Seasonal System Rework Concept

PC General Discussion
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Seasonal System Rework Concept

Bridging the gap between casual players and “blasters” while improving balance and player retention.

EDIT: see my reply several comments down for example versions of Season 8 and 9.

I started this discussion on the PTR forums, but forgot the forum locks out after PTR completes, so I wanted to continue it here.

Diablo 4’s balance constantly swings between two extremes:

  • The “blaster” experience: A grind-heavy, high-challenge game with slow progression and rare loot, ensuring long-term engagement.

  • The “casual” experience: Faster leveling, frequent loot rewards, and a reasonable chance to complete the seasonal journey with limited playtime.

The Fix: Seasonal Content (incl Season Journey and Battlepass) Becomes a Game-wide Feature

Instead of locking new content behind forced resets, allow both Seasonal and Eternal realms to participate. Here’s how it would work:

  • Seasonal Realm: Stays as it is—resets every season for those who enjoy a server-wide character and economy refresh.

  • Eternal Realm: Lets players engage with seasonal content without resetting characters or progress. Seasonal mechanics expire at the end of the season, just like in Seasonal Realm.

Why This Works

  1. Fixes the accessibility vs. challenge problem. No seasonal deadline in Eternal Realm means casual players aren’t rushed, while “blasters” still get their grind-focused experience.

  2. Better use of development time. Right now, massive effort goes into mechanics that get deleted every season as well as constantly rebalancing the game between the divided playerbase. This change could help resolve the constant balancing issues as well as shift seasonal focus toward adding more permanent changes to the game instead of temporary powers. (edited from original post for clarity)

  3. Seasons become more meaningful. Developers can focus on storylines with lasting impact to Sanctuary like more connection to the main campaign or build-up for upcoming expansions, or on creating more permanent additions like mythics/uniques/aspects (instead of temporary powers).

  4. Targeted Focus on End-Game. By embracing Eternal Realm’s immediate access to end-game, seasons would need to adapt to create appropriate and relevant content with renewed development priority.

  5. More revenue for Blizzard. If battlepasses applied to both realms, more players would be incentivized to purchase them, increasing overall sales without restricting participation.

Addressing Common Counterarguments

  • “Seasonal powers would break balance in Eternal Realm.”

    • Not if seasonal mechanics are designed as questlines, bosses, or challenge modes rather than overpowered bonuses.

  • “Seasons are meant to be fresh.”

    • The seasonal realm would still exist for those who wish to socially play this way. Adding content to Eternal Realm just gives more options to those who prefer long-term progression at their own pace (though they would still have to complete any seasonal objectives before the deadline).

  • “Eternal Realms shouldn’t get everything. What incentive would anyone have to still play Seasonal Realm?"

    • It doesn’t take anything away from Seasonal Realm—it just stops forcing players into a seasonal grind if they don’t want. Seasonal Realm would likely remain blasters realm-of-choice because of the fresh start, but to further distinguish them from Eternal Realm, this could be a great opportunity to add leaderboards, such as “race to max level,” as a Seasonal Realm feature.

UPDATE: see my reply several comments down for example versions of Season 8 and 9.

Final Thoughts

This change would make Diablo 4 more inclusive, balancing all player types while letting the game grow sustainably. Instead of endlessly tweaking difficulty and loot rates, let players choose how they want to engage with seasonal content.

Seasons should be game-wide. What do you think?

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I like the idea unfortunately I don’t see them doing this

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I like the eternal realm. It’s a place where we have infinite resources. I stopped playing there after nerfs and more nerfs of items. I believe that if the powers came to both realms, more people would play in the eternal realm… since we need to level up these powers. They could force them to level up the powers per character and not per account.

  • I think I would still play in the seasonal realm with a hero other than mine. I played 7 seasons and never created barbarians, necromancers, or druids. I find it interesting to have a place where the economy is reset and everyone starts from the same place.

  • I miss more value for retired heroes. Something to admire, like a hall of heroes where their achievements are listed… number of deaths, highest pit, paragon reached, number of demons killed, etc. This differentiates the heroes.

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I think this idea is on the right track. But I have trouble understanding this:

But since

the mechanics would unfortunately still get discarded after 3 months followed by the next season’s collection of new abilities. What do you mean when you are talking about lasting impact?

I definitely agree with seeing this as a problem though. Its one of my biggest concerns with D4 right now.

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Its evident the playerbase has large splits in what players want and we have so many players that we could just split this up. Have another couple realms. Name them Casual, Normal, Elite.

Casual - Players get 10% more life. 300% more gold dropped. 75% more XP. 50% more loot.
Normal - Exactly like now.
Elite - Players get 10% less life. 50% less loot and 75% less XP. Game is much more grindy and getting good loot and higher level will be hard. Qualify for exclusive titles, feats of strength, achivements, portraits, and other cosmetics.

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Thanks for asking. I was really tired when I wrote that up, so I may need to edit my original post a little more.

My first quote about the “better use of development time” was supposed to include not having to waste time constantly rebalancing the core game between grindier vs more casual.

Regarding what I meant about the seasons having a lasting impact while still having any seasonal mechanics wiped at the end of the season is regarding kind of a shift of perspective of what purpose seasons serve in the game, and is there a better way they could be designed that would better serve that purpose?

First of all, seasons are not synonymous with “borrowed power.” That trope has been a recurring theme because it was successful in Season 2, while season 7 saw praise for it despite criticism for a lack of originality. Season 8 so far is receiving the least praise for this system, and it seems to largely be missing the mark, as the devs like to put it.

I haven’t played Diablo Immortal much after the first couple months of release, but in my understanding, they do not have eternal or seasonal realms - it’s all seasonal, and you don’t lose your character progress as new seasons are released. That is essentially the kind of system I’m proposing.

But furthermore, seasons themselves can be a means to continue progressing the story between expansions, with the themes maybe more grounded in permanent content or world-progression rather than so much focus on temporary, season-only powers.

I think naturally by including Eternal Realm in the new seasonal content, it actually takes some of the pressure off what is released in the season, as they don’t have to do so much focus on flashy, gotcha mechanics–potentially tied to leveling–to try to win players back every time. Currently, every season, players have to weigh in and say, did they add enough new stuff this season to justify me starting a brand new character from scratch? When they spend more time on rebalancing core systems, it takes away development of seasonal mechanics, and then the actual seasonal portion of things can end up being smaller and less exciting by itself. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if seasons were also on Eternal Realm, because players wouldn’t be focused as much on making brand new characters from scratch and needing it to be a fully reinvigorated progression experience.

That may all still sound a little vague, so let me give some more concrete examples.

Season 8

  • Season 7 left off with the Tree of Whispers having many of its heads restored and the rootholds under control. As the Tree no longer has such high demand for us, the Coven of Witches reclaimed their witch powers, causing Occult Gems to be destroyed. However, there are still headrotten out in the world as a permanent feature, with Whispers for Headrotten, which have a chance to drop Fugitive Heads. As such, Gelena is going to continue to craft new Occult Gems, reworked to not tie in to witch powers anymore. This system can start off small but grow over time in future seasons as a semi-permanent feature.

  • As Mephisto travels across Sanctuary, he continues to leave a trail of hatred in his wake. Seemingly traveling northwest (hinting to his final destination for the next expansion), there is newly reported activity from Caldeum and the Fields of Hatred.

  • In Caldeum, something dark stirs from the Gates of Hell entrance below the city. There is significantly more demonic presence active in the area, as well as the Burnt Knights resurfacing, praising the seeming resurrection of Urivar, claiming he was restored to life by Akarat himself as a new ordained disciple in order to continue spreading the light. Furthermore, Belial himself has supposedly been spotted, though the truth of these matters seem shrouded in lies and misdirection.
    • Continue progressing the campaign with a new questline to uncover more of these events, ultimately leading to the addition of three new Lair Bosses, a revamped boss ladder system, and new pinnacle boss fight - Belial.

  • Further north in the pvp area The Field of Hatred, a charismatic and cunning new leader has arisen to power in Alzuuda, building a massive coliseum, drawing in cannibal hordes, bandit gangs, and burnt knights from across the surrounding regions. Beware, the enemies in the arena seem to be invigorated with demonic-like strength as their hatred fuels their lust for violence.
    • The Coliseum will be a new end-game feature for solo and co-op players. Complete increasingly challenging tournament-style events to test your mettle or die in bloody glory.
    • There will be both PvE and PvP events.
    • At the side of the new leader stands the Grand Vizier, a shadowy figure with unknown ambitions and great power. For those seeking the greatest challenge, he will summon echos of the greatest enemies the world of Sanctuary has faced, with new powers, culminating in a randomized double-boss fight.
    • The Coliseum features a reward ladder and reputation board, including unique titles and cosmetics for the most victorious who have accumulated the most glory and hate of their opponents.

  • Instead of new temporary boss powers, this season will feature around 40 additional aspects and uniques earnable only from defeating the new Lair Bosses and through conquering challenges in the Coliseum. These will be in addition to the new legendary aspects and uniques already announced, and include some pvp-focused items for those who decide to test their worth in the PvP arena.


    Season 9
  • After the season ends, the only mechanic that would be wiped would be the Caldeum Questline*. All other systems would continue, with some new and removed encounters and rewards in the Coliseum.
    *edit - further discussion in posts below regarding how to retain access to the "continued campaign" questlines added across the seasons, which personally, I would prefer. This suggestion of wiping it was based on how the game currently handles seasonal questlines, as each new season, the timeline of the world has progressed beyond the state of the previous season's events.
  • To continue the story, the next season would further escalate the presence of Hatred in the land as Mephisto continues traveling northwest. Meanwhile, pilgrims have begun flocking to the coast to travel to Xiansai as word of Akarat’s return have begun to spread, but with the increased travel, the Dry Steppes have equally increased bandit and cannibal activity.
  • At this point, chaos is descending on the land as trade caravans continue to be attacked, triggering food and supply shortages. The increased foreign presence from the pilgrims and Mephisto’s presence across the land causes Ked Bardu to barricade their borders from outsiders, further stagnating trade in the region. Nearby, the Barbarian Tribes have taken this as a declaration of war and have begun raids on traveling trade caravans. As the world descends into Hatred’s despair and the cycles of violence perpetuate, many pray that Akarat can come to save them and return peace to the land.
    • Ked Bardu and the Barbarian Tribes each feature an opposing factional reputation and questline. There are also trade caravans traveling across the Dry Steppes that can be defended or raided in optional events featuring pvp microzones in the area around the caravans.

  • Further south, Mephisto’s presence has been fed significantly by the carnage of the Coliseum and warring tribes, causing the pvp areas to turn into a new helltide-like feature with revamped activities, events, and rewards.

etc.

I think you get the point. The seasons can still be seasons, WORTH playing, interesting, fun, with really dynamic additions to the game, without them being entirely temporary and just disregarded afterward. They can be story rich and relevant while still offering enhanced gameplay mechanics.

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See instead of a UI for seasonal powers, we could have an artificer in town where we would choose 5 powers or 5 sockets on the gloves. Instead of losing the powers they would be part of the game and we could imagine combining the new powers with old ones. This would leave a lot of build variation.

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Normally I’d agree with this but the problem is the game is not (at all) balanced

If a skill or build does 2000x damage of another then those 75% less XP really makes no change :stuck_out_tongue:

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As an eternal player I’d probably enjoy this myself; but i could imagine a lot of eternal players being against this idea.

Personally, I play eternal because I do not want to reset progress constantly and I want to consistently grow my characters. Blizzard has already made the latter very hard because of the frequent meta changes, not to mention the numerous itemization resets up through VOH; now imagine a player who doesn’t want to interact with the seasonal gimmick but has to because now Blizzard would have every reason to rebalance (I use that term loosely) each season around that gimmick.

It already seems like that’s what’s being done with season 8, much to my chagrin.

Ultimately I think this is an attempt to fix a problem that doesn’t really exist.

I skimmed so correct me if I’m wrong but it sounds like you’re suggesting campaign storyline be continued seasonally but then wiped from existence…absolutely not.

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I want to emphasize that in my suggested changes with making seasons game-wide, that I strongly feel that the constant balancing around overpowered temporary/borrowed powers is one of the worst parts of a season, and they should not be doing this kind of a thing as much. We can get more meaningful build-changing things by adding other things to the game instead, like just more items, or things like that, but nothing ridiculous like season 8’s insanely OP boss powers. The game should realistically be balanced in the same way for both realms, and not need fully rebalanced every season because of massive seasonal changes to the core mechanics and structure. That’s one of the main problems we currently have, and one I strongly want to avoid. I want everything refocused on much more grounded things, like just more content, and things to do with our builds, and permanent additions to our build variety instead of temporary seasonal powers. Ideally the seasonal things that may expire would just like, non-essential sidequest style things, whereas the majority of any seasonal content would hopefully be things that would continue existing or be able to be revised and reiterated in the future without drastically changing core systems and balance. Hopefully that makes sense…

The previous seasons so far have ALL had their “canon” questline wiped post-season. Yet their impact does still linger in ways. The Infernal Hordes are all still in the game, but can we still make a new character and play through the questline that introduced them again? AFAIK, no.

To be completely clear, I am 100% pro-story, pro-campaign, pro-lore and keeping everything in the game if characters want to progress through the campaign again and then post-campaign questline that connect to the proceeding expansion.

I only suggested this route because that’s how Blizz is already treating the seasonal questline, while claiming they’re canon and part of the post-campaign storyline.

If we can change this moving forward, sure, I’d love that. It was more to stay consistent with the way they’ve been addressing this, rather than retconning like, 7 seasons of quests or something that are missing their connected seasonal stuff. I think the idea is that the progression of events over time makes the world feel more alive while overall they aren’t necessarily as consequential to the overall story itself. One could easily just go from campaign to expansion to expansion. The idea is these enhance the world in a really relevant way but aren’t essential enough to the ongoing story that they need to necessarily continue existing once a season is finished.

But really, I would be down with there being a central questline that DID continue, that was permanently part of the game and considered part of the campaign when playing through campaign, requiring completion before getting to the next expansion.

There are potentially several ways to integrate keeping the seasonal questlines intact while still progressing the game forward seasonally. Other seasonal game I’ve played have handled this exact issue in many different ways –

After the season…

  • the questline is retired and no longer accessible at all as it’s considered “in the past”
  • the questline is still accessible as an optional questline that can be completed at any time by going to the quest giver
  • the questline is required to be completed by all characters in order to even reach the next season’s quests
  • You can choose where you want to start in the overall questline if joining in late

etc.

so if there’s a best one that would be most appropriate here, I’m all for it. I think that if they are going to be able to be more relevant as canon, continued story, I definitely want to be able to continue accessing at least the campaign-relevant questlines if possible.

It gets a little more complicated when considering if seasons were added to Eternal Realm, because characters may be done with the campaign, but have sat unplayed for several seasons in a row. There would need to be a smooth, intuitive way to integrate the additional campaign questlines not completed yet, even though the current state of the game would be several seasons beyond where they left off.

I think if the goal was to retain access to the continued campaign questlines, then they would need to be considered separate from any seasonal (temporary) quests, reputation or mechanics. Only the temporary portions of the season would disappear at the end of the season, as those issues would be considered resolved, and for balance sake would be gone from the game – but each portion of the continued campaign questline would still persist permanently.

From there, there a couple ways to address it -

Example 1 -

  • Newly made characters on Eternal and Seasonal realms that skip campaign would progress immediately to the new season in terms of questline.
  • Continued characters on Eternal realm and new characters that did not skip campaign would need to complete all continued-campaign questlines across each season before they would reach the current season and be able to participate in the current iteration of the world.

Example 2 -

  • The continued campaign questlines would only need to be completed once per account, then would be considered skippable by all characters.
  • When playing an Eternal Realm character for the first time that season, who has not completed any portion of any previous continued-campaign quests would be asked if they want to skip to the current season. If they want to still complete the missed continued campaign quests, they select No.
  • At any point in time, a player can select from their quest journal in-game to “skip to current season” which would just immediately skip that character’s quest progress ahead to the current season.

Do any of those ideas sound okay or what are your thoughts?

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Sounds good to me. Story and lore are not my strengths when playing video games, but I think you have a talent for writing about story progression. It was interesting to read how the coliseum idea is woven in.

I wouldnt mind if Blizzard presents their upcoming roadmap this way.

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Bliz is failing eternal players more than season. Eternal has gotten very little after nearly 7 seasons in the book. We have gotten more legacy mythics than content for eternal.

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People have suggested this before, quite a few times in fact. So this isn’t a new suggestion, but I agree with the first reply to this topic, sadly it’s doubtful it’ll ever happen.

Now this doesn’t mean I’m against the idea, in fact I’ve advocated for this idea ever since some one brought it up as I am all for more options within the game, regardless if I use said options or not.

I would still only play seasonal myself, even if eternal gained access to seasonal gimmicks and the battle pass. The issue is convincing the devs, which is a hard sell.

Again keep in mind they have the number of players for eternal and seasonal. They see how long each player spends in each realm respectively, how many come back for the season resets, and how long they stick around. I believe if the eternal realm number was closer, or even above the seasonal player numbers, they would seriously consider this.

I personally believe the number is much lower than people realize, and this is the main reason they don’t do this. Now could it potentially make them more money? Absolutely, but right now they’re not willing to make that gamble, more than likely due to the numbers.

I fully admit this is pure speculation on my part, so take it with a grain of salt. I support your suggestion regardless, as it wouldn’t affect me either way, I just don’t know if every eternal realm player would feel the same.

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We will get instant cry about cosmetics and titles locked by “Elite”

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I totally assume eternal realm is far less players than seasonal. I also remember how many people bought the game at release and then massively complained and left bc they were so upset at having to reset progress every season. All their efforts to cut down on the time it takes to complete everything the game has to offer since then were all efforts to retain those players, but it’s in constant conflict to people who wanted a harder game with rare items and more effort to complete your progression. So moresonthan anything to do with changing the Eternal Realms by itself, my suggestion is significantly more focused on altering the structure of how things are setup to align everything far more with their goals and intentions, in order to retain and gain the most players, and not need to constantly battle their own flawed setup that’s never going to settle when you can’t balance the game as-is to satisfy casuals and blasters.