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Blizzard Knows Diablo 4 Season 14’s Mythic Changes Are Controversial, But It’s For The Game’s “Long-Term Health”
Diablo 4 Season 14 is set to be one of the biggest shakeups for the ARPG in quite some time, even as Blizzard deals with what it described as "issues compounding issues."
The upcoming season, titled Death Awakening, is bringing controversial changes to Mythic items, weakening many build staples players have become accustomed to while opening the door for any of the game's 100+ Uniques to become "Mythic" quality with a 30% boost to the item's Unique power. This major update to items and how players construct builds isn't just for the season, but is intended to come to the game in its entirety as a permanent change.
At first glance, it looks like a win on paper. Less one-item-fits-all solutions and more build diversity, a frequent ask from the community, sounds like a good thing. The issue has stemmed from Blizzard's approach. It added a heavy dose of randomness to the game's best items, first to Uniques in Lord of Hatred, then to Mythics as part of proposed changes for Season 14. A Unique or Mythic item could have completely undesirable affixes, making the dopamine thrill of getting what is supposed to be one of the best items in the game instead feel like Blizzard is playing a cruel practical joke. While players do have some control over adding and modifying affixes via the Horadric Cube, it felt like far more work (and luck) was required to get a usable item that will last long term, much less a great item that will last an entire season.
Blizzard knows it's stuck between a rock and a hard place. Following a playtest of the new season on Diablo 4's public test realm and feedback from a concerned community, Blizzard is now meeting players halfway. There is still some randomness to be found, but Unique and Mythic items will now have two set affixes instead of only one. Crafting Mythics via the cube will also be more focused. Instead of receiving a largely random item when upgrading a Unique into a Mythic, it will now match the slot of the original item. It's a step in the right direction, but it remains to be seen how players will react to the season overall once it arrives in full.
It's all in service of ensuring Diablo 4's long-term health, Dan Tanguay, design director for live services on Diablo 4, said in an interview with GameSpot. One of the main goals behind the changes was to make it so a handful of the game's current Mythic Uniques--must-have items like Heir of Perdition or The Grandfather--don't continue to dominate.
"There's a handful of them that just become best-in-slot," Tanguay said. "Once you can earn that, you get lucky enough to roll it, drop it, or craft it, that's it--you're never going to worry about that slot again. And it kind of narrows the types of builds that players will pursue, especially if they're reading Maxroll or Icy Veins or something like that. We really want to increase the possibilities at the end of the game for what your build can be, and we need to look at mechanics that allow us to do that."
The fix the team came up with, and one it was excited about, Tanguay said, was to make regular Uniques more competitive by having them become Mythic and amping up their power. At the same time, the choice was made to bring down the power of the game's existing Mythics, now referred to as Iconic Mythics, by inserting a level of randomness.
Random affixes for Uniques in Lord of Hatred did not go over well, but were done to combat how easy fixed-affix Uniques were to get and to increase the length of their "item journey," Tanguay said. Work on Season 14 was already well underway by the time Diablo 4's second expansion launched and Blizzard started to receive negative feedback surrounding the Unique change. That led to what Tanguay called a "perfect storm" in regards to the Season 14 PTR, where Blizzard looked to test its proposed revamp.
"We had started getting this feedback that people weren't happy with some of these changes to Uniques, and we were like 'Oh boy, well, we were building on top