With the release date of Diablo 4 Season 5 approaching, the developers recently finally revealed some major changes for the new season. I must warn you that many of these changes are different from what is already in PTR.
In this guide, we want to discuss in depth the unique items and gameplay changes for all classes in Season 5, as well as take a look at some general game updates that will affect our experience to help you prepare before you start playing! Without further ado, let’s get started!
Unique Item Changes
Let’s start with Diablo 4 unique items. We know that the developers plan to redesign almost every unique item in the game before the upcoming season to bring them in line with the design philosophy of the basic Diablo 4 items.
As you know, it evolves and changes every season, so the general idea is to make these unique items feel more special, give them all affixes that wouldn’t normally exist in their slots, or make their effects better. Therefore, they reworked the affixes for these unique items:
Frostburn
- Up to 8% Lucky Hit Chance
- Up to 15% Attack Speed
- Up to 180% Fire and Cold Damage
- Lucky Hit: Up to a 40% Chance to deal 4,000 Cold Damage
- Lucky Hit: Up to a 50% chance to Freeze enemies for 2 seconds
Flickerstep
- Inherent: Attacks Reduce Evade’s Cooldown by 2.5 Seconds
- Inherent: Evade Increases Movement Speed by X%
- Up to 18% Movement Speed
- Up to 300% Ultimate Damage
- Up to 60% Lightning Resistance
- Up to 12.5% Damage Reduction from Close Enemies
Fists of Fate
- Up to X% Attack Speed
- Up to X% Critical Strike
- Up to 51% Lucky Hit Chance
Overall, the developers are aiming to make these Diablo 4 items really good items to consider. With these changes, should you actually use them?
Class Changes
Next, let’s take a look at some of the class changes coming in Season 5.
Barbarian Changes
For Barbarian, its Fields of Crimson inherent Affix has been changed from increasing Vulnerable Damage to increasing Strength and Damage to Bleeding Enemies. Then Rupture Explosion Size has been increased while keeping the old Rupture Cooldown Reduction.
Battle Trance’s Cooldown Reduction and Maximum Fury have been removed, but it has gained up to 8% Critical Strike Chance and Duelist skill buffs, which grants bonus attack speed when using One-Handed Weapon. Besides this, Frenzy’s effects have also been increased at the top end.
100000 Steps’ inherent Affix has been changed to gain 10% attack speed after Evade. Then Dexterity and Ground Stomp affixes, when switching weapons, have both been removed. It now increases Movement Speed by up to 7% per Walking Arsenal Bonus, and the amount of Fury gained from unique effects has been significantly increased, and more importantly, the internal cooldown of effects has been reduced from 15 seconds to 10 seconds.
For Barbarian, each key passive is getting general changes, but their actual effects have been significantly weakened, mainly because these changes are too big for the class and define every build in a very unchangeable way, whether it’s Unbridled Rage, or the undeniable king of previous seasons, Gushing Wounds.
They have too much impact on actual build diversity, and this aims to address this across the board by reducing the effectiveness of these passives.
Druid Changes
Then we have Druid, whose Greatstaff of the Crone is losing all of its non-inherent affixes in favor of newly added critical damage, as well as damage to close enemies. Storm Strike now chains to additional enemies and the damage bonus has been significantly increased. Finally, its new affixes also include bonus levels to all base skills.
Also, all the old perks of Mad Wolf’s Glee have been removed. Besides the extra max life, there’s now an extra level of Werewolf attack speed, Werewolf’s critical passive damage effect, and extra levels of Digitigrade Gait associated with Werewolf form. This now gives more skill levels from the unique effect itself.
And finally for Druid, all affixes to Storm’s Companion Unique Pants have been removed from it, except for the extra level of Wolves as a skill. These were then replaced with extra Wolves’ attack speed, and a great Lucky Hit Chance bonus to Packleader Spirit Boon. This is actually pretty crazy.
On top of that, they also increased Spirit generation for Balanced Aspect. Then some bigger rework was done to Runeworker’s Conduit Aspect to change the duration of the effect so that the effect scales based on weapon damage, rather than a fixed number. Finally, they also further increased the damage of all lightning effects that Druid can trigger by a large amount.
Necromancer Changes
Moving on, we have Necromancer’s Blood Artisan’s Cuirass, which has just had a massive affix increase, and replaced Blood Orbs Healing Increase affix with an Essence generation effect on picked up Blood Orbs. This means that high-end characters with these unique effects are now better, too.
Both Lucky Hit Chance bonuses from Howl from Below have been removed, and instead, now spawns Corpse Explosion against Fear and Slow enemies, as well as bonus tiers to Corpse Explosion. Overall, the unique effects here again have a higher cap than before.
Then there’s Lidless Wall, where the inherent Thorns Affix has been replaced with % Total Armor, and all the old Affixes have been completely replaced. It’s now Flat Armor, Bone Storm duration increased, cooldown reduced, and all Bone skills have also received bonus tiers. Like the others, the high-end versions of the unique effects are better than before.
Rogue Changes
The developers made changes to Rogue’s Uniques, and Windforce no longer has a Knockback effect. And Eyes in the Dark had all of its affixes replaced except for max life. New affixes include extra ultimate damage, reduced damage to enemies affected by Trap, and a passive bonus ranks up for extra passive regeneration and energy gain after using the ultimate.
Then they did a proper full replacement of the affixes on Saboteur’s Signet as well. Now it has extra Grenade damage, increased Stun Grenade Size, and gains an extra energy per Stun Grenade explosion. Then it has a reduced cooldown, which is pretty good as a stat on a ring.
Then Exploit Weakness Paragon Node effect of executing enemies below a certain health percentage no longer applies to elites. And finally, they increased the damage cap on No Witnesses Node.
Sorcerer Changes
Finally, for Sorcerer, we’ll take a look at Staff of Lam Esen first. First, Inherent Affix changed from Damage over Time to Raw Lightning Damage Increase, which is no longer part of Weapon Affix. Additionally, Charged Bolts skill has been replaced with a new affix on this weapon, which gives us the chance to double cast Charged Bolts, and the resource cost has been reduced as well.
There is also Fractured Winterglass, which has lost the cooldown reduction and vulnerable affixes, and instead gained the chance to cast Frozen Orbs twice, and the summon cooldown is reduced every time a Frozen Orb explodes.
And then there is our last unique, Blue Rose. They have replaced all affixes on this Ring except for Ice Spike damage, and it has gained bonus critical chance, general cold damage, and a chance for Ice Spike to explode twice.
General Gameplay Updates
Finally, let’s talk about some general changes.
One change we found to be very important is that the way primary attributes scale skill damage is currently just a general homogeneous number, but will now be a per class in Season 5, rather than being synchronized across the board. The primary goal of this is to create another way to balance weapon slots, as different classes have different numbers of weapon slots and different numbers of affixes.
There is another general change on top of this, which is that enchanting no longer requires the consumption of Angelbreath. This removes yet another unnecessary resource farm from the game.
Honestly, while I appreciate this move to remove players from wasting time farming unnecessary resources, it feels like if this continues, we’ll be completely reliant on Diablo 4 gold as our only real resource. But they now seem to have some sort of plan to rebalance the resource economy, and I’d definitely love for them to at least show us a bit.
Finally, we found Profane Mindcage, a seasonal consumable from Season 4 that adds 10 levels to enemies in Helltide, while also increasing Diablo 4 Gold and XP rewards you get for killing them.
These will now be added to the game permanently, so they’re no longer seasonal consumables. And unlike our current version, they’ll be changed to allow stacking three times. If you’re really confident, you can take on a higher level Helltide enemy 30 levels higher than you, give it a try!
So that’s all we know about the new changes coming to Season 5. What do you think of these upcoming changes? Do you have any better ways to get your footing in Season 5? See you in the game!