Diablo 4: Season 2 starts today – all about time and preload

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Sanctuary will soon be teeming with vampires. We reveal the release, the start times and give an overview of the contents of Season 2.

With Season 2, the world of Diablo 4 will be overtaken by a vampire plague. The so-called Season of Blood is set to arrive soon, replacing the Season of Malevolence, which lasted for three months. With Season 2, Blizzard wants to go all out for the first time and at the moment it also seems as if Diablo 4 will win back many players.

In this article we summarise all the information known so far about Season 2.

Season 2 start times

When do we start?

  • On Tuesday, 17 October 2023 the new season will celebrate its release. Then you can set off on your seasonal journey with a new character and confront the vampiric spawn.

What time?

  • again at 7pm time, as we did at the start of Season 1.

Is there a preload of Season 2?

According to Blizzard’s head of community Adam Fletcher, the download of the Season 2 update will begin one hour before the official start of the season, which is at 6pm

When is the end?

  • A concrete end date for Season 2 is not yet known, but overall the whole season will probably last three months again. So we expect it to end in January 2024

    All new content

    What’s new in the game

    • A new quest series: You will explore the underworld alongside the vampire hunter Erys and try to thwart the Dark Master’s plans.
    • A new event: The so-called Blood Harvest ensures that areas in Hawezar, Scosglen or the Dry Steppes are infested with vampires. Those who collect bounties, rip open blood bubbles or stop vampiric activities here gain hunter reputation. This unlocks new reputation levels that give you additional rewards such as materials, items or pact consumables.
    • New Events: New spontaneous events may also occur in dungeons and the open world, such as a vampiric ritual.
    • New Endgame Bosses: With the new endgame bosses, it will finally be possible to specifically search for rare items or even unique items. In return, however, you will have to face enormously powerful enemies. These are the five bosses that are available in the game from Season 2:
      • Grigoire, the Galvanic Saint
      • Echo of Varshan
      • The Beast in the Ice
      • Dark Master
      • Echo of Duriel

    What is the season’s theme?

    (You can equip up to five vampiric powers at a time.)
    (You can equip up to five vampiric powers at a time.)

    Besides these further innovations, Season 2 is mainly characterised by the season theme. This is a new possibility to optimise characters or classes in a way never seen before. In Season 2, the seasonal theme consists of the Vampiric Power. With it, your heroines and heroes become unstoppable vampire warriors. This is how the Vampiric Powers work.

    • Mighty Blood: By slaying enemies, you collect Mighty Blood, which you spend to gain random Vampiric Powers. You can also use it to level up powers.
    • Pact Armours: Each power requires a certain number of pacts. There are three of them: ferocity, divinity and eternity. You need pieces of equipment that in their sum provide enough of these pacts to use the desired vampire powers.
    • Craft Items: To add pacts to your armour independently, you can pick up Purifying Acids or Standalone Pacts from Blood Seekers. The former adds pacts, the latter can remove pacts.

    You can see all available powers here. There are 22 different ones in total:

    Low Vampiric Powers (1-3 pacts needed):

    • Prediction (1 divinity): Your ultimate skills receive 20% cooldown reduction. Your ultimate skills deal 12% increased damage to any nearby enemy affected by your damage-over-time effects.
    • Rippers of the Circle (2 Divinity): The attacks of your summons, companions, minions and bat familiars deal 52% increased damage to enemies with loss of control. Lucky Strike: Your Summons, Companions, Servants and Bat familiars cause a Vampiric Curse with a chance of up to 30% when they hit enemies.
    • Dominion (1 Fierceness): You deal 24% increased damage to enemies who are stunned, immobilised, frozen or gripped by fear. If they are also injured and not elite enemies, they are killed instantly.
    • Feeding the Circle (1 Eternity): Lucky Strike: Summons, Companions, Servants, as well as your Bat Familiar’s attacks have up to a 60% chance to restore 10 of your Primary Resource and increase your damage by 10% for 4 sec.
    • Hectic (3 Divinity): For every 5 basic skills you cast, one of your active cooldowns is reduced by 2 sec.
    • Hemomania (3 Eternity): Your attacks deal 80% of your maximum life as physical damage to nearby enemies. This effect can occur once every 4 seconds. You heal 1% of your maximum life for each enemy hit in this way.
    • Infection (1 Savagery): If you hit enemies with direct damage, they become infected with pox. If enemies are infected with smallpox 8 times, the infection is expelled, causing 70% poison damage.
    • Jagged Spikes (1 Fierceness, 1 Divinity): Thorns have a 10% chance to deal 300% increased damage and chill enemies by 8%.
    • Chasing the Weak (2 Ferocity): You deal 16% increased damage to vulnerable enemies. Enemies are vulnerable under the influence of a vampiric curse from your other vampiric powers.
    • Protective Wall (1 Divinity, 1 Eternity): If you do not move for 3 sec, you gain a barrier of 40% of your maximum life for 6 sec. This effect can only be triggered every 20 sec.
    • Ravenous (3 Ferocity): Lucky Strike: You have up to a 20% chance to increase your attack speed by 40% of your total movement speed for 6 sec.
    • Hardening (2 Eternity): For every 2% of your missing life, you gain 1% damage reduction.
    • Blood Red Supports (1 Divinity, 1 Eternity): When you kill an enemy, you receive 6% of your base life as Steal. As long as the steel is more than half your maximum life, you gain 8% critical strike chance.
    • Fear (1 Fierceness, 1 Divinity, 1 Eternity): If you are hit, you have a 14% chance to strike fear into nearby enemies for 2 sec and slow them by 80%. You are guaranteed to critically hit enemies struck by fear.
    • Unfading (1 Eternity): Casting skills heals you by 3% of your life. If you have less than 50% life, this bonus doubles.

    Higher Vampiric Powers (6 pacts required):

    • Cursed Touch (6 divinity): Lucky Strike: You have up to a 44% chance to inflict a Vampiric Curse on enemies. Affected enemies have a 15% chance of passing the curse on to other enemies. The collected souls of the Vampiric Curse cause 200% increased damage.
    • Bathe in Blood (3 Divinity, 3 Eternity): Channel a skill and a puddle of blood forms beneath you. If you channel a skill in a puddle, your channelled skills deal 40% increased damage and you receive 30% damage reduction. A puddle can only form every 8 sec.
    • Bloodbruise (6 Eternity): If your core skills overpower an enemy, you create 3 Unstable Blood Drops. If you collect an Unsteady Blood Drop, it explodes and deals 60% physical damage around you. Every 20 sec, your next skill is guaranteed to overpower.
    • Summon Familiar (3 Fierceness, 3 Divinity): When casting a Mastery, Weapon Mastery, Macabre, Fury or Infusion skill, summon an allied bat that attacks nearby enemies, dealing 80% physical damage with a 30% chance to stun enemies.
    • Flowing Veins (2 Fierceness, 2 Divinity, 2 Eternity): You deal 60% increased damage over time to enemies that are moving or affected by a Vampiric Curse.
    • Metamorphosis (2 Fierceness, 2 Divinity, 2 Eternity): If you escape, you turn into a swarm of bats for 4 sec and become unstoppable. You deal 160% physical damage to enemies in your path and place a Vampiric Curse on them.
    • Moonrise (6 Fierceness): When you hit an enemy with a basic skill, you gain 4% attack speed for 10 sec (stacks up to 5 times). When you reach the maximum number of stacks, you experience a Vampiric Bloodrage for 10 sec, giving you 160% base skill damage and 15% movement speed.

    Battle Pass and Season Travel

    As usual, Season 2 also unleashes a new Season Journey, which also unlocks favour for the Battle Pass. Both bring with them new rewards if you fulfil the corresponding requirements.

    • Season Journey: By completing challenges, you unlock certain rewards of a chapter. In addition to aspects and materials, these include the Salmagundi mount, the strip-and-dot armour for your horse, and three scrolls of amnesia.
    • Battlepass: The Battle Pass is again available in different versions. The free pass contains 27 levels, the premium pass contains 63. The premium pass contains some platinum for the shop, as well as cosmetic armour for animals and humans.

    What’s in the new patch?

    A new patch for Diablo 4 will be released along with the new season. Of course, this patch brings a lot of content into the game, which you can then try out during the season. However, the patch also includes a lot of balance changes to various classes, from which you should also benefit outside of the season. The patch will be applied at the same time as the season Here are a few of the most important changes:

    • Resistances will be revised.
    • Classes and various builds will be adjusted.
    • When and how you can find uniques has changed.
    • World bosses will soon spawn much more frequently.

    What do you think of the new features in Season 2? Are you already looking forward to using your vampiric powers to beat up the bloodsuckers, or does the season leave you completely cold? Would you like a different theme or do you like the new mechanics very much? Will you start right away, or will you wait and see? You can answer all these questions in the comments!