With every Diablo 4 season comes a fresh gimmick, new power, or temporary meta shake-up to keep things interesting. In Diablo 4 Season 11, that twist is Sanctification — a new way to upgrade and enhance your gear even further. But during the initial PTR, most players were frustrated to see Unique and Mythic items losing core affixes in favor of weaker Sanctified Affixes. Thankfully, Blizzard stepped in with adjustments before Season 11 goes live!
What Is Sanctification in Diablo 4?
We have covered Sanctification quite a bit since the PTR, so if you want a more in-depth breakdown, you can read about it here. But for a quick overview, the Sanctification system is basically blessing your gear with the power of the heavens, giving you more stats, and every Sanctified item gets unique effects.
This allows you to infuse your legendaries and Unique’s with bonus powers, upgrading affixes into greater affixes. Replacing an affix, or adding a bonus Sanctification affix, but there were a lot of problems with this system during initial testing.
What Went Wrong?
During the PTR, the community felt that the Sanctification system wasn’t rewarding at all and was more like a lottery, with players having to gamble or grind through until they finally got that good role. The majority of the roles felt very underwhelming, with a handful of results that the community simply deemed as dead rolls. One of the biggest complaints is that players had roughly an 18% chance to have their gear ignore durability loss or become indestructible. We also previously discussed community reactions, so if you want to learn more, read about them here.
Sanctification Changes
With the release of the latest patch notes, Blizzard has finally listened to the community feedback and has made several changes to the Sanctification system. This includes the full removal of the Indestructible affix. Upgrading affixes can now occur on non-ancestral items and additional Legendary powers.
- Upgrading an affix to a Greater Affix can now also occur on non-ancestral items.
- Affixes on Ancestral Unique or Mythic Items can no longer be replaced.
- Indestructible affix replaced by adding 5-25 Quality ranks.
- To sanctify an item, it only needs to have an item power of 750 or higher in Torment difficulties, rather than being Ancestral.
- Affix ranges have been adjusted across the board. In general, affix values have been increased, and ranges have been narrowed, and some affixes now have a higher maximum.
- Additional Legendary powers have been added.
While these are definitely good chances, is it enough to give Sanctification any real, meaningful power, or even live up to the heights that Season 10’s Chaos Armor did?
