News Tag: Diablo 4 Sanctification

Diablo 4 Season 11, Season of Divine Intervention, has been postponed from the previously speculated December 9th to December 11th, specifically at 8:30 PM Pacific Standard Time, unlike the usual 10:00 AM start time.

Season 11 differs significantly from PTR 2.5.0, including a large amount of new content, system rework, and balance adjustments. However, the core theme is a slower overall game pace, increased difficulty, and a general nerf to build strength compared to Season 10.

In PTR, players were generally dissatisfied with changes to crafting aspects such as Sanctification system and Masterworking, and the official response was that these would be adjusted. These changes are now live in Season 11 release. Let's take a look at the specific changes.

Sanctification System

Sanctification is a new seasonal mechanic introduced in Diablo IV Season 11. The development team seemed to have considered making it a permanent system, but recent campfire chat hints that it might not be.

Veteran ARPG players will recognize that this system's core concept originates from similar systems in other ARPGs, such as Vaal orbs in Path of Exile and Worldstone Shards in Diablo 2 mod.

Essentially, it's a gambling mechanic with gear. Players can potentially gain powerful buffs to a piece of gear or brick it. Based on strong feedback from the player community, the development team made two key changes to Sanctification mechanic.

Removing Negative Effects On Specific Gear

In PTR, Sanctification could replace an affix on gear. While the new affix might be powerful, it could also brick the gear by replacing Greater Affix on Uniques and Mythic Unique items.

The current official solution prevents the attributes of Unique and Mythic Unique gear from being replaced. This means that the risk of destruction for top-tier gear, which is of greatest concern to most players, is no longer present. This negative effect may only exist on Legendary gear, and its impact is significantly reduced.

Changing No-effect Outcome Result

In PTR, there was approximately a 20% chance that sanctification would result in no change, meaning the equipment neither improved nor damaged. In Season 11 live servers, this 20% probability has been replaced with an increase in equipment quality.

This effect works in conjunction with Masterworking system, as Masterworking can increase equipment quality by up to 25%, with each 1% quality increase boosting all equipment stats by 1%. Sanctification now directly increases equipment quality by 5% to 25%, improving base stats such as armor, resistances, weapon damage, and the values ​​of all affixes, tempers, and mythic equipment stats.

Sanctification Probabilities

Based on official information and player testing results in PTR, the possible results and approximate probability distribution of sanctification are as follows:

10% probability: Replace an affix

• Approximately 15% probability: Add a new power.
• Approximately 20% probability: Add a more powerful affix.
• Approximately 30-35% chance: Adds a random powerful affix.
• Approximately 10-15% chance: Improves equipment quality.

According to Diablo 4 community manager, the new Might pool contains some incredibly powerful options, and the affixes added by Sanctification come from a specific pool of powerful affixes, which may include:

• Cooldown reduction
• Attack speed
• +2 to all skills on jewelry
• Doubling the strength of gems
• Percentage core stats
• Total resistance
• Crit chance
• Movement speed
• Lucky chance
• Resource cost reduction
• Maximum resource
• Maximum life

Defense System Overhaul  

Diablo 4 has made many changes to the defense system, including a rework of Fortify and Toughness system.

Fortify Reworked

Diablo 4 Season 11 introduced a new attribute, Fortify. It has also been reworked in the live servers of Season 11. It no longer directly provides damage reduction. The new mechanism is: when you take damage, Fortify points are converted into health regeneration, essentially a second health bar.

Fortify can coexist with Barrier, but they function differently: Barrier adds a shield to health, while Fortify quickly regenerates health after it is depleted.

New Defense System

Season 11 introduced a completely new Resistance and Armor system, but the specific workings (such as the cap) are somewhat unclear.

Additionally, UI displays a comprehensive Toughness value as a reference for survivability at each difficulty level, but you shouldn't blindly rely on this value. You must balance improving all resistances; otherwise, too low a single resistance can still lead to instant death.

Intelligence class can equip Skulls gems. For non-Intelligence classes, if the primary attribute is Armor, socket Diamonds to increase all resistances.

Affix Updates

Rings and gloves will have new affixes such as life on hit and coldown reduction, and Life on hit will be a crucial survival affix.

Crafting Changes

Tempering System

Tempering changes are consistent with PTR, and each item can now only be tempered once. As compensation, Diablo 4 items will drop with an additional base affix. While player control over affixes is reduced, the total number of affixes remains unchanged.

Masterworking Upgrade Rework

Masterworking has received some adjustments compared to PTR. Its maximum level has been increased from 12 to 25. While the increase per level is smaller, the cumulative increase may be greater, perhaps providing a 50% increase in base stats. Furthermore, there is now a chance to critically strike upon upgrading, resulting in an even greater boost.

Potion System Changes

Basic potions can no longer be upgraded, and players will only have four basic potions. As compensation, your character will automatically replenish one potion every 30 seconds to cope with prolonged battles.

These are the main changes to crafting and items in Diablo 4 Season 11 live server. Compared to PTR, it restores the strength of builds, preventing players from struggling this season.

With Season 11 launching soon, are you sure you've got a good grasp of the key content from the previews? Knowing your enemy is half the battle; mastering important information beforehand will help you adapt to the new season faster.

Of all the new mechanics, those related to gear upgrades have received significant changes in Season 11, including more consistent upgrade rates for gear affixes in Tempering and Masterworking, and the entirely new Sanctification.

Furthermore, this season also features new unique items for each class, just like before. Therefore, in Season 11, besides mastering the basic uses of these Uniques, you'll also need to learn how to enhance them using Sanctification - we'll show you.

Rogue - Death's Pavane

The biggest advantage of these unique pants for Rogue is that they allow for better use of the classic build Dance of Knives this season. This is because they give you a higher dodge chance when channeling Dance of Knives skill.

Furthermore, this gear provides up to 11% base critical strike chance and a movement speed bonus. This not only increases Dance of Knives skill level and agility damage, but it's also beneficial for other highly mobile Rogue builds.

However, we highly recommend using it to enhance Dance of Knives in Season 11. It allows you to obtain Dance of Knives items upon hitting enemies, granting a charge that increases skill damage by 20 times for 6 seconds.

More importantly, this damage can stack up to 3 times, meaning your final damage output from Dance of Knives skill, or your entire build, will be multiplied by 3, or 60 times. Combined with your base damage, you'll dominate the dungeon!

Note that many elite enemies have been buffed in Season 11. Therefore, to fully utilize your Dance of Knives build to counter them, you'll also need to buy Diablo 4 items that can coordinate with Death's Pavane.

Sorcerer - Orsivane

This one-handed mace might seem out of place for a Sorcerer on style, but it offers significant buffs, including increases to damage, maximum health, and core skill levels.

More importantly, it has a unique effect: for every defensive skill not on your action bar, your damage increases by 20-40%, and you gain associated enchantments.

Generally, a Sorcerer should have four defensive skills in combat, meaning this mace provides a 40x4, or 160x, damage multiplier - a huge boost.

While this effect might not match the overall DPS of the core skills provided by the various Sorcerer gear in Chaos Armor version of Season 10, the added enchantments make up for it.

Spiritborn - Path Of The Emissary

This new item is a pair of unique boots that increase your movement speed and core ability damage, and these damage effects are expected to stack (otherwise, the buff would be meaningless). It also increases core ability level and debuffs.

The boots' unique ability is that every 12 to 14 meters moved, you can summon a core ability from your Primary Spirit Hall:

• Quill Volley - Eagle
• Stinger - Centipede
• Rake - Jaguar
• Crushing Hand - Gorilla

This effect means you can utilize Spirit Hall mechanic to create more usable Spiritborn builds in Season 11, enriching the class's playability. For example, you can apply different debuffs to enemies.

Barbarian - Chainscourged Mail

This unique pair's special ability is that after casting a damaging melee ability, that ability is disabled. For each disabled ability, your melee ability damage increases by 50-100%. If all melee skills are disabled, they will be re-enabled, and their cooldowns will be refreshed.

Gear's basic functions include:

• + All Stats
• + Maximum Life
• + Brawling Skills
• Cooldown Reduction

When playing Barbarian, you should typically carry five melee skills, activating and cycling them one by one - all you need to do is keep tapping your skill bar.

Druid - Khamsin Steppewalkers

These unique boots increase your movement speed and crowd control duration, and provide a reduction in nature spell cooldowns, further granting you a 25% bonus to your enhanced attacks.

Their unique power grants a charge if you deal damage to at least 100 enemies with your storm ability. Subsequent defensive abilities will grant 1 second of maximum movement speed and Unhindered.

Unhindered means you can pass through enemies. Each charge grants an additional second of Unhindered, and enemies you collide with during the charge will be immobilized.

Therefore, you can add more skills or gear to stack bonuses that enhance stun effects, allowing you to better control enemies with Khamsin Steppewalkers and deal more damage in a short time.

Necromancer - Gravebloom

The value of this one-handed mace lies in its unique power, allowing you to summon three small golems, each dealing 40-60% of normal damage and gaining a 30% attack speed and 50% respawn speed bonus.

Furthermore, when the golems are at full health, they reduce enemy attack speed, and summoning a golem to attack twice grants Golem Mastery. This will be very suitable for the new Golem Necromancer Build in Season 11 craft.

Other gear benefits include:

• + Intelligence
• + Maximum Life
• + Chance for Golem to Hit Twice

Can Sanctification Enhance These New Gear?

As a brand new system, Sanctification allows your gear to be further enhanced after utilizing Tempering and Masterworking, but the final enhancement effect is random and cannot be modified after completion.

At first glance, this mechanism seems good, but the key issue is that if you randomly get a useless new affix, it can ruin the entire gear's value, wasting all your previous efforts to enhance it.

Therefore, from its launch on PTR to its end and even now, the player community has consistently been pessimistic about sanctification, and we also advise against hastily sanctifying new Uniques after acquiring them.

Based on this, we hope that after Season 11 launches, the development team can find a way to optimize this new mechanism, making it a true highlight of the new season, rather than just a filler feature.

That concludes our introduction. We hope this helps you choose and experience classes in Season 11! We wish you all the best on your new season journey!