Season 5 News (Campfire Summary + PTR)

This guide was written by Blyndside.

Season 4 has been a blast so far, but as it’s settling down, coverage and news about the upcoming Diablo 4 Season 5 are well underway. As always, Blizzard likes to cover these upcoming changes with their Campfire chats, which can be pretty lengthy.

In this post, we’ll cover the Campfire Chat and go over some of the changes that are coming in Diablo 4’s upcoming Season 5.

The PTR (Public Test Realm) for Diablo 4 will be from June 25th to July 2nd. You can pre-download the client’s PTR version through the Battlenet launcher under the game “Game Version”.

Diablo 4’s new Vessel of Hatred expansion will bring the Spiritborn class. Stay updated with our Spiritborn news.

Infernal Hordes is a new upcoming wave-based gameplay mode that will culminate in a boss encounter and is all located in Hell. It’ll come with its own mini questline to introduce you to the mechanic.

• Compass these will open access to Infernal Hordes in a similar fashion to Nightmare Dungeons.
• Compasses can be upgraded to higher tiers with Abyssal Scrolls, similar to Nightmare Dungeons, which have higher tiers. There are eight levels of difficulty.
• Compasses are gained by defeating Endgame bosses, Helltides, Nightmare Dungeons and Whispers.
• Infernal Hordes will be a time-limited wave-based horde mode, lasting 90 seconds each.
• At the end of the 90 seconds, you’ll be given time to kill the remaining enemies and then be given the choice of choosing between three Infernal Offers; once selected, the next wave will start.

Once you’ve gone through all waves in a tier, you’ll reach the Fell Council.

Boons and Banes

After every wave, you’ll be tempted with an Infernal Offer. The Infernal Offers give you a choice of three different Boons and Banes, and they’ll modify your run.

• Example: Elite damage increased, Elites grant increased Burning Aether.
• The more Burning Aether you have at the end of your run, the greater your rewards.

These Boons and Banes will increase the difficulty of your run but allow you to earn Burning Aether. They’ll also stack across the duration of your Infernal Hode run, so choose wisely.

Fell Council

Once you survive an Infernal Hordes run, you’ll be met with the Fell Council. These are the bosses of the Infernal Hordes, and there are a total of 5 Fell Council members.

• Each Fell Council member is equipped with their own unique ability.
• You’ll be forced to face 3 different Fell Council members at the end of each run, allowing for some variety with each run.
• The fight will escalate as you deal damage to the Fell Council, increasing the difficulty of the encounter as they’re slain.
• Who you face is random, allowing for up to 10 different variations with each encounter.

Rewards and New Uniques

Once you’ve defeated the Fell Council, you’ll be given the option of choosing what you want as a reward. Opening up new avenues of farming gear and even gold.

• Spoils of Equipment
• Spoils of Materials
• Spoils of Gold
• Spoils of Greater Equipment, this Reward guarantees an item with a Greater Affix.
• Among the rewards is a pool of new Uniques, up to 10 new Uniques overall, some for a specific class and some usable by all classes. There will also be a pool of new legendaries.

Two big updates are coming to Uniques overall, increasing the power of the design. Mythic Uniques will also be getting a facelift, new color beams, new sounds, and a New item UI.

The first big change will focus on increasing the overall high-end power of unique items.

The second change will focus on making them less competitive with Temperings by adding a tempering stat and making them more build-defining by fitting a theme with their stats.

Target Farming Uniques

You’ll now be able to target farm uniques for certain item slots; for example, when opening a Weapon/Armor Helltide Chest, you’ll have a chance at a unique for your class from that chest.

• You’ll be able to target with all forms of content that gives you a choice of item slots such as Obols, Helltides and Whispers.
• It’s also possible to obtain Mythic Uniques this way.

There will be improvements and some nerf across the board for all classes. In general, though, there will be some nerfs to Invulnerability skills so that their cooldown starts when the Invulnerability ends instead of when it begins. This is to prevent some abuse with infinite Invulnerability and to open up design choices for these skills.

Potions will not be usable while CC’d; this is to prevent deaths when death happens during long and frequent CC stacking from monsters. Monster CC across the board has also been reduced in both duration and frequency.

Now, we won’t go over everything here, but you can find a more comprehensive list of Blizzard PTR class Patch notes here.

A lot of bug fixes will be coming in Diablo 4 Season 5, such as Rogues Victimze will no longer be double dipping on its damage. There will also be a bunch of new Uniques coming for all classes, as is typical now for a new season.

Overall, class changes come in both the buff and nerf variety.

Barbarian

A new unique for the Barbarian was teased, linking Steel Grasp and Iron Maelstrom, opening up some options for Support Barbarian playstyles with the debuff option.

Rogue

Buffs being introduced to Rogue, specifically some Flurry changes to incentivise some Flurry Builds.

Druid

Sheperd’s Aspects power is being shifted to the Companions as there was previously an overuse of using Shepherd’s Aspect to buff the Druid while the companions were just there doing nothing and destroying the companion fantasy.

To compensate there will be a lot of buffs to druid skills.

Sorcerer

Pretty hype. Sorcerer Unique was teased for Sorcerers. It enhances Chain Lightning, allowing them to orbit you for a period of time and lash out at enemies as they appear. This really fulfils this Chain Lightning class fantasy, and it looks pretty good.

Necromancer

A pretty neat upgrade to the Golem was teased for the Necromancer, giving the Golem a leap-slam ability so it can get into combat significantly quicker and really giving the Golem both a quality of life buff and a nice damage buff. This works for all the Golems.

In Diablo 4 Season 5, weapon choices were opened up for certain classes, specifically Druid, Sorcerer, and Necromancer.

• Sorcerer gained the ability to use 1H Mace’s and 1H Swords
• Druid gained the ability to use 2H Polearms, 1H swords and Daggers.
• Necromancer gained the ability to use All Mace and Axes.

This has the added bonus of allowing a lot of the Uniques to be used by these classes. For example, Sorcerer will now have access to Azurewrath and Doombringer.

Weapons were also revamped a bit to make them more generically useful to a broader selection of classes now that they have access to them. The new affixes for weapons are below.

There weren’t many changes here, just more of a quality-of-life change that allows you to Temper a few more times so that bricking is a little less RNG. They’re also looking for ways to adjust this in the future.

A note about this is that this change will be retroactive, and thus, any items you have that are currently not bricked will be given additional Temperings.

Quite a few QoL for helltide and Whispers here, especially to the Whispers in Helltides. They’ve been significantly optimised so they do not take as long, do not require you to complete multiple Helltides, and are completely completable within a single Helltide.

Baneful Hearts also were made a little more valuable by adjusting their drop rates.

Endgame Bosses

Make the most of Season 5 with our interactive map that tracks Helltides, World Bosses, and other events.

Overall, a lot of these changes look great. The horde mode looks fantastic, specifically. I’m really excited about it.

The PTR will open on July 25th, so be sure to check that out to test some of these additions and changes before they hit the live server.

Let us know what you think about these changes below, what are your top changes and what changes are you disappointed with.