The latest developer live stream talks about the upcoming Season 9: Sins of the Horadrim, launching on July 1.
Stream Highlights
- Blizzard just showed the Season 9 infographic on stream, which covers all the features players can expect in the latest update.
- The devs are now talking about the story content in Season 9. We won’t be covering that here, as we don’t want to go into spoilers.
- The devs explained how Horadric Strongrooms will work.
- When you finish a Horadric Strongroom, you will receive an Escalation Sigil. This is going to spawna series of dungeons that you can complete one after the other.
- There are new affixes, e.g. Forgotten Wisdom spawns XP wells across the dungeon.
- Blizzard now explains how Horadric Spellcraft will work in Season 9:
- Horadric Spellcraft lets you build one custom spell by combining three parts, a Catalyst (the core spell), Infusion (changes the elemental damage type and adds effects), and Arcana (up to 3 modifiers, adding buffs, cc, executes, etc.).
- Once you slot in the Catalyst, an Infusion, and up to 3 Arcana, you can link it to a skill on your Action Bar, the Horadric effect will trigger when the bound skill is used and the spell is off cooldown.
- Horadric Jewels are powerful gems to augment your Horadric Spellcraft. They are learned from Horadric Tomes found in Strongrooms. They are crafted with Horadric Phials and Gem Fragments.
PTR Learnings
Now comes the most important part of the stream. Blizzard is going over what they’ve changed ahead of Season 9 based on community feedback and Season 9 PTR testing!
- The vast majority of improvements can be found in the updated Season 9 notes.
Horadric Strongrooms
- Horadric Strongroom UI was not clear enough, so they’ve improved it.
- A pit-style death penalty was added to Horadric Strongrooms.
- Additional ambushes were added.
- The boss will spawn right when you hit max Attunement.
- They’ve added a buff you can carry over to the Escalating Nightmare Dungeon that follows after the Horadric Strongroom.
Escalating Nightmare Dungeons
- They updated their difficulty/tuning
- They created a bunch new negative affixes.
- The Escalating Sigil now has a beam and its own art.
- A pre-Torment version of the Escalating Sigil has been added. It won’t feature the Astaroth fight, though, that’s reserved for Torment difficulties.
Balance Changes
- On high level, there are some broader issues that affect all classes in Season 9. As a result, they’re implementing Basic Skill Buffs, Overpower Nerfs, and changes to Key Passives.
- Overpower has been nerfed even more based on S9 PTR testing.
- They’ve implemented additional changes for the new Uniques introduced in Season 9.
- We will have all the details after the stream in the updated patch notes.
Seasonal Activity Variety
- Goals:
- Elites and Bosses granting Seasonal reputation.
- Lair Hoards granting Seasonal Currency.
System Updates | Legendary Item Drop Updates
- Increased quality of item drops.
- Lair Boss Unique drop quality
- Torment progression updates.
- More details here.
System Updates | Resource Economy
- They increased Legendary Rune drops.
- Infernal Hordes gem drop quantity changed.
- The drop rates for Scroll of Escape increased.
Overall, this live stream doesn’t cover many new items.
Livestream / VoD
You can watch the stream below.
