The next Diablo 4 season is upon us, and Blizzard revealed all the details about the Season of Death Awakening in a livestream yesterday.
Because the gameplay portion of the season went into testing earlier this month, we’ve known about its biggest new additions for a while. Namely, the ability to turn any Unique item into a Mythic – the highest quality available.
When Season of Death Awakening arrives on 30th June, that feature, now dubbed ‘Mythic Uniques 3.0’, will be available to all players alongside the rest of the season’s slate of new stuff. That includes the season journey, a reward track with 120 objectives across nine ranks; the new Ruptures mini-activity, which appear all over the world as portals that spew forth enemies; a new quest that sets you on a path to uncover the origins of a Death Cult; and the new Solo Self Found Mode, which prevents you from being able to join parties or trade with other players.
Season of Death Awakening launches alongside patch 3.1.0, and you can pre-download it starting tomorrow, 25th June at 6pm BST (10am PT, 1pm ET, 7pm CEST) across BattleNet, PlayStation and Xbox, although not Steam, curiously enough.
But that’s not all. To celebrate the season’s launch, Blizzard is offering a free trial for the Warlock class, which is one of the two new classes that debuted in the Lord of Hatred expansion earlier this year. Blizzard previously offered a Paladin trial, so I suppose it’s only fair that the Warlock follows.
The Warlock trial begins with the launch of the new season on 30th June and will be available for one week, ending 7th July. It allows anyone who doesn’t own Lord of Hatred to play as the Warlock for free and take the class up to level 30.
Again, players on every platform but Steam will be able to take advantage of the trial while it’s running, and any progress you make will carry over, so if you buy the Lord of Hatred expansion afterwards, you can just carry on.
I played the Warlock and it’s probably the most involved class in Diablo 4, so it does benefit from a trial. It’s a hybrid Necromancer-Sorcerer capable of tapping into the powers of hell to summon demons to do your bidding, but it can also be specialised in several other ways to fuse the powers of demons into your attacks.
And, well, if that’s not enough to bring you back, Overwatch is collabing with Diablo 4, offering a free Reliquary (battle pass) that features a few cosmetics, including Diablo 4’s first earnable dye. Killing Elite and Champion monsters will drop the Eye of the Overwatch currency, which you can use to unlock cosmetics in the Overwatch Reliquary.
Unfortunately, none of the rewards include character skins. Instead, those will be exclusive to the in-game store, and will almost certainly cost a lot of money, if past collaboration events are anything to go by. The skins include looks inspired by Mercy, Reinhardt, Kiriko, Roadhog, Reaper, Genji and others.
