Diablo 2 Patch 2.5 PTR Update: September 6th

(Source)

Hey all – Apologies for the silence on the PTR front. But wanted to provide a few updates here.

The team was spending the last week going through the survey information and community reports from PTR. There may be another iteration of PTR as the team wants to implement some items based off of the feedback but that is still being determined. We are running up against some scheduling timelines and want to make sure we can get 2.5 out the door sooner rather than later and get Season 2 kicked off for ladder. Extending PTR to continue to test and iterate will of course hold those two dates back. We are going to see if we can fit something in the existing timeline for right now, but if we can’t we may use some of the buffer between Patch 2.5 hitting and Season 2 starting to ensure we can get some additional game time from players on some of the Terror Zone items.

Some top level items from the feedback:

Players were noticing some zones were kind of not great for Terror Zones so expect some to be moved out and some others be moved in.

Players found some of the TZ content to be easy but we also can determine what characters played on PTR who offered that specific feedback and we noticed a lot of this came from Hammerdin players. The team has some ideas on this and we will be sharing that soon. I expect it to create a bit of a shift in build/class opportunities for players.

We will have more info on unlock conditions for TZ and how long each zone will be terrorized as well. We appreciate those who offered their thoughts on this.

Lastly, I know there were a lot of voices wanting this in SP. I can say that it is being looked into but for now, I would expect this to be a Ladder S2 feature as we are able to make tweaks to online numbers on the fly while SP has diff values for XP and needs to be tuned differently. The desire is high, but we want to get this nailed down for ladder play first and will move into looking at it for offline afterwards.

Lastly, I wanted to clear up on the S2 timing as there is a bunch of confusion on this and honestly it is 100% understandable why there is confusion. Before S1 began, we had noted that we were aiming to have seasons last 4 months. We are obviously past that timeline and to be 100% honest, we kind of didn’t plan very well on our end for that date. Terror Zones was a cool feature we wanted to nail correctly as it teetered back and forth on the line of “Should we do this or not?” many times throughout development and with that it caused a little bit of a delay on the Season transition. I just wanted to state that and apologize for that murkiness around when that season transition would occur. We are looking at mitigating this issue for future seasons in D2R.

The current order of operation is that we will end PTR here soon and start submission for final builds on 2.5 and get out that to everyone on the live environment. Season 1 to Season 2 will happen fairly immediately. We expect S2 to start a week or two after 2.5 hits so we have a date that everyone is aligned on and knows about. S1 will literally end the second we transition to S2.

For example: Season 1 will go to 4:59:59pm Pacific Time and Season 2 will begin at 5:00:00pm Pacific Time.

As more dates become aligned here in the coming week, we will provide updates to give a better window on 2.5 and S2 for the community.