Following Vicarious Visions officially merging with Blizzard Entertainment and becoming Blizzard Albany, it’s released the newest patch for Diablo 2: Resurrected. Though it features numerous balance changes and quality of life improvements, the main purpose of patch 2.4 is to prepare for the Competitive Ladder. The ranked system launches on April 28th, 5 PM PDT with different modes having their own respective leaderboards.
For instance, there’s the Classic Ladder for running through all four acts as a fresh character. Hardcore Classic Ladder is the same but you get only one life. Expansion Ladder is the same as Classic but includes the Lord of Destruction expansion. Finally, Hardcore Expansion Ladder offers all five acts to play through but with only one life.
Once the season ends, a Ladder character will migrate over to the non-Ladder modes along with any items equipped or in one’s inventory. Players must retrieve any items before the start of the season after next or else they’ll be lost forever. Check out some of the patch notes below and full notes here.
Diablo 2: Resurrected Patch 2.4
QUALITY OF LIFE UPDATES
General
- Added language support for non-ASCII written language
- Added player messaging for when a player tries to launch the game on an out of date patch version
- Added ‘Message of the Day’ capabilities to the main menu to allow us to share important game updates with all players
New Feature – Legacy Graphics Emulation
- There is now an option in the Graphics Settings Menu under ‘Legacy’ that allows you to choose between 3 different emulation options for the Legacy game graphics. The options are ‘GDI’, ‘Glide’, and ‘Resurrected’.
- ‘GDI’ emulates the software rasterization of the original legacy game and does not apply any filtering
- ‘Glide’ emulates the hardware accelerated backend of the original legacy game with bilinear filtering
- ‘Resurrected’ uses the Glide emulation with additional fixes in place to address an artifact that would occur with the original Glide rendering
Developer Comments: We feel ‘Resurrected’ is the definitive emulation mode players should use, but we noticed feedback during PTR that some players preferred the style of legacy graphics released at launch, which did not have any filtering and most closely resembled the software rasterization of the original legacy game. We hope these emulation modes provide players the means to choose the legacy graphics they prefer.
AI
- Improved the reliability of pets, summons, and mercenaries teleporting to the player instead of being despawned
Barbarian
- Updated Barbarian Leap and Leap attack animation behavior to give it a smoother trajectory that should keep the Barbarian on-screen at all times, and reduce jerkiness when he lands
Character Selection
- Newly created characters will now sort to the top of the character selection list
Gameplay
- When holding down a mouse button to target an enemy with a skill, the skill will continue to execute after that target dies
- Minimap will now automatically re-open after death if you had it open prior to dying
- Arrow and Bolt max quantity increased to 500
- Throwing weapon quantity has been increased by 50%
- Blocking will no longer interrupt a player while performing a skill or attack. If a player character triggers a block during this time, the damage will still be negated, but the animation will not play
- Changed how attack speed is determined while dual-wielding weapons. Swapping weapons between hands should no longer result in dramatically different attack speeds
- Character hit recovery will now have diminishing returns when being hit by another player
- Quick cast skills behavior has been unified such that left click quick cast skills behave in the way the right click behavior operated
Developer Comments: We want to fix some of the awkward lockouts that reject player input from casting skills. For PVP, we added a way to reduce hit recovery spam to prevent edge cases of characters being locked out for too long.
Mercenaries
- Mercenary UIs will now display if the mercenary cannot use a skill because they are too low level