DIABLO 4 - SEASON 9 LAUNCH & POST PTR CHANGES!
Hey everyone, hope a few of y’all are as excited for this next season as I am! The new season, “Sins of the Horadrim”, I’ve covered in past D4 posts, but there’s been more changes to the new Horadric Powers coming this season, in addition to some cool overall changes to class balance, endgame activities, and changes even in place already for the new uniques coming this season, namely the one I was VERY optimistic about for the Pulverize Druid. The new Unique, “Rotting Lightbringer” seemed to be somewhat of a side-grade in terms of damage output on the PTR. It felt GREAT when you could line up your innate Pulverize/Provocation overpower hits with the poison pool, and not so much otherwise. Now, with this newest change, the poison pools are GUARANTEED overpower procs, while also empowering poison/DoT damage. I think overpower will be weaker in S9, BUT I do think Pulverize will still level well, AND I think it will scale better in the endgame once you get the new unique, even better than it currently does with the current pre-nerf S8 overpower scaling. I can’t wait to level with Pulverize and rush this unique and get back to werebear slamming! Boulder has felt fine, but I think one of my favorite Druid builds will ALWAYS be Pulverize.
These are the changes to the “Rotting Lightbringer”, I can’t explain how much better this unique is now with these changes, probably 2-3x more damage fully min-maxed.
Check out Blizzard’s latest post below sharing these changes made based on PTR Feedback, and as soon as I can, I’ll add the full S9 patch notes as well. Until then, see you soon in Sanctuary! SEASON 9 IS DROPPING THIS TUESDAY JULY 1st!!!
***Update 6-30-2025***
Check out these videos from Wudi which add some more insight to this season coming TOMORROW! The patch at first sounded a bit rough, but I think the monster health nerf in later Torment Tiers/The Pit and the S tier Builds nerf will just reduce the gap between S Tier and A/B Tier and make MOST builds feel viable at the cost of nerfing a few broken builds. Check out the patch notes below as gone over by Wudi and the guys at Maxroll, as well as the new Tier list for builds. At the very least, this season has shaken up meta BIG time, TONS of builds are now viable that have been irrelevant for a long time, so that in itself makes me very excited for this season!
