Blizzard has made a bunch of positive changes to Season of Mastery and the latest change seems really good as well!
Kaivax – Blizzard Community Manager
We’ve developed some adjustments to a few items that we want to see more available early in Season of Mastery (than they were in WoW Classic).
We’re increasing the availability of Plaguebloom, adding a small chance for Black Lotus to drop from high level Herbalism nodes, and increasing the availability of Elemental Fire, Elemental Earth, and Elemental Water.
These adjustments are not yet testable on the Season of Mastery Beta, but they will be deployed there at some point over the next few days.
We’ll let you know when this slate of adjustments is in place in the Beta.
This is a quick list of optional but very important quests in Diablo 2 Resurrected! Even though these quests are not required to complete the game, they are absolutely worth going back and completing in each difficulty to get their rewards. These quests give a combined 12 skill points, 60hp, 30 to all resistance, 15 stat points and more! I can’t recommend doing these quests enough!
For our Burning Crusade Classic players, we’re excited to let you know that the first major content update, Overlords of Outland, will be going live soon. Starting September 15, you’ll be able to take on Prince Kael’thas and Lady Vashj in a pair of iconic raids, engage in a new season of Arena combat, and more. We’re also working on something for WoW Classic players who’ve told us they’d like a chance at a fresh start, and will be sharing more on our plans soon.
Creating World of Warcraft is truly a collaborative effort between the people on our team, across Blizzard, and all of you—and as we build, iterate on, and talk about what’s next, we hope we can demonstrate our commitment to making Azeroth the best place it can be for everyone.
Maybe you will find some of these tips and tricks helpful! These range from the ability to toggle always show items to swapping between resurrected and legacy mode! Legacy mode is super cool!! Some of these tips are from my days of playing Diablo 2 and others are entirely new D2R features!
This guide walks you through leveling a character quickly in Diablo 2! Generally, this path is followed by a group instead of being solo. You can solo level in these areas but I highly recommend making public games. Having other players in the game increases experience gain significantly. These areas are exactly the same in Diablo 2 and Diablo II Resurrected, so this power leveling path will work exactly the same for either version of the game!
Power Leveling Steps
Leveling Areas
Level 1-15 Tristram
Clear Tristram over and over. The fastest way is to either join or host your own public game. More players give you more experience, so shoot for a full game. To host your own game, you have to save Cain.
Level 15-24 Tombs
Clear Tal Rasha’s Tomb over and over. The fastest way again is to join or host your own public game. Once you can access the tome, you can create your own game, no additional quest is required.
Level 24 Ancients – Normal Difficulty
At this point you need to kill your normal Ancients to complete the Right of Passage quest. This will allow you to access Baal’s throne room for the best experience.
Level 25-40 Baal or Chaos Sanctuary
Once you hit 25 you will have a few options. You can now level in either the Chaos Sanctuary or by doing Baal runs. Chaos runs seem to give a little bit more loot, so if your drops have been lacking, I would recommend that.
Level 40 Ancients – Nightmare Difficulty
It’s time to kill your Nightmare Ancients for Right of Passage! Ideally, you should find a nightmare rush and also enlist help killing your Ancients. This will speed the process up a ton!
Level 41-60 – Baal or Chaos Sanctuary (Nightmare)
After obtaining level 41 and entering Nightmare mode it’s time to start doing Chaos or Baal runs. Both of these will require either a nightmare rush or playing through nightmare mode.
Level 60 Ancients – Hell Difficulty
After hitting level 60 it is time to get a rush in hell difficulty from Act 1 to Act 5. You will need help killing your ancients as well. They can be pretty tough in Hell difficulty.
Level 61-99 Baal or Chaos Sanctuary (Hell)
At this point you can start doing Chaos runs as soon as you get to act 4. This is really good experience and a nice way to find some valuable items. Once you complete Right of Passage you can begin doing Baal runs. Baal runs are going to give you the fastest exp/hr but Chaos is worth doing due to the drops.
That’s about it for this leveling guide! Hopefully this gets you into the 90’s without a problem. Experience really slows down after level 90. Enjoy the grind and I’ll hopefully see you in game!
After many years of waiting, it’s finally here! Come September 23rd, we will be able to play Diablo 2 Resurrected. I can’t tell you how excited I am for this!! Below is Blizzard’s press release about the release date.
The call to arms has been issued—who will stand ready at the gates of Hell to face the Lord of Terror? Diablo II: Resurrected™ is coming soon, a definitive remastering of Diablo II alongside its Lord of Destruction® expansion! On September 23, veteran and new players alike can save Sanctuary from the Burning Hells on Windows® PC, and for the first time on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, and Nintendo Switch™.
Experience the timeless classic, now with high-resolution visuals (with support for up to 4K resolution) and remastered 7.1 Dolby Surround audio bringing the world of Sanctuary to life in a whole new way. Prepare to witness the original game’s cinematics, 27-minutes of epic storytelling, faithfully recreated to capture the dark ambiance so fondly remembered.
While Diablo II: Resurrected takes full advantage of today’s modern gaming hardware, it preserves the engaging hack-and-slash gameplay that is as engrossing today as it was twenty years ago—but with a handful of quality-of-life changes, such as a larger stash for players to store more of their loot and automatic gold pickup for ease. Above all else, Diablo II: Resurrected remains true to the original, and with a touch of a button, players can transport themselves into the nostalgic past, playing the game in the original 800×600 experience.
Players who wish to get their hands on the game will soon have a chance to do so. The Diablo II: Resurrected multiplayer open beta will kick-off in August and will feature five of the final game’s seven highly customizable character classes for players to choose from—the Amazon, Barbarian, Paladin, and Sorceress from the core game, as well as the Druid from the included Lord of Destruction expansion. The Necromancer and Assassin will be available when the game officially launches on September 23. Players who preorder the game will also gain early access to the open beta test taking place in August on supporting platforms.
Since our announcement, the community’s enthusiasm and support has been staggering. We can’t wait to begin this adventure and share more details with you on our upcoming beta test. So, rally your friends and stay tuned! Learn more from our website here, or for real-time updates, follow the Dark Lord on Twitter @Diablo!
First and foremost, thank you to everyone who played Battlegrounds last week and sent us thoughtful and informed feedback on same-faction play. While we don’t plan to re-enable it again over the next few days, we’re analyzing the data we collected, and we’re planning to test more soon.
Here are some of our initial findings that will inform our next test:
Before this test, most players who joined the queue were unable to get a match, sometimes after waiting for over an hour and/or dropping out of the queue altogether. This was particularly unfortunate at some times of day or in some regions. During the test, BG queue times became short and reliable for both factions.
Prior to the first test, we wondered if the queue was having an effect on PvP in the outdoor world, and we now have data showing that when same-faction Battlegrounds were available, PvP deaths in the outdoor world were very close to 50/50 between the factions.
Similarly, win-rates for the two factions when facing the other faction in Battlegrounds were close to 50/50.
We’ll let you know as soon as we’ve completed our analysis, have decided on any further tweaks to the system, and are ready to test it again.
As soon as we saw Battleground queue times go way up a few weeks ago, we got to work on our options for addressing the situation. They’ve all been discussed here and elsewhere, as you know, and in addition to following your discussions closely, we looked at game history and data. What was most evident from all of your feedback was: players want to continue to play on their chosen side of the faction conflict, players don’t want to wait in long queues for BGs, and players don’t want a highly convoluted mechanism for getting into a BG.
To solve those issues as best we can, we’ve been internally testing a configuration where the War Games system is used to bring about Horde vs. Horde or Alliance vs. Alliance Battlegrounds from the regular queue, and we’re ready to test it in the live game. Here’s the plan:
Starting tomorrow (Friday, July 2), we’re going to enable same-faction Battlegrounds.
You’ll queue for BGs as usual, and the matchmaker will first try to make an opposite-faction match for you.
If an opposite-faction match cannot be quickly made, you’ll be matched against a team from your faction.
Rewards such as Honor and Reputation will be assigned as usual.
We’ve been thinking of these like military training exercises, and to help get that feeling across in-game, we’re testing putting masks and tabards on the team playing out of the enemy faction’s base.
Please note that same-faction play won’t be available for Alterac Valley, which was never hooked up for War Games and would be particularly awkward for the team that found themselves fighting alongside a great number of enemy NPCs.
We’ll follow the action closely throughout the weekend, and with scheduled maintenance next week (July 6 in this region), we’re going to return the matchmaker to its regular configuration and analyze what happened.
When same-faction play goes live tomorrow, we’ll open a new feedback thread in this forum. After you’ve played some BGs, please come to that new thread and let us know how it went.
Blizzard just sent out a new survey to random players. This survey is asking for feedback on the possibility of fresh Classic realms and possible updates to Classic. These range from summoning stones to a possible introduction of the barber shop…
Classic Survey – Fresh Realms
Along with these changes, Blizzard seems to be eyeing possible fresh servers on a cycle. Some would call these seasonal servers. This image was provided by user liljoey300 via Reddit.
Seasonal survey
To go with the season timing, Blizzard sent out another survey asking about things such as faster gold and/or exp rates and many other “seasonal” changes.
Seasonal changes
Hopefully, this means we should be getting fresh seasonal servers for Classic soon. I think this would be a great update!
