Patch 2.5 for Diablo 2 Resurrected has recently gone live. The patch brings many changes and prepares for Season 2, which is set to launch soon. Here is all the info.
Diablo 2 may have over 20 years under its belt, but the 2021 remaster breathed new life into the game. Since then, the role-playing game has regularly received new updates and in April, the new ranking season even finally started.
Soon the second season will begin, and a new patch was applied on 22 September. And this update was quite something! It made big optional changes to the endgame of Diablo 2: Resurrected and brings even more exciting changes.
The new Endgame Feature
Patch 2.5 is designed to allow a greater mass of people to reach level 99 during their heroic lives. In the past, this maximum level was a milestone that required a lot of willpower and time. In the future, it should be possible to reach this milestone faster in Diablo 2. The developers also hope that this will make the end game of Diablo 2 even more varied.
In order to achieve all of this, the new terror zones have now been introduced.
- How to unlock terror zones
Terror zones are an optional feature that must be activated when creating an online game. However, the feature must be unlocked for each character and difficulty level by defeating Baal and completing Act V. However, you can also simply join a friend”s game who has already been allowed to activate Terror Zones. - How Terror Zones work
Once the feature has been activated, quakes will occur every hour in specific zones. These quakes can encourage and terrorise monsters. This means that the monsters are usually at least two levels above you – however, there is also an upper limit set by the difficulty level (level 48 for Normal, level 74 for Nightmare and level 99 for Hell). Such monsters drop better loot and give you even more experience.
There are a few clues in the game that you can use to discover the terror zones. For example, terror zones are marked with purple lettering at the waypoints and you will see a few special overlays such as on-screen texts, symbols or graphic effects.
All info about Season 2
When does Season 2 start?
The second ranked season for Diablo 2: Resurrected will start on October 7 at 2am How long the season will run has not been announced. But expect at least four months.
What”s new in Season 2?
There are two big changes for Season 2. We have already introduced one to you. For the first time, you can play Diablo 2 with terror zones and thus reach level 99 even faster. The second big change is the spells with breakthrough.
These new spells are supposed to prevent certain class builds from not having a chance to grind in some zones on Hell difficulty. After all, it can happen here that enemies receive a complete immunity to damage types. To break through such immunities, there are now six new spells. These spells can be found without exception in terror zones, where they are dropped by unique, super-unique, champion or boss monsters.
The following spells can be obtained in Season 2:
- The Black Breach: Against Magic Immunity
- The Broken Bone: Against Physical Immunity
- The Cold Splitter: Against Cold Immunity
- The Sky Crack: Against Lightning Immunity
- The Flame Rift: Against Fire Immunity
- The rot gap: Against poison immunity
What are the rankings?
In total, you can compete with your characters in four different rankings. Remember that you will need to create a new ranked character if you want to be ranked in the ladder. You can choose from the following lists:
- Base game ladder: You play the base game of Diablo 2 without expansion.
- Hardcore base game ranking: You are playing the base game without expansion but only have one life available.
- Rankings: You play the full game including Act 5 from the expansion.
- Hardcore Ranking: You play the full game but only have one life available.
In addition to all these changes, patch 2.5 also adjusts the game in other ways. Bugs are fixed and small improvements are made. The complete patch notes can be found on the next page.
PATCHNOTES
Gameplay/Simplifications
- Added an additional warning to the confirmation window of a new mercenary if your previous mercenary still has items equipped.
- The damage value of Paladins” Thorn Aura is now visible in the character menu.
- Dead Finger Mages will now reset to their original status when resurrected by Necromancers as intended.
- Fixed a bug that could cause deployment delays to desync on a high ping.
- Fixed a bug where unique mods of certain monsters were triggered by the trigger of another mod. For example, Lightning and Fire Enchanted monsters were triggering an explosion every time they recovered from hits (ex: on repeated hits from War Cry).
- Fixed a rare bug where names of items on the ground would flicker and move erratically when moving around them.
- Fixed a bug where players and monsters could walk through doors that looked like they were closed.
- Fixed a bug where certain rune words could not be fixed in the same game session they were created.
- Fixed a bug where loading a character created on PC would cause texture and lighting errors on consoles.
- Fixed a bug that could occur when selecting a multi-key mapping for a skill (e.g.: CTRL + X, ALT + X). The action associated with the first key was then removed from that key.
- Fixed a bug where the game name and password were not updating and displaying in-game as intended when the show option was enabled.
- Fixed a bug where updates for stats, skills or quests were displayed even when no updates were available.
- Fixed a bug where hardcore character names were not in red in the character list.
- Fixed a bug with the original graphics update icon of the gambling system having graphical artifacts and bugs.
- Fixed a bug where attacks with claw weapons in one or both hands had inconsistent attack speeds.
- Fixed a bug where markers belonging to previous characters (Ranked, Hardcore, and Classic) persisted for newly created characters in the character creation menu with original graphics.
- Fixed a bug where the legend for the Buy button in the merchant window was not displayed in the first weapon tab.
- Fixed a bug where certain graphical effects were causing graphical errors when fighting Über-Diablo.
- Fixed a bug where Iron Golems could lose the aura they received from the item they were created from when the Golem was frozen.
- Selected game settings are now retained in the lobby creation and filter menu and are not reset.
- Fixed a bug where Iron Golems created in a previous game would disappear instead of teleporting to you.
- Fixed a bug where swapping weapons in a trade could sometimes cause the game to freeze.
- Fixed a bug where graphical effects could sometimes be turned on and off by set bonuses.
- Fixed a bug where graphical environment effects would not play.
- Fixed a bug where iron golems summoned by a skill charge (e.g. metal grids) would disappear when performing an inventory update.
- Fixed a bug where Iron Golems summoned by a skill charge were not saved between games.
- Fixed a bug where players playing with console and controller would sometimes see the red health loss flash while performing an inventory update.
- Fixed a bug where the Horadrim Cube could not be quickly discarded when items were inside and playing on console or with a controller.
- Fixed a bug where similar items would not group together when auto-filling the belt when using a controller.
- Fixed several bugs when moving a belt with items in the extra belt slots when using a controller.
- Fixed a bug that sometimes prevented you from quickly equipping an item whose conditions were met by another equipped item.
- Fixed a bug where an item with reduced requirements would sometimes still count as an item with unmet requirements when equipped on a mercenary.
- Fixed a desync with mana values that could occur when consuming and restoring mana in very close proximity.
- Fixed a bug where quick insert would sometimes assign the previous skill to the wrong mouse button.
- For Act V mercenaries with two weapons, two attack swings are now displayed instead of one.
- Fixed a bug where there were no corresponding suicide servant versions of the three guest servant variants. These Guest Servants no longer turn into a skeleton and continually stack blast damage when attacked by Nihlathak or an Overseer.
- Fixed a bug where Sky Fist could be used in error when the skill was set on a controller or assigned to the left mouse button on mouse/keyboard.
- Fixed a bug where companions summoned by skills with a trigger chance would disappear after an inventory update was performed.
- Fixed a bug where ravens summoned by skill charges would disappear after a few seconds.
- Death Summoner
- Difficulty level penalty for life drain now applies to Blood Golem attacks.
- Fixed a bug where Blood Golems were not stealing life from a PvP opponent as intended.
- Fixed a bug where, in rare cases, the experience point distribution calculation in a party of eight players could get out of hand and award less experience than intended.
Bug fixes for PC
- A friend rejection can now be undone, so the rejection is no longer permanent.
- Fixed a bug where the chat command “/friends list” was truncated after 256 characters.
- The print button can no longer be assigned.
- Fixed a bug that prevented controls from working when a player opened chat after dying with the original graphic active.
- Fixed a bug that prevented an item from being selected and displayed if an item linked in chat was longer than one line.
- Fixed a bug where when entering the lobby and then entering a game, the difficulty selection would be blank when returning to the lobby.
- Removed the scroll bar and buttons from the chat command suggestion menu.
- When a skill was assigned to a button and that button was then removed, the skill was still displayed without assignment. This bug has been fixed.
- Improved scrolling in the Ranked Season, Ranked Type, and Class drop-down menu in the Ranked Tab in the Online Lobby.
- Corrected a tooltip that mistakenly displayed “Show game name and password” to “Show game name”.
- Fixed a bug where the latency display in the lobby was not centred.
- Fixed a bug where the latency indicator disappeared when the player selected controller mode in the lobby.
- Skills can now always be assigned to left or right slots regardless of whether you meet the conditions for using them.
- Fixed a bug where rings were always assigned to the right slot even if the left one was open.
- Players using the mouse/keyboard can now quickly put on and take off items for their character and mercenaries.
- Fixed a bug where dragging an item onto a mercenary”s portrait did not swap out the currently equipped item.
- The voice assistant now uses the voice (installed on Windows) that corresponds to the selected language (set in the Battle.net launcher).
- The voice assistant reads out all chat commands, regardless of the channel.
- The voice assistant will only read the text when reading an item link aloud, not a combination of numbers and letters.
- Added an in-game icon to show friends who are online and playing Overwatch 2.
- Fixed a bug where players would not automatically enter a whisper channel when a player whispers at someone in another channel.
Console specific bug fixes
- Character names are now correctly displayed in the game details.
- Classic characters can no longer create games with non-classic content in the game creator menu (e.g. Act V).
- Updated the game creator menu icon to be more distinct from the search menu.
- Updated the magnifying glass icon in the game list search to match the text colour.
- Fixed a bug where the leaderboard season end message was mistakenly displayed on the front end.
- Fixed a bug where connecting a second controller belonging to a different player profile disconnected the game.
- Improved leaderboard loading for Ranked Season for PS4 and PS5.
- Fixed a rare bug that could cause the console language to display “Unknown” when changing the language in-game.
- Fixed a bug on the Switch where the tab text of the quest log was cut off in Italian.
- Fixed a bug that caused the end time of the Ranked Season to be displayed incorrectly.
- Fixed a bug where the emote menu was disabled when you died.
- When using the controller to close the inventory while an item is still in your cursor, the item will now be placed in your inventory and not dropped.
Location
- Work has been done on more gender neutral language in English.
- A prefix has been added to messages from online games regarding About Diablo received in offline games.
- Translations for the auto map tooltip have been added.
- Fixed a bug where the game text for max gold was too long in the Polish, Russian, Mexican and Portuguese translations.
- Adjusted a number of equipped skill names that were too long in the Russian and Polish translations.
- Removed unnecessary spaces between tabs on the PC in the quest log, waypoints and loot chest when playing with a controller and large font mode.
- Changed date format for Japanese to year/month/day.
- Corrected a typo in the Japanese translation for the quick equip and discard in the mercenary tooltip.
Stability
- Fixed a crash on PC that could occur when resizing the client window in the lobby.
- Improved the backend processes of game entry and creation to allow for smoother gameplay.
- Various game stability improvements
Mods
We have made a few changes to improve mods for offline single-player games. While these changes will cause compatibility issues with current offline single player mods, they will provide mod developers with many more customization options.
- New file added: LevelGroups.txt. Through this file, levels can be merged to compress messages into terror zones.
- New file added: hirelingdesc.txt. This file sets the mercenary”s monster class data, but not his value block. Currently it only determines the type of voice.
- Various attributes of the user interface of mercenaries can now be modified via data. These include skill icons, inventory slot backgrounds and class names.
- New parameters have been added to the mercenary AI to remove hardcoding. More details can be found in monai.txt.
- Hardcoded relationships for items that can be equipped on the belt have been removed. Similar items are now determined by spell type for scrolls and item type for all others.
- Fixed a controller crash that could occur when using new player skills that were listed after the original skills.
Changes to save states
In “ItemStatCost.txt” a few changes have been made to save items. If an existing single player mod has edited these values, save states from that mod may be corrupted when old save states are merged with the new save version. We recommend creating backups of existing saves before loading them.
- “damageresist” and “magicresist”
- Save Bits: 8 -☻ 9
- Save Add: 0 -☻ 200
- “fireresist”, “lightresist”, “coldresist” and “poisonresist”
- Save Bits: 8 -☻ 9
- Save Add: 50 -☻ 200
Column Changes for Text Files
Developers of existing mods for offline single-player can recreate their changes with the new data or add these new columns before merging.
levels.txt
- “LevelGroup”
monstats.txt
- “CannotDesecrate”
- “NoShldBlock” -☻ “ShieldBlockOverride”
skillsdesc.txt
- “hireableiconcel”
soundenviron.txt
- “InheritEnvrionment”
