With Season 4, Blizzard revamped the loot system in Diablo 4 and made the items significantly stronger. One of the most important changes happened because the developers thought of it shortly before.
What change are we talking about? Blizzard revamped the loot system in Diablo 4 with Season 4 and improved it:
- Loot just felt better afterwards. There were fewer useless drops, and the items were of higher quality. Blizzard revised the affixes, removed unnecessarily complicated ones, and provided more clarity. Some players joke about the affixes as “The ultimate ‘damage on Tuesday’ addition.”
- Additionally, Blizzard reduced the number of affixes per item. When “rolling” for items, they now receive affixes that fit the class, and the overall values of the affixes were increased.
- On top of that, Blizzard introduced the “Greater Affixes” (GA). These are 1.5 times stronger than normal affixes and make items even better.
The “Greater Affixes” make the items particularly powerful – especially since they can appear not only on normal items but also on Uniques and the rare Mythic Uniques. Additionally, GA items have an item power of 800, which makes their effects even stronger than those of regular items. However, the idea for the change only came to Blizzard shortly before the update.
The video shows the new item system that came into the game with Season 4:
“We literally had only two weeks left”
When did the developers come up with the idea? According to GamesRadar+, Patrick Ferland, the lead software developer at Blizzard Entertainment, spoke about the technical side of Season 4 on March 19, 2025, at the “Game Developers Conference”. The season was themed “Loot Reborn”.
He revealed that the idea for the Greater Affixes literally came up at the last minute:
Our idea for the Greater Affixes was a very late development. We literally had only two weeks left in the development schedule when someone suggested this idea. But since we had hardened our data reconstruction for changes, we were able to proceed with a large change like this with much greater confidence that we would not destabilize the build and cause issues.
Thanks to the robust system architecture, Blizzard was able to implement the spontaneous idea just in time. The goal of the loot overhaul was to have players genuinely excited about their drops again. To achieve this, Blizzard introduced two new crafting systems that allow players to customize their gear and create true God Rolls. Players were indeed so excited about their drops that they were literally showing them off.
The next major change followed in Season 6: Blizzard removed the often criticized world tiers and introduced new torment levels in Diablo 4. However, for some players, even Torment 4 is still too easy.
The developers’ philosophy is that Torment 4 should be “desirable.” Only the top 10% of players should be able to reach it in the upcoming season. In the PTR for Season 8, players were already able to get a first impression of the new challenge. You can learn more about it here: Blizzard wants to make Diablo 4 much harder – Players have now found out how hard
