Diablo IV will introduce a big change to item level requirements alongside the game’s first season, associate game director Joe Piepiora has announced.
In an interview with the German site GameStar and later clarified on Twitter, Piepiora revealed that Diablo IV’s Season of the Malignant patch will cap the level requirements needed to wear Sacred and Ancestral items. Sacred items, which begin to drop in World Tier III, will have a max level requirement of 60. Ancestral items, which only drop in World Tier IV, will have a max level requirement of 80.
While a little confusing at first, this doesn’t mean that characters who aren’t level 60 suddenly can’t equip Sacred items. Instead, the change means that gear found by a player on a high-level character will be more easily shareable with lower-level characters. Previously, players at level 100 would only find gear requiring a level 100 character to equip, meaning it couldn’t be thrown in the stash and saved for another, lower-level character. Come Season 1, if a level 100 Barbarian player finds a great Sacred item for a Rogue, the Rogue will only need to be level 60 to equip it.
It’s a nice change for players who have high-level characters but want to start gearing out some of their alternate characters, reducing the overall grind needed to get new characters off the ground. This change, however, doesn’t do much to reduce the grind for the game’s seasons, as gear earned by a character on the game’s Eternal Realm can’t be shared with seasonal characters.
Season of the Malignant arrives July 20. It will introduce new, more powerful Malignant enemies that players can defeat and extract Malignant Hearts from, which can then be inserted into gear for powerful effects. Players will need to have completed the Diablo IV campaign on at least one character before being able to dive into the game’s new seasonal content. Participating in seasonal content, and leveling up the Season 1 Battle Pass, will require creating a new seasonal character. For more information on how Diablo IV’s seasons work, check out everything we know about Diablo IV Season 1.
In a previous update, Blizzard made it easier to farm for Unique items using Helltides and increased the cap on crafting materials. Blizzard has already teased that the patch notes for the game’s Season 1 update will be 6,600 words and will be arriving a few days ahead of Season of the Malignant’s actual launch, so there will be plenty of new changes for Diablo IV players to sink their teeth into soon.
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