While you might expect vampires to dominate this season, Diablo 4 takes a different turn by focusing on witches and their mystical powers. As players dive into the upcoming season, they’ll channel arcane energy, summoning everything from giant frogs to swarms of fiery bats.
Launching on January 21, Diablo 4 will shake off its familiar action RPG style, replacing typical sorcerers and barbarians with a fresh array of magical abilities. This season marks the first time since season 3 that Blizzard steps away from just adding permanent features, opting instead to playfully experiment with the game’s traditional hack-and-slash format. That said, a few permanent features will still make their way into the game.
In the main campaign, players encounter the enigmatic Tree of Whispers, a morally ambiguous entity that trades secret knowledge for human heads, collected upon their owners’ deaths. This mysterious tree has always been shrouded in mystery, but during the Season of Witchcraft, it finds itself in desperate need of heads, requiring players’ assistance.
Your seasonal character will align with a witch coven tasked with defending the tree and hunting Headrotten monsters. The new seasonal questline will guide you through this process, sending you to open world regions teeming with these monsters. Here, you’ll not only defeat them but also unlock powerful witch abilities. Some provide passive perks like increased movement speed or enhanced damage, while others are more spectacular, such as summoning a poisonous, tongue-lashing frog. You can even acquire rare Lost Powers in dungeons, including the might to conjure up a whirlwind of piranhas famously known as the Piranhado.
Blizzard also plans to roll out several quality-of-life improvements this season, such as the handy option to save and switch between different character build loadouts. They’ll also tweak class balances, details of which will be shared during a stream this Thursday. In the wake of the recent Vessel of Hatred expansion, the Spiritborn characters quickly reached impressive damage levels that overshadowed other classes. They’re up for adjustments, but with the introduction of these new witch powers, they may very well remain at the top.
