druthers Attack Speed remains a genuine interaction problem — or both may stem from the same underlying Bone Armor state. We do not have enough evidence yet to choose confidently.

Diablo Immortal has accumulated plenty of examples where two individually functioning systems behave strangely when combined. We recently covered players burning thousands of Eternal Orbs through custom Wing rerolls, where the underlying feature works but the surrounding economy creates a very different experience than the simple cosmetic premise suggests. More recently, iPhone 17 owners have reported severe heat and battery drain after the engine update, another case where the interesting question is not whether the feature exists but what happens when it meets a particular hardware or system configuration.

Necromancer Summons Make Small Buff Bugs Much Bigger

A missing 19% Attack Speed bonus on one character is annoying. A missing 19% bonus across an entire summon army is potentially much more expensive in practical damage. Necromancer builds often stack summon duration, summon damage and attack-frequency improvements because each bonus multiplies the value of several active minions at once. A Golem attacking faster is good. Several Skeletons attacking faster is good. Two Mages attacking faster is also good. When all of those effects exist simultaneously, one shared Attack Speed essence can contribute considerably more than its tooltip initially suggests.

That is why summon-specific bugs have a habit of making builds feel mysteriously weak. The Necromancer itself can still cast normally. Bone Armor still activates. The Dead Druthers icon or buff may still appear on the player. Ward Armor may still protect party members. Nothing visibly collapses. The army simply performs below the number the build was constructed around. Diablo mathematics already contains enough opportunities for a build to disappoint its creator without one of the multipliers quietly deciding that skeletons are not invited.

For Now, Test Dead Druthers Before Building Around Ward Armor

Until more players reproduce the interaction, Necromancers using Dead Druthers together with Estranged Patron should treat this as something to test rather than a confirmed universal failure. The cleanest approach would be comparing summon attack frequency with ordinary Bone Armor against the same summons using Estranged Patron, while keeping other Attack Speed sources unchanged. Skeletal Mages are probably the easiest visual test because their repeated attacks can be timed over a fixed duration. If Dead Druthers clearly accelerates them under normal Bone Armor but the effect disappears when Ward Armor replaces it, that would strongly support the September report.

Players should also test without changing Dead Druthers itself. If swapping only Estranged Patron causes the summon Attack Speed bonus to disappear while the Necromancer's own bonus remains, the interaction becomes considerably easier to isolate. Additional Android, iOS and PC reports would help determine whether this is a general essence combination problem or something more platform-specific. The original report comes from a OnePlus 12 running Android 16 and Diablo Immortal version 5.0.4.

The Tooltip Is Pretty Clear About Who Should Get Faster

For now, the strongest reason to take the report seriously is simply Blizzard's own wording. Dead Druthers was not described as “you gain Attack Speed while Bone Armor is active.” It specifically included “you and your summons.” The September tester says half of that sentence continues working when Estranged Patron modifies Bone Armor and the other half apparently does not. Blizzard may ultimately clarify that the modified Ward Armor changes how summons qualify, or another player may discover an overlooked condition. But based on the published essence description, expecting the summons to become faster is hardly unreasonable.

This is currently a small report, and it should stay a small report until more evidence arrives. It does not prove Necromancer summons are broadly broken, nor that Dead Druthers fails in every setup. What it does show is one player testing four different summon types and finding the same missing Attack Speed effect whenever Dead Druthers is paired with Ward Armor.

Necromancers already went to the trouble of raising an army from the dead.

They should not also have to explain to it why everyone else got the speed buff.

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Diablo 4’s Mythic Crafting Tooltip Can Promise a Sword — Then Give You a Mace

Diablo IV players are accustomed to crafting systems containing a certain amount of disappointment. You bring rare materials, carefully select the recipe and press a button that costs enough resources to make the moment feel important. Sometimes the result completes the build. Sometimes Sanctuary hands you something technically valuable but spiritually offensive. That is simply Diablo. A fresh September 8 report, however, raises a slightly different problem: what happens when the crafting screen appears to promise one weapon type and the game gives you another? A Warlock player says the Jeweler specifically offered a “Mythic Unique Two-Handed Sword” craft, but the resulting Mythic was a Two-Handed Mace. The craft itself may actually be behaving exactly as Blizzard intended. The tooltip may be the part that has wandered away from reality.

The player was trying to quickly obtain The Grandfather for a new Warlock and used the Jeweler's Mythic crafting system rather than waiting for the correct drop. According to the report, the English-language recipe explicitly described the output as a Two-Handed Sword. They spent the required materials and received a Two-Handed Mace instead. Another forum user pointed out that Mythic crafting works through broader equipment slots rather than guaranteeing one exact item family, which would make the Mace a legal result. The original player's response was difficult to argue with: if the recipe is really rolling a random Two-Handed Weapon, perhaps it should say Two-Handed Weapon rather than Sword. (Blizzard forum report)

The Craft May Be Correct Even If the Tooltip Is Wrong

This distinction matters because it would be easy to turn the report into “Diablo IV Mythic crafting gives the wrong item,” which is probably not what happened. Blizzard's own explanation of Season 14's Mythic system says crafting returns a random class-usable Mythic from the same equipment slot, not necessarily the same Unique or exact subtype used to start the process. Blizzard even provides an explicit example for One-Handed Weapons, Offhands and Shields, which share a slot category: a Necromancer can use a One-Handed Weapon and receive a Focus or Shield. In other words, the system's internal idea of a slot is sometimes broader than the item label a player sees in their inventory.

That randomness has been one of Season 14's central Mythic debates. We covered it when Blizzard announced that Season 15 would already rewrite much of Season 14's Mythic crafting structure. Players were willing to grind rare materials; what frustrated them was putting a valuable item into a supposedly targeted crafting system and still receiving something fundamentally different. Blizzard's solution for Season 15 is to separate the philosophies more clearly. Jeweler crafting remains the cheaper random route. The Horadric Cube gets the expensive deterministic route. That makes sense. A slot machine can be perfectly good entertainment when the button says “slot machine.”

The Player Was Trying to Craft The Grandfather

The September 8 player says the goal was simple: their Warlock needed The Grandfather, so they went to the Jeweler and selected the recipe that appeared to offer a Mythic Unique Two-Handed Sword. They were not expecting The Grandfather with absolute certainty merely because they pressed a Grandfather-shaped button; the argument in the thread quickly became about what the category itself represented. If multiple Two-Handed Weapon families are valid outputs, then a Two-Handed Mace may be functioning correctly under Blizzard's slot rules. What becomes misleading is presenting that lottery as specifically a Sword recipe.

This is particularly important because Mythic crafting is expensive enough that players reasonably read the wording carefully. Season 14's Jeweler method uses Resplendent Sparks and specific Runes, resources that represent significant farming time and, in the case of Sparks, often the remains of Mythics players already sacrificed. We have previously looked at why players are desperate for more useful ways to spend surplus Resplendent Sparks, but “surplus” does not mean disposable. When a recipe consumes endgame currency, its possible outputs should be described with considerably more precision than a Treasure Goblin's employment contract.

Season 14 Made Every Unique Potentially Mythic

Part of the confusion comes from just how radically Blizzard changed Mythics this season. Season 14's Mythic Uniques 3.0 system transformed Mythic from a separate rarity into an item quality that can appear on every Unique. Mythic versions are always Ancestral, receive stronger Unique Powers and roll their other affixes at maximum values. They can drop naturally, come from caches or be created through the Horadric Cube and Jeweler. It is a much broader system than the old arrangement where “Mythic Unique” essentially meant a tiny collection of famous chase items such as Harlequin Crest, Ring of Starless Skies and The Grandfather. (Blizzard's Season 14 explanation)

The redesign has produced interesting buildcraft, but also enough terminology to make even experienced players occasionally stop and inspect the paperwork. There are ordinary Uniques, Mythic-quality Uniques, Iconic Mythics, Crafted tags, slot-specific random crafting, direct upgrades, Resplendent Sparks and several acquisition methods that follow slightly different rules. Some players are already arguing that Mythics no longer feel genuinely Mythic, while others welcome a system where powerful gear is something they can actively work toward rather than merely hope to see before the season ends.

Neither side benefits when the recipe description introduces another layer of ambiguity.

Season 15 Is Making the Difference Much Clearer

Blizzard's current Patch 3.2.0 PTR documentation makes the future structure refreshingly explicit. The Jeweler will continue to use Rune Crafting → Mythic Uniques, allowing players to choose a slot — Blizzard gives examples such as One-Handed Weapon or Ring — and receive a random class-specific Mythic from that slot. The Horadric Cube, meanwhile, gains Upgrade Direct Item to Mythic. That recipe is more expensive, but Blizzard describes it as a complete 1:1 transfer: put in the exact Unique you care about and receive the Mythic version of that exact item while preserving its affixes and modifications. (official Patch 3.2.0 PTR guide)

That is the direction we welcomed when Blizzard revealed that Season 15's Cube would finally preserve the Unique you actually chose. It turns the two crafting methods into understandable alternatives. The Jeweler is cheaper and random. The Cube is expensive and deterministic. Players can decide whether they want to gamble or pay extra for certainty. Diablo is allowed to contain both. In fact, the genre would become rather suspicious without at least one machine that consumes rare materials and quietly laughs.

But that clearer design also makes the September tooltip report easier to diagnose. If Jeweler output is selected from a broader weapon slot, the interface should name that broader slot. A player clicking “Two-Handed Sword” should not need prior knowledge of Blizzard's internal category structure to understand that “Sword” may include a Mace.

This Is More Than Cosmetic Wording When Sparks Are Involved

Normally, a tooltip mismatch would sit fairly low on Diablo IV's current emergency list. This week alone we have covered The Resounding Scream leaving players locked out of Echoing Hatred despite possessing multiple Traces and Nemesis portals still disappearing while players attempt to collect boss loot. Nobody loses access to an entire activity because the Jeweler says Sword and gives Mace.

They can, however, lose expensive crafting materials because they made a decision based on that wording. A player specifically chasing The Grandfather may reasonably be willing to gamble among a pool of Two-Handed Swords but unwilling to gamble across every compatible Two-Handed Weapon. Those are different probabilities. Even if Blizzard never promised the exact Mythic, the size of the possible output pool affects whether pressing the button is a sensible use of Sparks and Runes.

That becomes even more important because Diablo IV's gearing already has enough RNG layered on top of RNG. Transfiguration can create a second endgame gear plateau after the correct base item finally drops, while players have described rare 4GA items becoming disappointing after an irreversible Transfiguration result. Randomness is part of the pleasure. Hidden randomness is where the pleasure begins putting on a coat.

Diablo IV Has Already Had Mythic Crafting Confusion This Month

The Sword/Mace report is not even September's first example of players struggling to understand what Mythic crafting has produced. On September 1, another player reported spending Sparks, Runes and 50 million Gold on Jeweler and Blacksmith crafts because they believed they had received ordinary Uniques instead of Mythics. Other users pointed out that under Season 14's new system those items actually were Mythic-quality versions of ordinary Uniques. The game's modern Mythic presentation had simply made the distinction less obvious than the player expected. (September 1 crafting discussion)

That report and the new Sword/Mace complaint are not the same bug. One concerns players recognizing Mythic quality; the other concerns the apparent naming of the recipe output. Together, however, they highlight the same broader weakness: Mythics have become mechanically richer while the interface has not always become equally good at explaining them.

Season 15's direction should help. our broader Season 15 PTR assessment already identified deterministic Mythic crafting as one of the update's better ideas. The less the player has to wonder what the machine means, the more time they can spend wondering why the item they wanted still refuses to drop naturally after eighty-seven boss kills.

Grandfather Hunters Should Treat the Jeweler as Random Crafting

For now, players chasing one particular Mythic should treat the Jeweler as Blizzard describes it: random crafting within the selected slot, not direct target crafting. If the goal is simply “give me a useful Mythic Two-Handed Weapon,” the Jeweler remains perfectly reasonable. If the goal is “give me exactly The Grandfather,” Season 15's direct Cube upgrade is the much clearer system once those changes arrive.

And if the current Jeweler UI really does display “Mythic Unique Two-Handed Sword” while legally returning Two-Handed Maces, Blizzard should change the wording rather than the crafting logic. “Two-Handed Weapon” would describe the actual lottery. “Random compatible Mythic” would be even harder to misunderstand. Nobody is asking the Jeweler to become less random. We are merely asking him to label the roulette wheel properly.

Diablo players can cope with bad luck. We have nearly thirty years of evidence.

But if the game says Sword and means “Sword, Mace, or whatever the slot table feels like today,” that is not really RNG.

That is a vocabulary problem with three Resplendent Sparks attached.

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Diablo 4’s Nemesis Portal Problem Is Still Here in September

Diablo IV has spent several months trying to answer an unexpectedly complicated design question: how long should a player be allowed to look at loot before the game takes the next boss away? Apparently the answer is still “not as long as some players need.” A fresh September 7 bug report describes a player completing a Nemesis encounter, entering the first portal, killing both bosses inside and then watching the Greater Nemesis portal disappear while they were still collecting the loot those bosses had just dropped. If that sounds familiar, it should. We covered the same disappearing Nemesis portal problem on August 28, after months of complaints about timers, invisible expiration rules and players being forced to choose between sorting their rewards and continuing the encounter. Twelve days later, the portal is apparently still operating on the principle that hesitation is weakness.

The newest report is almost comically concise. Kill the first boss. Nemesis portal appears. Collect loot. Enter portal. Kill both bosses inside. More loot appears. Start picking it up. Greater Nemesis portal disappears. Another player responding to the report says this is connected to the timer Blizzard introduced after Nemesis Lairs were exploited, rather than a completely new bug. That explanation fits the history, but it does little to improve the player experience. Whether the portal is disappearing because of intended anti-exploit logic or unintended persistence behaviour, the practical result remains exactly what players complained about in May: Diablo gives you a mountain of loot, then starts quietly removing your opportunity to continue while you are doing the very Diablo-like activity of looking at it. (September 7 report)

This Problem Originally Arrived With a 30-Second Timer

The story began in May after Blizzard tightened Nemesis Lair behaviour around War Plans. Players suddenly started seeing a warning that the opportunity to enter the next Lair would expire in roughly 30 seconds. That was immediately controversial because Nemesis bosses can drop enough equipment to fill a substantial portion of an inventory, particularly when the player reaches a second-tier Greater Nemesis encounter after already collecting rewards from the previous boss. The original Blizzard forum thread is full of players describing portals vanishing while they salvaged in town, stood over piles of items or simply tried to pick everything up. One player watched the portal disappear after about fifteen seconds. Another said the Greater Nemesis portal vanished before they had collected even half of the double-boss reward pile. (original May reports)

The problem was especially absurd because the portal appears at precisely the moment players are supposed to stop moving. Diablo's fundamental rhythm has not changed much since 1996: kill monsters, inspect loot, equip anything useful, continue killing monsters. The Nemesis system briefly introduced a new instruction between stages two and three: stop inspecting the loot and run. Players adapted, because Diablo players will eventually optimize almost anything, including panic. Grab obvious Greater Affixes, ignore everything else, enter the portal immediately and clean up later. It works. It also makes a loot-driven activity feel like somebody has activated a fire alarm in the Blacksmith.

Blizzard Had a Real Exploit Problem to Solve

There was a legitimate reason for the restriction. Nemesis Lairs arrived through the War Plans system, and players discovered situations where the encounters could be repeatedly triggered or farmed. Blizzard's official Patch 3.0.4 notes later confirmed that Nemesis Boss Lairs could be infinitely farmed in certain scenarios, and the June 10 update fixed that behaviour alongside several other War Plan exploits and progression problems. The same patch also repaired repeatable Greed is Good portals and a Path of Coin issue involving teleporting out and back into an instance. Blizzard clearly had an entire collection of portals developing entrepreneurial ambitions. (official Patch 3.0 notes)

Closing an infinite farming exploit is obviously reasonable. The issue is whether legitimate players should still be inheriting the emergency measure months later. We recently saw almost the same philosophical problem with Treasure Breach runs that can prevent players from teleporting to town while their inventories overflow with Goblin loot. In both cases, Blizzard had a genuine exploit to close. In both cases, the protective mechanism appears capable of making normal players perform inventory gymnastics because somebody else once discovered that a portal could be persuaded to print rewards indefinitely.

The Original Timer Improved — but the Portal Problem Never Really Went Away

Players reported later in May that Blizzard had softened the original 30-second window to approximately two minutes. That was a substantial improvement. Two minutes provides enough time to grab obvious rewards and enter the next encounter without treating every Legendary item as unexploded ordnance. By Season 14, however, things became less clear. Some players no longer saw the explicit countdown at all, while others continued reporting portals disappearing after they spent too long in town or sorting rewards. That is why our August 28 article described the modern behaviour as a kind of “shadow timer”: the portal could still expire, but the urgency was not always communicated clearly enough for players to know exactly when.

The September 7 report suggests that confusion remains. The player does not describe seeing or ignoring an obvious countdown. They simply say the Greater Nemesis portal disappeared while they were looting the two bosses that preceded it. The response explaining the timer even admits uncertainty over whether the current limit is thirty seconds or a minute. That is part of the problem. If a valuable portal is deliberately temporary, Diablo IV should tell the player exactly how temporary it is. “There may be a timer somewhere; veterans remember something about it from May” is not an especially elegant user interface.

Greater Nemesis Makes the Design Conflict Worse

The Greater Nemesis stage exposes the contradiction more clearly than the first portal because the player has already committed to the chain. They entered the Nemesis Lair, completed the encounter and defeated two bosses. The reward pile belongs to that completed step. At the same moment, another portal appears offering the next stage. The player is therefore being asked to choose between evaluating rewards already earned and preserving access to rewards not yet earned.

That is particularly awkward now that Diablo IV's itemization gives players more reasons to inspect equipment. Transfiguration makes potentially valuable Greater Affix items worth considering before salvage, Mythic quality has broadened the range of desirable Uniques and players are carrying Seals, Charms and other progression items alongside ordinary equipment. Even aggressive loot filters do not make every decision instantaneous. Sometimes the correct Diablo decision really is to stand still for twelve seconds and compare two pairs of trousers.

Nemesis portals apparently regard that as a character flaw.

The Best Workaround Is Still Enter First and Think Later

Until Blizzard either removes the expiration behaviour or communicates it much more clearly, the safest strategy remains the same one players developed months ago: when a Nemesis or Greater Nemesis portal appears, enter it before doing serious inventory management. Pick up anything obviously valuable, step through the portal to establish the next area and then deal with the bags if the new instance allows a safe town trip. In a party, players have also reported using one member to hold the next instance while another finishes looting, although that is hardly a satisfying solution for solo players.

The Lost Items stash can rescue some abandoned Legendaries and Uniques, but it is not a substitute for collecting rewards normally. It has limited capacity, does not solve every material or item concern and certainly does not help players decide which Greater Affix item was actually worth preserving. We have spent much of the last week documenting strange forms of loot anxiety: players reporting entire stash tabs suddenly empty, Longtooth reportedly consuming Mythic Tribute runs without delivering the expected reward and high-tier gem salvage once again raising questions about missing progression. The Nemesis problem is less catastrophic than those. It simply makes the act of receiving loot unnecessarily stressful.

September’s Report Shows the August Story Wasn’t Finished

That is why the new report deserves a follow-up rather than another full reinvention of the story. When we wrote about disappearing Nemesis portals on August 28, the open question was whether Season 14's altered or invisible timing rules were still catching players after the original exploit fixes. On September 7, another player independently described exactly that outcome: kill bosses, loot drops, Greater Nemesis portal disappears before the looting is finished. The forum report was still active the following day.

There is still no evidence that every Nemesis portal disappears unusually quickly, and some of this behaviour may remain intentionally tied to Blizzard's anti-exploit timer rather than being a traditional bug. That almost makes the design issue easier to state. If it is intended, communicate the timer clearly and give players enough time to interact with the rewards. If it is not intended, fix the persistence. Either route is preferable to leaving players guessing how quickly they need to abandon the previous boss's loot.

Diablo IV is supposed to make players excited when another boss portal appears.

It should not make them afraid to read the item that just dropped.

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Diablo 4’s Resounding Scream Quest Is Still Locking Players Out of Echoing Hatred

Diablo IV's Echoing Hatred has always asked players to overcome one unusually difficult first boss: actually getting inside. Trace of Echoes is intentionally rare, and some players have spent extraordinary amounts of time waiting for one to drop. But a fresh September 9 report shows an even less satisfying version of the problem. This player has already found three Trace of Echoes. The Resounding Scream quest acknowledges the objective with a nice reassuring check mark. The Seer is standing exactly where she should be. And absolutely nothing happens.

The player says the priority quest remains stuck on “Bring the Trace of Echoes to a Seer”, except the objective is greyed out and marked complete. They cannot interact with the Seer, the nearby pedestal remains unchanged and obtaining more Traces through Kurast Undercity has not moved the quest forward. The result is not merely an untidy quest journal. The player says they remain unable to complete the associated seasonal objectives because Echoing Hatred itself never properly unlocks. This would be irritating enough as a fresh Season 14 bug. Unfortunately, players have been describing variations of precisely the same Resounding Scream soft-lock since the beginning of May.

The Trace Dropped. The Quest Updated. Then Diablo 4 Stopped Listening

Blizzard's intended sequence is straightforward by Diablo standards, which admittedly means there are fewer than nine currencies involved. Echoing Hatred is one of Lord of Hatred's major endgame activities. Blizzard describes it as a hyper-rare escalating survival challenge where players battle increasingly difficult waves of Mephisto's forces until the build, player or keyboard finally admits defeat. Access begins when an incredibly rare Trace of Echoes drops. The player takes that Trace to the Sightless Eye in Temis, offers it and gains access to Echoing Hatred.

We have already covered the first half of that problem extensively. In July, players reported going more than 90 hours without seeing a Trace of Echoes, and earlier this week we revisited the wider question of whether Diablo IV's activity keys are becoming rarer than the loot they unlock. The September 9 player has successfully cleared that hurdle three times. The problem is that the front door still refuses to open.

According to the new report, The Resounding Scream displays the Trace delivery objective as completed, yet the quest cannot progress. There is no useful interaction with the Seer and no change at the pedestal. The player has collected three Traces from Undercity runs without changing that state. It is difficult to blame bad RNG when the inventory contains multiple copies of the object RNG was supposed to provide.

Players Were Reporting the Same Checkmark in May

The oldest large bug reports date back to the first days of May. On May 1, one player said a Trace of Echoes triggered The Resounding Scream correctly, but arriving at the Seer produced no useful interaction. Other players immediately began reporting the same state: “Bring the Trace of Echoes to the Seer” showed a check mark, but nothing followed it. Restarting Diablo IV, changing difficulty, changing zones, tracking and untracking the quest and returning later did not consistently solve the problem.

A separate May 11 thread documents an even stranger failure. The player successfully handed in the Trace, watched the Seer perform the ritual and saw the Sightless Eye appear. The Eye was not interactable. After restarting the game, even that visual clue disappeared. The quest remained in the Journal but its Objective section became completely blank, the Seer could no longer be used and tracking the quest produced no destination. Other players confirmed the exact same progression state through May and June.

At that point The Resounding Scream stops behaving like a quest and begins behaving like an old Windows shortcut whose original file was deleted three months ago. The icon is still there. Clicking it merely reminds you that something used to happen.

Some Players Have Been Locked Out of the Activity Entirely

The consequences are more substantial than losing one quest reward. The Resounding Scream is the introduction to Echoing Hatred. If the Sightless Eye never becomes usable, the affected character can remain locked out of one of Lord of Hatred's headline endgame systems. Echoing Hatred was advertised alongside War Plans as a major expansion feature, and our original breakdown of Blizzard's new endgame systems focused on precisely why the mode sounded interesting: endless scaling waves, randomized enemy combinations and better rewards the longer the build survives.

For affected players, none of that matters very much. They can read about Echoing Hatred. They can find the extraordinarily rare entry item. They can even find several of them. They simply cannot complete the introduction that makes the system usable. One May player described being excluded from Echoing Hatred for weeks while continuing to find additional Traces. Another reached June with the same quest still stuck. The problem then crossed into Season 14: on July 3, a Solo Self-Found player reported that the Eye appeared during the ritual but became non-interactable, then disappeared after a restart while the blank quest remained in the Journal. A second player confirmed the same problem a week later and specifically noted that it prevented seasonal reward progression.

There Is a Player-Discovered Workaround — but It Involves Starting Another Character

The closest thing to a consistent workaround appeared in June, and it is not exactly elegant. One affected player created another character that had not yet attempted The Resounding Scream, obtained a Trace of Echoes on that character and completed the unlock successfully. Another player then tried the same approach: they created a new character, had it power-levelled to 70, transferred their equipment over, farmed until another Trace dropped and completed the quest there. Afterward, their original bugged character reportedly showed the Sightless Eye correctly and the quest appeared completed.

That is encouraging if your definition of “fix” includes create another hero and redo a meaningful chunk of progression. The player said the process cost them glyph progression and War Plan progress on the replacement character, so this is less a workaround and more a small relocation programme.

One player suspected changing difficulty after receiving the Trace may have contributed to their original bug, while others mentioned entering Temis or Echoing Hatred-related areas through somebody else's party before completing their own unlock. Those theories remain unconfirmed. The important point is that multiple affected players have experienced the bug while playing solo as well, so party interaction clearly cannot explain every case.

Blizzard Has Already Fixed a Different Sightless Eye Interaction Bug

There is one especially curious detail buried in Blizzard's June 30 Patch 3.1.0 notes. Blizzard fixed an issue where ineligible players in a party could interact with the Sightless Eye Pedestal. That was obviously incorrect and needed fixing. The current Resounding Scream reports describe almost the philosophical opposite: eligible players who possess the required item cannot interact with the system they are supposed to unlock.

To be clear, Blizzard never claimed that June fix addressed The Resounding Scream soft-lock. It concerned party members accessing the pedestal when they should not have been able to. We could not find a current public patch note documenting a comprehensive fix for the stuck Seer, blank objective or non-interactable Sightless Eye reports. The distinction matters because otherwise it would be tempting to describe this as a failed fix. It is more accurate — and perhaps stranger — to say Blizzard has already repaired one edge case around who can use the pedestal while a separate multi-month problem continues preventing some legitimate players from using it at all.

Echoing Hatred Has Accumulated an Impressive Collection of Access Problems

This is also not the first time the activity has created friction before the actual combat begins. Players have spent months arguing about Trace of Echoes rarity, prompting Blizzard to increase the drop rate of Echoing Hatred keys from Elites and Champions. That helped players who simply could not find one. Then there is the PlayStation side: PS5 players still report that the Echoing Elites trophy may count bosses while ignoring ordinary elites, turning a 1,000-enemy trophy into something that can require dramatically more runs than expected.

Those problems combine in a particularly unfriendly order. First you need the rare Trace. Then the introduction needs to function. Then you need enough additional access to run Echoing Hatred repeatedly. And if you are chasing the PS5 trophy, the tracking also needs to count the enemies the description says it counts. Echoing Hatred itself is supposed to be the hard part. Increasingly, it feels as though reaching the activity with every surrounding system behaving correctly is the qualifying round.

The Seasonal Objective Makes the Soft-Lock Worse

The September 9 player specifically says the broken quest is preventing them from completing seasonal objectives. That turns the issue from optional endgame inconvenience into progression friction. Blizzard has already made the rarity of Trace of Echoes slightly awkward by connecting Echoing Hatred to seasonal objectives; our recent look at rare activity keys argued that there is a fundamental difference between making a reward rare and making permission to play the content rare.

A quest bug creates an even harsher version. RNG can eventually produce a Trace. The September player has proved that three times. A corrupted quest state does not necessarily improve because you continue farming. It simply consumes additional rare keys while the Seer maintains the serene expression of somebody who has absolutely no intention of helping.

That is why this deserves more attention than an ordinary side quest marker failing to disappear. The affected player cannot simply ignore The Resounding Scream and access the activity another way. The quest is the doorway.

Season 15 Is Almost Here, and This Began in Season 13

The longevity is the uncomfortable part. Reports began during Season 13 in early May. They continued through the end of that season. Season 14 launched at the end of June, and another SSF player documented the same blank-objective state in July. Now, on September 9, with Season 15 approaching and players already debating whether the next season solves enough of Diablo IV's older problems, The Resounding Scream has produced another textbook report.

There is no evidence that every account is vulnerable. Plenty of players have unlocked Echoing Hatred normally, and the activity itself is obviously being completed every day. We also do not know whether the May, July and September cases all share one technical cause. A quest can reach the same broken state through several different bad triggers. But the visible outcome is remarkably consistent: Trace acquired, Seer approached, objective marked or ritual initiated, then progression stops.

A Rare Key Should Not Unlock a Broken Door

Echoing Hatred's scarcity is deliberate. Blizzard wanted finding a Trace of Echoes to feel like discovering access to something unusual and dangerous. That design can work. A rare key dropping unexpectedly in an ARPG creates exactly the sort of “one more run” excitement Diablo has lived on for decades.

What does not work nearly as well is finally obtaining that key and discovering the lock has entered a contemplative phase.

The September 9 player has found three Traces. The quest shows the delivery objective as complete. The Seer cannot be interacted with. The pedestal remains unchanged. Seasonal progression is blocked. Players were reporting the same fundamental problem in May, found a new-character workaround in June and reproduced it again in Season 14.

Echoing Hatred asks how long your build can survive against an endless army of demons.

Some Diablo IV players are still stuck on the earlier challenge: how long can they survive standing next to the Seer?

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Diablo 4’s BlizzCon Twitch Drops Will Take Six Hours to Unlock

BlizzCon returns this weekend, and Blizzard has found a traditional way to make sure Diablo IV players remain close to a screen while Sanctuary's future is revealed: three new Twitch Drops requiring six hours of total viewing to collect them all. Blizzard's newly published Diablo guide for BlizzCon 2026 confirms that viewers can earn a Dagger after two hours, an Axe after four and a Two-Handed Mace after six. The campaign runs from September 12 through September 15, giving players several days rather than forcing everyone to sit through six uninterrupted hours while attempting to explain to their families that this is technically weapon acquisition.

The timing is unusually good for Blizzard because this is not shaping up to be a routine Diablo convention. The company says the BlizzCon Opening Ceremony will reveal “extensive plans” for the future of Sanctuary, Saturday includes a full Diablo Developer Update, and Sunday brings the dedicated Diablo IV: What's Next presentation. As we already discussed in our look at Diablo IV's unusually important BlizzCon schedule, Blizzard deliberately kept some Season 15 content out of the PTR because it wanted to reveal it at the convention. So if you were going to spend six hours watching Diablo streams anyway, Blizzard has now thoughtfully attached three sharp objects to the experience.

Here Are the Three Diablo 4 BlizzCon Twitch Drops

According to Blizzard's official BlizzCon 2026 Diablo preview, the Twitch Drop campaign begins on September 12 at 10:00 a.m. PDT / 7:00 p.m. CEST and ends on September 15 at 9:59 a.m. PDT / 6:59 p.m. CEST. View any eligible stream in the Diablo IV category during that window and your cumulative watch time progresses toward three cosmetic weapon rewards:

• 2 total hours: Serrated Skean Dagger
• 4 total hours: Corroded Cleaver Axe
• 6 total hours: Tintinnabulation Two-Handed Mace

You therefore need six hours total to collect the complete set. The important word is total. Blizzard does not require six hours for each reward, meaning this is one cumulative six-hour progression track rather than eighteen hours of concentrated Diablo broadcasting. You can also switch between eligible Diablo IV channels without losing progress, so nobody is required to swear lifelong allegiance to one streamer just because the Dagger meter has reached 73%.

Watching several streams simultaneously does not accelerate the process, however. Blizzard specifically says Drop progress cannot be earned faster by running multiple eligible channels at once. Background streams or inactive browser tabs may also fail to contribute toward the viewing requirement, so the old strategy of opening twelve Twitch tabs, muting civilization and returning six hours later is not officially endorsed by the Horadrim.

You Do Not Need to Own Diablo 4 to Earn the Drops

One useful detail is that you do not need to own Diablo IV or Lord of Hatred to earn progress toward the Drops. A Battle.net account linked to Twitch is enough to participate. That makes the campaign available to people who are simply watching BlizzCon to see whether this is finally the moment that convinces them to return — or perhaps buy the game for the first time.

That audience could matter more than usual. We recently looked at Diablo IV's unusually quiet Steam population heading into Season 15, with the obvious caveat that Steam represents only one part of the total player base. BlizzCon is Blizzard's best opportunity this year to create a new spike of interest, and the company has deliberately preserved several announcements for the weekend rather than revealing everything during the PTR. Free cosmetics will not revive a seasonal population by themselves, but they are a fairly efficient way to make sure potential returning players are paying attention when the larger announcements arrive.

Do Not Watch on Your Smart TV If You Want the Drops

There is one particularly important practical warning. Blizzard says Twitch Drops can be earned through a PC or Mac web browser and the Twitch apps on Android or iOS. Twitch applications on game consoles, Smart TVs and other television apps do not support the Drops. That means sitting down for the entire BlizzCon Opening Ceremony on the living-room television may produce an excellent large-screen view of whatever Blizzard announces and precisely zero progress toward your Serrated Skean.

Players should also make sure their Twitch and Battle.net accounts are linked before relying on the campaign. Once a reward has been earned, it must be manually claimed either from the stream or through Twitch's Drops Inventory. Blizzard says earned rewards can expire seven days after being claimed if a Battle.net account has not been connected, which is a surprisingly bureaucratic way for a demonic dagger to disappear.

Six Hours Should Be Easy During This BlizzCon

Ordinarily, six hours of required Twitch viewing could feel slightly aggressive for three cosmetic weapons. This weekend, however, Diablo alone has enough programming to make the requirement fairly easy to hit naturally. Saturday's Opening Ceremony begins at 10:15 a.m. PDT, followed later by the Diablo Developer Update and The Art of Darkness: Behind Diablo IV's Cinematics. Sunday then brings Diablo IV: What's Next at 11:00 a.m. PDT, along with additional Diablo programming and creator streams throughout the show.

There is also rather more mystery surrounding those panels than usual. Blizzard has already told us Season 15's PTR was intentionally incomplete, something that helped fuel our recent look at the possibility that hidden Season 15 content could point back toward Westmarch and Malthael. Separately, Blizzard and CD Projekt Red have described Geralt's Diablo IV appearance as the beginning of a wider Witcher partnership and promised more information at BlizzCon. None of that guarantees a particular reveal, but it does mean people are likely to be watching the broadcasts for reasons slightly more substantial than collecting an axe with an unpleasant corrosion problem.

The nostalgia side is unusually strong too. the original Diablo will be playable at BlizzCon alongside Diablo II and Diablo III, adding another curious piece to this year's continuing Diablo 1 remaster speculation. And somewhere behind the convention curtain there is still the unresolved question of whether Blizzard deliberately saved a Diablo IV Switch 2 announcement for BlizzCon after skipping Gamescom. Six hours may therefore vanish surprisingly quickly.

There Is Also a Separate Diablo Twitch Badge

Blizzard is running another Twitch promotion alongside the weapon Drops, although this one is not free. Between September 12 and September 26, viewers can earn a special Diablo 30th Anniversary Twitch chat badge by purchasing one subscription to a creator streaming in an eligible Diablo category. Diablo II: Resurrected, Diablo III, Diablo Immortal and Diablo IV all count. The badge is separate from the three Diablo IV weapon Drops, so buying a subscription does not replace the six-hour viewing requirement, and watching six hours does not award the badge.

That distinction is worth remembering because Blizzard has attached quite a few digital rewards to BlizzCon this year. Attendees who correctly link their BlizzCon Pass to Battle.net can receive applicable viewership rewards through the event system, while everyone watching remotely needs to follow the normal Twitch Drop requirements.

BlizzCon Weekend Starts September 12

For European Diablo players, the useful number is therefore 7:00 p.m. CEST on Saturday, September 12. That is when Twitch Drop progress begins. Two hours gets the Serrated Skean, four gets the Corroded Cleaver, and six finishes the set with Tintinnabulation. You have until early evening on September 15 to complete the requirement, and you can spread the viewing across different eligible Diablo IV channels and multiple days.

More importantly, those six hours coincide with what may be Diablo IV's most consequential BlizzCon since launch. Season 15 still has deliberately hidden content, Rebirth is finally returning to simplify the seasonal reset, Blizzard is promising broader plans for Sanctuary, and Sunday's What's Next panel has been positioned as the place where at least some of the missing pieces finally become visible.

So the requirement is six hours.

Considering how much Blizzard appears to be saving for this weekend, the larger danger may be accidentally watching twelve.

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Diablo 4’s Xbox Friends List Has Been Broken Since Season 14

Diablo IV contains an impressive selection of creatures designed to make players feel alone. Demons crawl from the ground. Entire villages have been murdered before you arrive. Mephisto spends an extraordinary amount of time explaining why trusting anyone is probably a mistake. Xbox players have apparently discovered a more efficient system: simply make the Friends and Clan lists forget who is online. Players say Diablo IV's Xbox social interface has been behaving incorrectly since the beginning of Season 14, with friends appearing offline, Clan rosters showing empty or unnamed entries and chat messages disappearing. A Blizzard forum thread that began in July received another detailed confirmation on September 7, meaning some Xbox players have now been reporting the same problem for more than two months.

This is not merely somebody discovering that one friend had sensibly gone outside. Multiple Xbox Series X players describe the same recognizable pattern. When Diablo IV starts, friends and Clan members who were already online frequently appear offline or do not appear at all. Players who log in after the affected Xbox user can begin appearing normally, and some lists gradually populate after the game has been running for a considerable period. One player says the same Diablo IV account and Clan work normally when played on Steam Deck, which makes an Xbox-specific Diablo IV or Battle.net presence synchronization problem a reasonable suspicion. Blizzard has not publicly confirmed that diagnosis, so for now it remains player evidence rather than an official technical explanation. (Blizzard forum thread)

The September 7 Report Says the Bug Has Lasted All Season

The newest update came on September 7 from an Xbox player who says the problem has existed since the beginning of Season 14. When they log into Diablo IV, Clan members who were already playing show as offline. If somebody logs in afterward, that person appears correctly. Clan chat can also fail to display messages. Crucially, the player says they use the same Battle.net account and the same Clan on Steam Deck, where existing online members display normally. That comparison removes quite a few ordinary explanations such as an empty Clan, inactive friends or incorrect Battle.net relationships. The social information exists. Diablo IV can display it. This particular player says the Xbox version simply does not display it properly. (September 7 update)

The player also says normal Xbox troubleshooting has not solved the problem and asks whether it will finally be fixed before Season 15. That is a reasonable question at this point. Season 14 is approaching its end, Season 15 is already carrying a sizeable list of player hopes and unresolved complaints, and social functionality is not exactly an experimental endgame mechanic. Diablo IV launched with parties, Clans and cross-platform play more than three years ago. Knowing whether your friend is online should ideally be somewhat less complicated than calculating whether a Transfiguration roll improves a four-Greater-Affix amulet.

The First Reports Appeared Around the Start of Season 14

The main Xbox thread began on July 11, but the original poster said the problem had already been happening for roughly two weeks. Two Xbox Series X consoles using two different accounts were reportedly affected despite extensive troubleshooting: restarting the router, checking NAT, clearing the Xbox cache, hard-resetting the consoles and verifying account status did not help. Other Xbox users quickly joined the thread. One said the issue began with Season 14 and described their Clan list as empty when logging in, only gradually filling as people came online afterward. Another said communicating with friends had become difficult enough that they were texting or calling people outside the game to discover whether they were actually playing. (original Xbox report)

A separate July 2 thread contains an even larger collection of similar reports. Players describe completely blank Friends and Clan lists, faceless entries with missing names, online players showing offline and extremely long delays before the interface catches up. One user said that after leaving Diablo IV running for around 45 minutes, only six or seven friends had finally appeared. Another could receive party invitations from somebody who was not visible in their Friends list at all; after playing together for around twenty minutes, that person eventually appeared. Several Xbox players said Battle.net's mobile app or other platforms showed the social information correctly while Diablo IV on Xbox did not. (second Xbox social thread)

There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about needing a telephone to discover whether somebody is online in a game connected permanently to the internet.

Clan Rosters Can Show 150 Members — and Apparently Nobody in Them

The Clan side of the bug may be even stranger. A July 29 Xbox Series X report describes a full Clan showing 150/150 members while the actual roster contains empty slots and everybody appears offline. According to that player, the situation had persisted for more than a month despite multiple Diablo IV patches. Another user replied that many players were experiencing the same behaviour, and the original reporter included screenshots intended to demonstrate the empty roster. (Clan roster report)

That distinction is important because this does not look like ordinary connection loss. The game can apparently know that the Clan contains 150 people while simultaneously failing to populate those people's identities and presence correctly. Some affected users also report missing Clan chat messages, which suggests the problem may involve more than one visual list. Again, we should be careful not to diagnose Blizzard's backend from forum behaviour alone. But the player's repeated Steam Deck comparison is useful: same account, same Clan, working social data on Steam Deck, broken or delayed data on Xbox.

Blizzard Has Already Patched One Friends List Issue This Season

Blizzard's own patch notes make the timeline slightly more interesting. Patch 3.1.1 on July 14 included a specific fix for the Friends list: the Solo Self-Found icon could fail to appear on a player's profile in the Friends list, and Blizzard corrected it. That proves the social interface was receiving attention during Season 14. The same patch fixed several other multiplayer issues, including a bug where only one party member could receive Tower rewards. But the current public patch notes contain no matching fix for the broader Xbox Friends/Clan presence problem described in these threads. (official Diablo IV patch notes)

That makes for an unfortunate contrast. The game can now correctly show whether somebody is Solo Self-Found. Some Xbox players would first like it to correctly show whether that somebody exists. We covered the Tower fix at the time because Solo Self-Found and multiplayer systems depend on Diablo IV being very clear about who is participating and under which rules. The same principle applies here. Presence information seems mundane compared with loot tables or class balance, but it is the front door to actually playing with other people.

This Hurts Diablo More Than It Would Hurt a Purely Solo Game

Diablo IV can certainly be played alone, and plenty of people prefer it that way. But Blizzard has increasingly built systems that reward or encourage group activity. Boss farming is faster with coordinated groups, parties can share difficult encounters, Clans organize seasonal play and Battle.net cross-play exists precisely so friends are not separated by hardware. We have already covered how earlier co-op bugs made Season 12 party play considerably more awkward than it needed to be, and Ultimate Nemesis groups have had their own problems with party members completing the encounter without receiving equal loot.

Those are gameplay bugs. The Xbox social problem happens before gameplay begins. If friends appear offline, Clan members cannot easily see who is available, messages disappear and party invitations become unreliable, players need external apps simply to arrange the activity Diablo IV already supports internally. Discord can solve much of that, of course. So can WhatsApp. So can leaning out of a window and shouting toward your friend's house. None of those should really be required because the Xbox social panel has entered an existential crisis.

One Player Says Blizzard Support Told Them the Issue Was Known

There is one potentially encouraging detail, although it needs a clear caveat. A player in the main thread says they opened a support ticket and received a response from a Game Master stating that Blizzard was aware of the issue and encouraging players to continue posting on the forums. We cannot independently verify that private support response, and Blizzard does not appear to have made an equivalent public statement in the patch notes or forum thread. It should therefore be treated as a player's account of their support conversation rather than formal confirmation from Blizzard. (Blizzard forum thread)

If accurate, though, it would explain why the reports have continued without affected users finding a reliable local fix. Many have already performed the standard console rituals: restart everything, clear cache, toggle cross-play, log out, log back in, inspect NAT settings and stare accusingly at the router. One user reported temporary success after disabling cross-play options, restarting the Xbox, re-enabling them and restarting again, but other reports continued afterward. There is no evidence that this sequence is a universal workaround.

This Does Not Look Like the July Xbox Outage

It is also useful to separate the social bug from broader Xbox service problems. Microsoft experienced an Xbox outage in late July that temporarily affected Diablo IV access for some players, and those service problems were subsequently resolved. The Friends/Clan issue predates that outage and persisted after Xbox services returned to normal. Players in the relevant forum discussion explicitly noted that the social-list problem had already been occurring beforehand. That makes the July outage a poor explanation for a bug reportedly lasting throughout Season 14.

Yesterday we looked at another strange piece of the Microsoft/Diablo relationship in Xbox's coming 15-hour Cloud Gaming limit and the fact that Diablo IV still is not normally available through Microsoft's own cloud service. Today's problem is considerably smaller in corporate terms but more immediate for people already playing on Xbox. Microsoft owns Blizzard. Battle.net provides Diablo's cross-platform social layer. Xbox provides the hardware and network. Somewhere in that impressively well-funded chain, some players say the list showing who is online has spent an entire season needing several minutes — or considerably longer — to remember.

Season 15 Is a Good Deadline for Something This Basic

Season 15 provides a natural point for Blizzard to resolve the issue, assuming the reports describe a reproducible Xbox-side bug. New seasons bring returning players, fresh characters and the inevitable flurry of messages asking who is playing what class. Warlock already looks capable of attracting plenty of Season 15 attention, while Blizzard has deliberately withheld some seasonal surprises for BlizzCon. It would be unfortunate if Xbox players returned for all of that and discovered that every member of their Clan had apparently chosen the same build: Offline.

There is still no evidence that every Xbox player experiences the problem, and reports vary in severity. Some lists eventually populate. Some players can still accept direct invitations. Others describe friends remaining invisible, Clan chat becoming unreliable or party joining timing out entirely. What matters is the consistency of the core behaviour across multiple independent reports since late June and July, followed by another detailed confirmation on September 7.

Diablo IV’s Social Tab Should Not Be the Hardest Boss in the Party Finder

Compared with disappearing stash items, broken damage multipliers or a Secret Cow Level quest that can stop before producing its required key, a broken Friends list sounds almost quaint. Nobody loses a Mythic. Nobody's Hardcore character dies. No boss consumes an expensive Tribute. But multiplayer games depend on a layer of invisible infrastructure that only becomes noticeable when it stops working. Friends lists are part of that infrastructure. Clan rosters are part of it. Presence synchronization is boring right up until everybody you know apparently vanishes.

Xbox players began describing this problem around the start of Season 14. They reported it throughout July. It remained in August. On September 7, a player using the exact same account on Steam Deck said Xbox still shows existing online Clan members as offline while the Steam Deck displays them correctly.

Season 15 is nearly here.

It would be nice if the Friends list arrived before it.

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Diablo 4 Players Are Reporting Entire Stashes Suddenly Disappearing

Diablo IV players spend an extraordinary amount of time deciding what deserves to live in the stash. Mythics go in. Greater Affix items go in. Interesting Uniques go in. Perfectly ordinary equipment that might become useful after three future balance patches also goes in, because Diablo players are nothing if not optimistic archaeologists of their own bad decisions. The arrangement generally works because there is one reassuring assumption beneath all of that hoarding: when you open the stash tomorrow, the things you put there yesterday will still exist. A pair of fresh September reports are making that assumption slightly less comfortable.

On September 8, a returning PC player reported logging into Diablo IV during Lord of Hatred and finding their entire stash empty. Two days earlier, another PC player said a stash tab suddenly became empty while moving keys between characters. Neither report currently has enough independent confirmation to establish a widespread stash-loss bug, and returning players in particular can sometimes encounter completely legitimate seasonal-transfer rules that make old items disappear after the Withdraw Only window expires. But the new complaints are uncomfortably similar to a much more detailed May report where a Season 13 player said all stored items and purchased additional stash tabs vanished while their character remained in the same active season. That older report became active again on September 8. (September 8 report)

A Player Returned on September 8 to Find the Stash Empty

The newest report is straightforward. The player says they had not played for a while, returned during Lord of Hatred and discovered that everything in the stash was gone. They explicitly linked their experience to an older thread titled “Seasonal Stash completely empty + purchased tabs gone after finishing Lord of Hatred campaign,” saying they had already replied there without receiving an answer. There are important unanswered questions — most notably which realm and season originally held the missing items — so this specific case cannot yet be confidently labelled a bug. If the equipment was left behind in an expired seasonal Withdraw Only stash, the disappearance could be expected behaviour rather than deleted account data.

That distinction matters. When a Diablo season ends, seasonal items are transferred through temporary storage rather than preserved forever in an infinitely expanding warehouse beneath Kyovashad. Players who stay away long enough can lose unclaimed seasonal items once that transfer window expires. So “I came back after months and my old seasonal stash is empty” is not automatically proof that Blizzard misplaced anything. What makes the September report worth watching is that it points directly toward another case where the normal seasonal explanation does not fit nearly as comfortably.

The May Player Says Everything Vanished During the Same Season

On May 1, shortly after Lord of Hatred and Season 13 launched, a PC player described creating a Seasonal Paladin, finishing the campaign, farming equipment and filling their stash. They then took a single day away from the game. When they returned and created a Warlock, the Paladin's stash was completely empty. According to the report, all stored items had disappeared and all purchased extra stash tabs were gone, leaving only the default storage. Equipped gear remained on the Paladin, and the character was still correctly marked Seasonal. The player says they restarted the client, switched characters and even completely reinstalled Battle.net and Diablo IV. Nothing restored the missing storage. (original May report)

That case is much harder to explain through ordinary season rollover because the player explicitly says the disappearance occurred inside the current Season 13 after only a day away. There was no old seasonal transfer waiting to expire. There was no character migration to Eternal. The stash simply appeared to reset while the seasonal character itself remained intact. We cannot independently verify the contents of the player's account, and Blizzard has not publicly confirmed what caused the report, but the details are specific enough to make it considerably more concerning than an ordinary returning-player misunderstanding.

A Separate September 6 Report Says One Stash Tab Emptied Too

There is also a second current report from September 6. Another PC player says they were moving a collection of keys to another character when an entire bank tab suddenly became empty. The post is extremely brief and currently lacks the detail needed to determine exactly what happened, but its timing is interesting: within two days, one player reports an individual stash tab emptying and another reports returning to find the entire stash gone. (September 6 report)

That still does not make this a widespread September epidemic. Two fresh reports are two fresh reports. Diablo IV has millions of accounts, and a bug headline should not quietly transform “two people on the forum” into “Sanctuary has eaten everybody's inventory.” But because the consequences are potentially so severe, even isolated reports deserve considerably more attention than something like a cosmetic animation flickering for half a second. Losing a stash can mean losing months of accumulated Uniques, crafting candidates, Mythics, boss materials and the small mountain of “maybe someday” equipment every veteran player insists is strategically essential.

The Stash Is Already Doing Far More Work Than It Used To

The timing is particularly uncomfortable because Diablo IV's stash has become increasingly important as the game has added systems. Lord of Hatred brought Talismans, Seals, Charms, War Plans and additional layers of equipment progression. Season 15 is preparing even more build experimentation, while Transfiguration gives players another reason to keep potentially useful Greater Affix items instead of immediately salvaging them. The stash is no longer just somewhere to keep two spare helmets and an embarrassing collection of gems. It is increasingly the archive behind the entire account.

That is why we noted during our Season 15 PTR review that inventory bloat is becoming a design problem of its own. Every new form of buildcraft introduces another category of things players reasonably want to preserve. Even when the stash works perfectly, deciding what stays has become one of Diablo IV's unofficial endgame activities. When a player believes an entire tab has vanished, “perhaps we needed more storage space” suddenly becomes a less urgent philosophical debate.

Diablo IV Has Had Several Strange Loot-and-Stash Problems Recently

September has already given players a remarkable selection of ways for loot management to become unexpectedly stressful. We recently covered Treasure Breach runs where players can receive more loot than they can carry while town teleporting remains unavailable. A separate report described boss rewards apparently skipping the ground and appearing directly in the Lost Items stash. And just two days ago, a PS5 player reported high-tier gem progression disappearing after salvage, raising uncomfortable memories of an older gem-fragment bug Blizzard had already patched.

Those incidents almost certainly do not share one underlying cause. One concerns teleport restrictions, another Lost Items behaviour, another gem conversion and the newest reports concern stored inventory. Connecting them technically would be pure speculation. What they do have in common is player trust. Diablo is a game about obtaining things. If the game tells you something dropped, moved, salvaged, transferred or entered storage, players need absolute confidence that the item state being shown is real. An ARPG can survive the Butcher killing you. It becomes considerably harder to enjoy if the filing cabinet develops predatory instincts.

Some “Missing Stash” Reports Are Actually Normal Seasonal Behaviour

This is also why anyone discovering an empty stash should check the obvious explanations before assuming account data has been deleted. First confirm whether the missing equipment was seasonal or Eternal. If it belonged to a previous season, consider how long it has been since that season ended and whether its Withdraw Only stash was ever emptied. Check every relevant character and realm, restart Battle.net and verify that the game has connected to the correct account. A surprisingly large amount of apparent missing-item drama in seasonal ARPGs eventually turns out to involve progression transfers rather than vanished server data.

But those explanations do not neatly cover the May Season 13 report, where the player says their stash disappeared while the same season was still active. Nor do they obviously explain the September 6 player who says one tab emptied while transferring items between characters. Those are the cases Blizzard needs to investigate if the reports are accurate, because they involve storage disappearing during normal account use rather than after an old season's cleanup window.

Do Not Panic — But Screenshots Are a Very Good Idea

There is currently no evidence that Diablo IV players should begin emptying their stashes or moving everything onto characters. In fact, frantic inventory rearrangement would probably create more opportunities to accidentally salvage or discard something than it would solve. The reports are still too limited for that. What experienced players may reasonably want to do is keep occasional screenshots of important stash tabs, particularly Mythics, perfect Greater Affix items and other difficult-to-replace equipment. Screenshots will not restore an item, but they provide considerably better information for a support or bug report than “I definitely had some very good trousers somewhere.”

The same applies to newly purchased stash tabs. If a player notices tabs or stored items disappearing, document the account state before changing characters repeatedly, purchasing replacement tabs or moving other gear around. The more precisely players can identify what vanished and what action preceded it, the easier it becomes to distinguish a genuine storage bug from seasonal transfer behaviour or a UI problem.

Diablo Is About Losing Characters — Not Filing Cabinets

Diablo has always been unusually comfortable with loss. Hardcore characters can vanish permanently because somebody became overconfident around a boss. Valuable crafting resources can disappear because the Occultist disagreed with your preferred affix fifteen times in succession. Players can apparently even lose a Mythic Tribute when Longtooth decides not to provide the corresponding loot. Those experiences may be painful, but at least there is supposed to be a game mechanic behind them.

A stash is different. It is the place where Diablo tells you the things you are not currently using are safe.

The September 8 returning-player report still needs more context and may ultimately have a perfectly normal seasonal explanation. The September 6 empty-tab report needs considerably more detail. But the May case — an active Seasonal character, one day away, items and purchased tabs apparently gone — remains difficult to explain away, and that thread has now returned to the surface months later.

For the moment, this is something to watch rather than a reason to panic.

Because Sanctuary is allowed to take your life.

It really should leave the stash alone.

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Diablo 4 Players Say One Sorcerer Build Is Doing as Little as 1/20th of Its Intended Damage

Diablo IV's Sorcerer has received plenty of numerical help lately. Blizzard has buffed damage, adjusted Intelligence scaling and spent much of 2026 sanding down individual skills that were not behaving quite as advertised. Unfortunately, there is an old problem with making the numbers bigger: first the numbers have to actually turn up. Players testing Spark's Electric Blast upgrade together with Vox Omnium say two separate damage bonuses are still failing, leaving one potentially interesting Sorcerer setup doing a fraction of the damage its tooltips suggest. The original controlled testing put the combination at roughly one-eighth of its expected output. A new September 6 comment goes further, with another player calculating that their complete build would produce only around one-twentieth of its intended damage once all the missing multipliers are considered.

That 1/20 figure is not an official Blizzard measurement, and it should not be treated as proof that every Electric Blast build loses exactly 95% of its damage. It is one player's calculation for a specific build. What is considerably easier to document is the underlying problem: multiple Sorcerer players have independently tested Electric Blast and Vox Omnium since May and reported that Electric Blast does not receive its advertised 50% bonus damage, while Electric Blast Sparks triggered through Vox Omnium apparently fail to receive the staff's Basic Skill damage multiplier. Those reports have survived Patch 3.1.1, Patch 3.1.2 and several months of Sorcerer changes. In a game where Blizzard is preparing another substantial global Sorcerer buff for Season 15, that creates a slightly awkward question: how useful is more damage if one of the builds cannot collect the damage it already has?

Electric Blast Is Supposed to Turn Spark Into One Big Hit

Spark normally deals its damage across several hits. Electric Blast changes that behaviour by combining the damage into a single explosion and, according to the skill description, increasing that damage by 50%. The attraction is easy to understand. Turning several small Spark hits into one larger blast can interact differently with effects built around individual hits, and it gives Sorcerer players another way to construct a Basic Skill build rather than simply returning to whichever established endgame setup happens to own this month's largest spreadsheet.

Player testing suggests the consolidation works. The 50% bonus does not. One July tester gave a deliberately simple example: if ordinary Spark produces four hits of roughly 500 damage each, Electric Blast should combine the 2,000 base damage and then apply its 50% increase, producing around 3,000. Instead, the tester reported an Electric Blast around 2,000 — the four attacks had become one, but the advertised bonus had apparently disappeared. An earlier May bug report described the same issue, and further testing in July again found Electric Blast performing approximately like ordinary Spark rather than the upgraded version described by the tooltip. (Blizzard forum report)

On its own, that would already make Electric Blast an unattractive upgrade. Losing a 50% multiplier is not the sort of thing an endgame build casually compensates for with a slightly nicer pair of boots. Unfortunately, Vox Omnium appears to add another missing number on top.

Vox Omnium Appears to Trigger Spark — Without Its Big Damage Bonus

Vox Omnium is designed to turn Core Skill casts into additional Basic Skill attacks. When the appropriate elemental interaction is present, the staff triggers a Basic Skill and applies a substantial damage increase to that triggered attack. This should make something like Electric Blast Spark particularly interesting: use the Core Skill to trigger Spark, allow Vox to massively amplify that Spark and then let Electric Blast consolidate the attack into one large hit. It sounds like exactly the sort of odd little build engine Diablo IV's Unique items are supposed to encourage.

The attack itself does trigger. The damage bonus apparently does not. The July 28 bug report says Sparks generated by Vox Omnium still appear normally but do not benefit from the Unique's bonus damage when Electric Blast is selected. The tester calculated that combining the missing Electric Blast multiplier with the missing Vox bonus leaves this specific interaction producing roughly one-eighth of the damage expected from the tooltips. They also noted the rather painful consequence for Mythic Vox Omnium: improving the Unique's multiplier does not meaningfully help Electric Blast if that multiplier is not being applied in the first place. (current bug thread)

That is a familiar type of Diablo IV problem. We recently covered Paladin's Hallowed Ground apparently displaying a perfectly functional upgrade while two of its actual benefits fail controlled testing, while Leoric's Crown and Soul Splinters produced an enormous defensive number on the Season 15 PTR that did not survive contact with the Training Dummy. Diablo IV's tooltips increasingly describe extremely complicated mechanical contracts. The difficulty begins when only one party honours them.

The New September Calculation Says a Full Build Can Lose Even More

The thread became active again on September 6 when another Sorcerer player argued that the original one-eighth estimate can actually understate the practical loss. Their reasoning is that a real build does not stop at Electric Blast and Vox Omnium. Diablo IV multiplies effects through numerous layers of gear, skills and conditional bonuses, so removing a multiplier early in that chain can also reduce the value of everything built around it. For the setup this player had calculated before discovering the bugs, the final result was approximately 1/20 of what they expected the finished build to produce.

Again, that does not establish “Electric Blast deals 5% damage” as a universal Diablo IV fact. Different gear, different Vox rolls and different supporting effects will produce different totals. The useful part of the comment is the broader point: missing build-defining multipliers can hurt considerably more than their individual tooltip percentages suggest once the entire build has been constructed around them. The same player says other Spark variants interact with Vox correctly and can make each individual Spark tick hit roughly five times harder than their Electric Blast version.

That difference is exactly why this is more interesting than a generally weak skill. If every Spark setup performed poorly, Blizzard could simply decide Spark needs a buff. Here, players are reporting that the alternative variants work with Vox while Electric Blast specifically does not. That points toward a mechanical interaction rather than ordinary balance. We saw something similar when Sorcerer's Ice Shards Enchantment could apparently stop triggering partway through a dungeon. The class had not suddenly become weaker because monsters gained hidden resistance to frozen architecture. One part of the machinery had simply stopped moving.

Players Have Been Reporting Electric Blast Problems Since May

The timeline makes the current report harder to dismiss. A dedicated Electric Blast thread appeared on May 9 reporting that the 50% increased damage did not apply. By July 7, controlled testing had linked the same problem to Vox Omnium and identified the missing Unique damage bonus. Another report on July 14 said both issues remained in Patch 3.1.1. On July 28, the tester reposted the problem for Patch 3.1.2 and calculated the one-eighth damage result. That same thread was still receiving new discussion on September 6. (earlier Patch 3.1.1 report)

Blizzard has not ignored Sorcerer bugs during this period. Quite the opposite. May's Patch 3.0.2 contained a substantial Sorcerer bug-fix list, including fixes for Meteor, Fireball, Chain Lightning, Ice Shards, Hydra and several other interactions. Blizzard specifically fixed Vox Omnium causing triggered Basic Skills to miss their intended targets and also fixed Crackling Energy failing to trigger when combined with Electric Blast. In other words, both Vox Omnium and Electric Blast have already been touched by official bug fixes this year. The current player reports concern different parts of those mechanics — the damage multipliers themselves. (official Diablo IV patch notes)

That distinction is important. It would be inaccurate to say Blizzard previously announced that this specific Vox/Electric Blast damage bug was fixed. The May patch addressed Vox targeting and Electric Blast's Crackling Energy interaction. The missing 50% and Vox damage bonuses are player-reported problems that continued afterward. Blizzard repaired two rooms in the house. The current complaint is that the electricity is still off in the kitchen.

This Is Exactly What Sorcerer Players Were Worried About Before Season 15

The timing is particularly interesting because Blizzard's Season 15 PTR gives Sorcerer a significant global boost. The class's Core Stat scalar is being raised from 1.25 to 1.625, increasing the damage Sorcerers gain from Intelligence. That is meaningful and should lift many builds automatically. But when we covered the Season 15 Sorcerer changes in August, one of the main community concerns was already that larger global numbers do not solve skills and interactions that simply fail mechanically.

Vox Omnium and Electric Blast are almost too perfect an example. Suppose Blizzard gives the Sorcerer another healthy percentage of general damage. Excellent. That percentage then enters a build where players say one advertised 50% bonus is absent and Vox Omnium's major multiplier is absent as well. The Sorcerer technically received the buff. The broken interaction politely eats around it.

We have seen that pattern elsewhere this season. Talisman set bonuses have reportedly vanished mid-combat until players refresh the affected state, while Cataclysm Druids have reported boss damage collapsing until an encounter transition effectively resets the build. These are far more damaging to build diversity than an ordinary 10% balance discrepancy because they discourage experimentation. A player can spend hours assembling an unconventional setup, discover it performs terribly and conclude the concept is bad without ever realizing the game is refusing to apply part of the concept.

Vox Omnium Should Be Exactly the Kind of Unique Players Build Around

That is the real shame here. Vox Omnium is an interesting Unique precisely because it invites experimentation. It does not merely say “Core Skills deal more damage.” It encourages the Sorcerer to connect Core and Basic Skills, find elemental relationships and exploit effects attached to the triggered attacks. That is much healthier item design than equipping a staff because 427 is larger than 381.

Players are still experimenting with Vox despite the reported problems. A recent community discussion around a four-Greater-Affix copy shows people continuing to search for Basic/Core combinations that can make the staff work, and another Sorcerer thread notes that some other Spark variants appear to interact correctly with Vox. That makes Electric Blast's failure particularly unfortunate. It is not simply making a mediocre Unique weaker. It is potentially removing one branch from an item whose entire purpose is giving players branches to explore.

Diablo IV's current gearing already contains enough barriers before a strange build becomes viable. Transfiguration can add another RNG wall after the correct endgame item finally drops, Greater Affixes have to land on useful stats, and Mythic versions add another layer of rarity. When somebody finally assembles the correct equipment, the reward should be discovering whether their theory was clever. Discovering that the tooltip's multiplication never entered the calculation is considerably less satisfying.

For Now, Electric Blast Players Should Test Before Investing Heavily

There is no official Blizzard confirmation of the current damage bug and no documented workaround in the active forum thread. Sorcerer players interested in Vox Omnium and Electric Blast should therefore test the interaction themselves before committing expensive crafting resources. The Training Dummy makes this relatively straightforward: compare ordinary Spark against Electric Blast under controlled conditions, then compare naturally cast Spark with the Spark triggered through Vox Omnium. Remove as many unrelated modifiers as possible, keep Critical Strikes and conditional buffs under control and record several hits rather than trusting one damage number.

If Electric Blast produces approximately the combined base Spark damage without the expected 50% increase, that reproduces the first player report. If Vox-triggered Electric Blasts then fail to scale with the Unique's listed Basic Skill bonus while another Spark variant does, that reproduces the second. More independent tests would be useful, particularly across different Vox Omnium qualities and current Patch 3.1.2 setups.

Because right now the strangest thing about this Sorcerer build is not that somebody calculated it at one-eighth of its expected damage in July or one-twentieth in September. Diablo mathematics can always produce increasingly alarming fractions if given enough time.

The stranger part is much simpler:

players have been reporting the same missing damage since May, and Electric Blast is still apparently waiting for the electricity.

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