Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred PTR for Patch 3.1 Review

The Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred PTR Patch notes for 3.1 have dropped along with the announced Season 14 mechanic. I won’t be going over each item in the specific patch notes but will give my feedback on the talking points from the main article. There are more changes, including massive nerfs/balances as well as the highly requested SSF mode coming to the game.

Season 14 Mechanics / Features

Pandemonium Ruptures

This is the main new season feature where an event can occur in the open world called a Pandemonium Rupture. There will be three classes of this:

• Normal – Small versions that can be found anywhere in the open world but happen more frequently in Helltides.
• Surging – Medium versions that can replace events in Helltides.
• Colossal – Larger ones that appear in the Fields of Desecration.

You basically kill the mobs around something called Death’s Head Idols (Jerry Garcia reference????) to open the ritual ring (which I’m guessing is similar to most of the summoning mechanisms you find in this game). Then like Hellspires and Ravenous Soulspires, you try to keep these ruptures open by killing mobs as well as closing something called Tears. Also, Rupture Goblins can appear to open more Ruptures. So it sounds similar to the other type of events like certain chest and shrine events found in dungeons.

Realmwalker 2.0

The return of the Realmwalker is here (something I have asked for just as adding content to the base game). I know the fight itself has changed where you no longer have to chase the Realmwalker around as that portion was heavily criticized by the community. Instead, this new Realmwalker will behave as a world boss fight once it’s summoned. The way a Realmwalker is summoned is through Pandemonium Ruptures:

• Normal – Cannot summon
• Surging – A chance to summon when you completed with a Mastery level within the timeframe of the event.
• Colossal – Guaranteed

Like in Season 6, defeating the Realmwalker will once again open a portal, this time to a smaller arena called the Deathtoll Chamber.

Deathtoll Chamber

This area will be a one-room mini-dungeon you can enter via defeating a Realmwalker or when you close enough Tears inside a Rupture within a Nightmare Dungeon. I’m guessing that this area is similar to the one from season 6 where you’d fight a gauntlet of enemies and some sort of mini boss for the rewards. But the key takeaway from the notes is that you can get Greatere Lai Boss Keys here, at least as the best source. I’m not sure if that implies other places like normal bosses, etc. will still give them out but I’m guessing that you will be able to better target farm them here.

New Monster Family: The Risen

Gravehounds are a part of the new Risen monster family and will appear from Ruptures and the Deathtoll Chamber. When you kill these Gravehounds, they will drop orbs that enhance an Exarch monster, which is another form of the Risen, that aims towards it. If you get the orb before it reaches the Exarch, you get the power yourself. So this thing sounds a little similar to a Headhunter except you probably get some sort of temporary power like the thing you’d find from Chaos Portals. Instead of having an actual permanent season power, you’re just granted a transient one here.

Seasonal Lair Boss

This is a familiar boss (a Reaper type) that we’ve seen from Diablo 3. But this new boss will have a lair similar to other lair bosses that is accessible from Zarbinzet. The boss opens up like other bosses from Torment I and will require a Greater Lair Boss key to get its rewards cache. The main purpose behind this boss for the end game activity is to farm Mythics and the Mythic Unique Upgrade currency as the chances will be higher than other bosses for the season.

One comment I have here is if this boss is going to suck. It’s obviously meant to be a farmable mob but lately, the end game bosses have been worsening. On the bright side, you’re not forced to farm this thing at T12 but I have to wonder with all the changes to Mythics how frequent the drops will be depending on the difficulty especially with the incoming class nerfs.

Mythic Uniques 3.0

So the main story here is that Mythic items are going to undergo yet another change but in a huge way. The old Mythics items are losing their status and becoming regular uniques where they only have a single static affix. Instead, Mythics are going to be a quality property (as opposed to rarity) where your affix stats are boosted as well as the core Aspect power by about 30%. So in a way, they’re receiving the Chaos Power treatment in terms of the power gain. From what I can tell, this is going into core as finding the new Mythics in eternal will be a thing. Also, you can craft onto a Unique this Mythic attribute with a special currency. They’re saying it’s a season only currency found from bosses but I heard on the live chat that this will also be going into core. Lastly, only one craftable Mythic unique can be equipped, which implies that Mythics are effectively becoming the equivalent of Primordial Ancients from Diablo 3.

With regards to Uniques though, the main upside is that they’re using the Horadric Cube to be able to reroll affixes using the Chaotic and Focused Reroll abilities. That should help the overall unique scenario a lot but I’m still unhappy that Uniques in general are becoming more generic by the day. Also, I’m very unhappy that the Diablo 3 systems are continuing to make its way into the game but not really having a meaningful impact but turning the game into something more generic when it comes to skills and modifiers as multipliers.

Tower & Leaderboards Beta Rewards

I’m not going to describe what’s going on here. Instead, I’m going to use this space to continually make my disgust for Leaderboards well known as the thing that’s going to rot this game further. There is going to be a moment of respite though that I hope counterbalances the emphasis on esports that I will discuss since it may affect how I play.

War Plans Updates

Most of the feature updates here affect group play. I still think that making War Plans this randomly constructed thing is terrible. Again, instead of going into the mechanics here, I am going to utilize this space to emphasize how the notion of a play list needs to actually resemble a goal oriented mechanism and to remove the nonsensical random generation of an already small set of options.

The other major piece is that the rewards are being increased for longer activities like Helltides and Inferno Hordes due to their time commitment. So rather than having 1 or 2 open chest in pre-Torment difficulties, you’ll be forced to achieve 300 Cinder. That partly makes sense in that people are swapping between activities quickly and probably shifting once their Helltides quest is done but forgoing the normal Whisper activities. I honestly wish that you’d just get random quests for Helltides instead to vary up the activities and make it more goal oriented.

Solo Self Found Mode

This is probably the second biggest update to me. They did mention since the launch of the Paladin class that they were working on an Solo Self Found (SSF) mode. Well, it’s here. I am very much in favor of this because I think it’s mostly going to cater towards streamers and the crybabies in this game who bitch all the time about gear and unfairness. In having the HCSSF mode in particular, I think you’ll see a new group of crybabies that will suck each other off and become elitist in swimming in their own toxic pools.

That said, I think once the basic SSF mode goes out it might help clear up certain areas because these modes will have their own instances. You’ll still see people in the game but cannot trade nor group. You can fight world bosses and legions but cannot partake in a group that do those events. Also, that shitty raid won’t be a thing for these people, which is fine because I’m hoping that this mode will further kill off this activity.

For myself, I might actually try it. Not because I’m elitist but because I’m hoping that having a separate instance will shrink the general population in town and prevent lag. Someone did complain this is not a true SSF mode because of the world participation aspect. I argued that the only way you’d get a true SSF situation is if the game received an offline mode. Otherwise, you’d need a dedicated instance per player. Neither are viable for one reason or another (all financial reasons). So this is the compromise. The main reason to do this in the first place though is getting to a purer state where people can earn bragging rights. Then the main issues will be on Blizzard when it comes to problems like dupes and that odd Transfiguration issue. The dupes might actually get fixed in SSF and I’m sure they’ll patch up the Transfiguration problem by the time PTR or S14 launches. But I do think this is going to be a huge win overall in any case as well as addressing that question I had about world bosses and other group related content (except for the Raid since we hate the raid).

Other Aspects

The rest are more QoL things, fixes, nerfs, etc. But I want to talk about the main problem: more numeric changes. I get that S13/Launch was meant to be the actual PTR for the game. I think the devs went in and figured they could get away with this situation just one time and you can see the numerous bugs in place. However, there’s a constant factor that bugs me in that we still are seeing balance changes.

What I really want is a stable game. No more bipolar disorder because of the constant leadership and priority changes. Can we finally have a game that starts to move forward much quicker? I do appreciate the updates to uniques, the new season mechanic, a new boss, mobs and the SSF mode. But where’s the new items? How about increasing the number of activities for War Plans? The upcoming S14 is okay but it’s like S6 except worse because you didn’t get the expansion content underneath. Instead, we’re just seeing balance changes mostly while the main season content will end up getting stashed away, iterated upon as feedback entered rather than becoming another core piece of the game whether it was good or bad.

But I keep emphasizing that the main game needs more to do. Blizzard’s feedback loop is just too slow and it’s frustrating to see that they keep tackling the same problems over and over with only a tiny amount of momentum forward. With all the nerfs coming up there’s no real compensation. I don’t think this new version of Mythics is going to make the game play anymore interesting because it’s just numeric and another hamster wheel being tacked on. If they suddenly announced that Legion events, World Bosses and Strongholds would become parts of War Plans with their own trees along with past successful seasons, then I’d be really excited because my game play would change with the new activities that would change. But I want the game to change and move forward somehow. I feel stuck in a shitty timeloop where the world is familiar but the names change and nothing else meaningful. Give us something to really chew on to feel excited about rather than incremental updates that focus on constantly trying to repair outdated systems or things that are considered unbalanced.