Diablo 4 Season 2: Season of Blood Stream Summary

Update: you can check out the official Season 2 preview here.

The big information reveal for Diablo 4’s second season arrives today! We’ll have a full summary of everything revealed on the stream right here. The Season of Blood Launches on October 17th.

Stream Highlights

We already know we’re getting some mount upgrades in addition to all the new Season of Blood features, so let’s dive into the upcoming stream.

In Season 2, you can obtain Vampiric Powers that empower your characters in various ways.
Blood Harvests are a new world event where players rescue villagers and stop rituals.
5 new endgame bosses are coming for World Tier 3 and 4. The bosses will allow you to farm Uniques.
Rewards will be account-bound, the mounts you unlocked on one character will be available to all characters on your accounts.
During the season 2 intro quest, you will ally with a Vampire Hunter who wants to hunt down a vampire and his minions.

Vampiric Powers

Will have a separate interface.
You can obtain up to 22 Vampiric Powers during the season.

The powers are class-agnostic. Here are some examples of Vampiric Powers. One turns you into a cloud of bats and makes you Unstoppable for a short duration.

All armor pieces will have a number of pacts associated with them in Season 2. The pacts only appear on armor pieces, not on jewelry.
Every armor piece will have pacts associated with them in Season 2.
You can remove/add pacts onto items.
Bloodseekers have a chance to drop potent blood, a currency used to upgrade Vampiric Powers and unlock new ones available through the UI. Whenever you find them you want to kill them.
Bloodseekers can be found in Dungeons and Blood Harvests.

Blood Harvests

Lord Zir’s minions have taken large swaths of zones in the Sanctuary.
Blood Harvests are available at Level 1.
They are constantly up. When 1 ends, another begins shortly after.
You will be earning new materials in Blood Harvests. Vampiric keys to open chests and an item that summons bloodseekers to your location.
You will be earning new rewards in Season 3 through a system called Hunter’s Acclaim.

Launch Content Progression (Now Versus Season 2)

Blizzard shared a slide with the current launch content progression that’s live right now and the improved version that’s coming in Season of Blood.

In Season 2, players will have more activities to complete.

Uber Uniques

You can farm them from Duriel in Season 2. You will see people from your Clan having Uber Uniques, they will still be relatively rare to other types of items, but definitely more frequent.

Whenever a Uber Unique drops it will ALWAYS ROLL WITH THE HIGHEST VALUES POSSIBLE.

End-Game Bosses

Five bosses are coming to both Eternal and Seasonal Realms. You will need reagents to summon some of them. The materials can be traded between players and farmed with friends.

Each boss has 5 Uniques tied to them, allowing for target farming.

Gameplay and Quality-of-Life Changes Coming in Season 2

The devs now talk about about general improvements coming in the Season 2 patch.

Scrolls of Escape will be consumed automatically if a Hardcore player disconnects while in combat, teleporting them to a safe location.
Incenses now grant a bonus to XP and they persist after death.
Experience bonuses are now multiplicative with the World Tier bonus.
It will be 40% faster to reach Level 100 in Season 2 compared to Season 1.
Ten unlocked waypoints will be added to Skip Campaign, 2 in each zone.
Renown rewards will persist between seasons and new characters (obols, skill points, etc).
Overworld Monsters in World Tier 3 and 4 will no longer trail the player’s level after levels 55 and 75 respectively.
Two additional character slots are coming in Season 2.
Occultist has set up shop by the Tree of Whispers.
Stashes have been added to all small towns with waypoints.
Additional stashes have been added to capital cities near important vendors.
Purveyors of Curiosities have set up shop closer to the waypoints in Kyovashad, Zarbinzet, Ked Bardu, and Gea-Kul.
Mounts are now less likely to get stuck or slow down unexpectedly. Improved mounts automatically jump over traversals.
The base movement speed of mounts will be increased by 14%. Top speed remains unchanged. Achieving full speed when using mouse and keyboard has improved.
The speed boost from Spur duration increased by 50%.
Using Spur now breaks through barricades.
Manual dismount cooldown is now 5 seconds (was 10).
Forced dismount cooldown is now 15 seconds (was 30).
Dismount combat skill now has a 3-second cooldown (down from 10 seconds).
Teleporting to a Nightmare Dungeon now takes the player inside the dungeon, instead of teleporting to the Dungeon Entrance.
Dungeon events monster density increased. NPCs no longer get one shot in later world tiers.
Overall readability of traps has been improved. CC time in general has been greatly decreased.
Paragon Glyph Experience has been increased.
Close monster attacks from behind cause you to become Vulnerable. Vulnerable damage taken is increased by X%.
Monster attacks reduce the damage of your Critical Strikes for 3 seconds by X%, stacking up to Y% (depending on World Tier).
Prevent death pulses on monsters that have on-death explosions.
Prevent death pulses from spawning on top of each other.
Being shocked while in the bubble grants 35% bonus Movement Speed for 5 seconds.
Lightning Storm will only start when players are in combat.
Lightning Storm will only start when the player has a direct path to the bubble.
Persistent duration of Drifting Shade has been reduced to 3 seconds (down from 5).
Drifting Shade respawn time increased by 2 seconds.
Completely removed objectives from a handful of dungeons, just to find the boss. Placed objectives on the critical path through the dungeon.
Many dungeon layouts have been redesigned. Additional changes were made to dungeon layouts to limit backtracking while preventing the dungeons from feeling too linear.

Legion Events time between events reduced from 30 minutes to 25 minutes. Warning timer increased from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. Fixed an issue where the Legion Event pin would not display at the edge of player’s minimaps if a Whisper was active for the Legion event.
World Boss spawns have been reduced from 6 hours to 3.5 hours. The warning timer increased from 30 minutes to 60 minutes. Fixed an issue where the World Boss pin would not display at the edge of player’s minimaps if a Whisper was active for the World Boss. A message is broadcasted to all players when the World Boss is 15 minutes from spawning.
Nightmare Sigils rewarded from Whisper Caches will now always be within 5 levels of the highest level Nightmare Dungeon the player has completed.
Gold Rewards from whisper caches has been greatly increased.
Experience from Whispers/Helltide has been increased substantially.
Whisper Caches adhere to the item slot of the cache.
Helltide Chests now have specific icons on the map to indicate their type.
Items can now be marked as “Favorite” or “Junk” in your stash or inventory. Favorited items cannot be sold or salvaged.
Extracted Aspects with the same Legendary Power will now be grouped together when sorted in the Inventory and Stash.
Sorting of normal affixes on items has been improved to be more consistent.
Dungeon Map Tooltips that have active Whispers associated with them will now display the Aspect Name and Description earned when completing that dungeon as well.
Stash can now be searched and filtered to more quickly find items.
Streamer mode has been implemented. Players that wish to hide identifying information, such as character name or Battle.net tag, can now find these new settings in the Social Options menu.
Combat text has an added option for hiding text (i.e. Vulnerable, Dodge, Fortified).
Auto-run has been added. When pressing the bound key/button, the player character will continuously move in the direction currently faced or of the mouse cursor until another movement action or skill is initiated.
Minimap has been zoomed out farther to capture a wider area.
Gems no longer drop directly as rewards. Now players will earn Gem Shard materials they can use at the Jeweler to craft gems.
Enchantment costs have been updated. The initial cost for the first Enchant will be a bit higher than it is now, but the price cost spike will not be as significant for players trying to reroll their stats.
Crafting materials will drop in place of lower Item Power Normal, Magic, and Rare equipment in World Tiers 3 and 4. For example, in World Tier 4, only Ancestral items will drop for you as you play, you will no longer see Sacred or Normal items, Legendaries and Uniques (Sacred / Normal) will still appear for you. The changes will help with inventory management.
Higher level monsters in World Tier 3 and 4 drop Sacred and Ancestral items of greater Item Power potential.
Normal Whisper cache rewards now provide +10 Item Power. Upgraded caches now provide +20 Item Powe rewards.
Helltide cache rewards now provide +20 Item Power value.

Season Blessings

We will have 3 new Season Blessings.

Battle Pass Cosmetics

The free track will include various town portals.

Diablo 4 Coming to Steam

Blizzard announced Diablo 4 is coming to Steam with Season 2. Cross-platform progression will work from Day 1 on October 17, 2023.

Q&A

It’s Q&A time!

They want to implement more endgame stuff and improve itemization.
They are looking into compelling ways to provide people with activities at Level 100 that make them stronger.
They are looking into a Paragon Reset button.
Stash search works for Legendary Affixes.
They want to improve Clan management features in the future and add more social features to the game.
Season 2 includes 12 Uniques.
Uber Lilith will be nerfed in Season 2 to be easier.
More content will be added to Eternal Realms beyond the endgame bosses.
They want to improve the Codex of Power and they will have more information to share in the future.
Leaderboards are coming in Season 3.
The Nightmare Dungeon rotation will remain the same during Season 2.
They will continue to make improvements to Stash space. However, there are no new Stash tabs coming in Season 2.

Livestream

You can watch the livestream below.

We’ll be hearing more about class tuning, damage bucket changes, the Resistance stat rework and what’s happening with Uniques in next week’s stream on October 10th.