Blizzard finally relents on a Diablo 4 feature I've been asking for since launch, and it'll change how I play forever

Diablo 4 Season 11 is set to make some big changes to fundamental mechanics, but it's the news about what's coming a little further in the future that's got me excited. Diablo 4 YouTuber and Twitch streamer Ryan 'Raxxanterax' sat down with Colin Finer and Zavin Haroutunian from Blizzard to talk about what we can expect in Season 11 and beyond. Among the discussions are future difficulty scaling, the creative potential of the new Tower activity, and the reintroduction of support builds, and it sounds like we're finally getting a feature I and many others have been wanting since the game first launched.

I'd still count Diablo 4 among the best RPGs on PC, but there's no question that it's become somewhat trapped in a seasonal loop of repetition. We've seen some more interesting experiments with the current season's chaos armor, but the next update is planned to be a more dramatic systems overhaul. What I'm most pleased to hear, however, is a little further out, and it's the return of SSF, or Solo Self-Found, a mode for players who want to find all their gear themselves without any co-op or trading. You can watch the full interview below from the 6:40:25 mark, but what I'm referring to here starts at 7:27:23, during a discussion about the impact of RMT (real-money transactions).

Raxx, a long-time advocate for SSF mode, asks "Is whoever is going to clear the Tower whoever has the biggest credit card?" In response, Haroutunian smiles. "There's this feature in other games, I don't know if you've heard about it, it's called Solo Self-Found. It's something we've heard about a lot and we might do something like that." He confirms that the team is "actively talking about it," although cautions that it won't be in Season 11. "We really want people to weigh in and tell us what they think."

Personally, I'm pretty happy about this (and Raxx's enthusiastic response is similarly telling). With the Tower bringing back leaderboards, SSF becomes much more important as a way to distinguish yourself from the pack of players who are grouping up and trading for the best gear. It's how I played most of my Diablo 3 characters, and while you can self-restrict yourself to only using gear you've found, there's something nice about having the definitive in-game marker to confirm that you've done so.

Elsewhere, Haroutunian notes that the existence of the Tower will also let Blizzard make bigger changes to the Pit "without messing up the only competitive thing players have." He adds that the Tower is also designed to be a flexible format that can "be very reactive and very responsive to what the community needs for it." That there are currently no plans in place for what this might include, as Blizzard is watching to see what the reaction looks like to Season 11 before considering its future.

Another exciting tease is the promise of new Torment difficulty tiers for the future. One of Season 11's biggest overhauls is to its defensive system, which Blizzard says will help with futureproofing. "Candidly, we're also looking at adding more Torments and we felt like the constant penalization of resistance and armor was going to be really obnoxious if we added, let's just say double the amount of Torments," Finer explains.

Something a little closer to now are the monster reworks in Season 11, which should see enemies attacking faster and more accurately, with more variety in their move sets. Expect to see some weirder elite mobs, too; "I'll give you an example," Finer says, "Before we didn't make those little spider minis elites ever because that's kind of weird." However, Blizzard has changed this philosophy in service of creating new, unique, and more dynamic encounters.

"It's actually kind of cool if these little guys get promoted," Finer continues, "because what previously happened was that when they're normal, you just stomp them and they die instantly." However, taking their fast attack speed and ramping it up to a champion level where they're tankier suddenly creates a "much more interesting" opponent.

Finer also confirms that in Season 11, you'll go back to starting with just one skill point as opposed to the fifteen you could immediately claim if you'd already played a character. That should make the early game a little tougher and give progression more meaning. There will also be a bit more pushback against just blasting relentlessly with the return of capstone dungeons, with Haroutunian describing it as "the endless task to remove the bad friction and keep the good friction."

In the longer term, Finer admits that one of the biggest problems for long-time Diablo 4 players is its overly simplistic skill tree. "The skill tree is the foundation of your build and we feel like it's not doing enough to create a broad foundation for builds, so there will be major updates on it on the horizon. That's all I can say [for now]." Haroutunian does note that "we're not going back to the old [Diablo 3] skill rune model."

What we should see is more ability to create support builds. Finer notes that at launch, Blizzard was focused on feedback "that players wanted to make sure that D4 wasn't a required-multiplayer game," which led to the team feeling "a little gunshy" on support-style multipliers. However, they recognize that "that kind of interaction with ZDPS ['Zero DPS,' a community term for multiplayer-focused support builds] is actually a really fun way to build," and want to support it more going forward.

The pair are understandably reluctant to talk about what the next Diablo 4 expansion might hold, but the changes discussed here are certainly a step in the right direction. I'd like to see Blizzard get a little bolder with its seasonal mechanics moving forward, rather than periodically reworking the fundamentals of gear and crafting, but that'll likely come down to how well the latest round of changes are received once the Diablo 4 Season 11 start date arrives.

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