Diablo 4’s Season 15 PTR is still live, giving fans the opportunity to test the changes coming to the upcoming season.
Players have quickly realized that some of these changes were not included in the patch notes, as Blizzard has been quietly reworking how we approach elemental resistance stacking.
Currently, individual resistance affixes on gear are almost useless because their values are too low to compete with a dedicated All Resistance affix. This will change in Season 15, as those single-element resistances are getting some hefty buffs.
Fans playing the PTR report that these resistances can now reach values of up to 3,000. For comparison, a single-element resistance affix is capped at 630 in the live version of the game. This means that the current resistance values on the PTR are almost five times higher than those on live servers. While these values will surely change, individual resistances will become far more valuable than they are now.
Another unannounced change affects Charm affixes. Currently, charms cannot roll both resistances and +skill affixes at the same time. On the PTR, however, this combination is now possible, giving players yet another way to stack large amounts of resistance on their characters.
The new season will also see the return of Legacy Unique items from previous Diablo games, and some of these items offer incredibly powerful bonuses that complement this boost to defensive stats.
The first of these is Leoric’s Crown, with an effect that increases the potency of all gems slotted into the item, similar to the effect of its Diablo 3 counterpart. It also has a secondary effect that causes the item to count as a jewelry slot for socketing purposes.
This effectively gives players up to five jewelry sockets, as opposed to three. Most people will prefer to slot the powerful new gems into the Crown, but any standard gem put into it will grant yet another huge boost to its corresponding elemental resistance.
Finally, tying the entire system together is the Stone of Jordan. Diablo 4’s version of this famous item causes all of your character’s resistances to match the highest one. This is where all the previously mentioned buffs come in, since aggressively stacking single-element resistances can ultimately result in tremendous amounts of All Resistance.
Even though defensive stats like armor and resistances suffer from diminishing returns, all of this could result in major bonuses to Damage Reduction that were previously inaccessible, which might lead to balancing issues down the line.
