As part of a recent Campfire Chat developer livestream, Blizzard discussed Diablo 4’s upcoming mid-season update. The patch will be released on Tuesday, March 5th, and it is indeed the patch that will introduce Gauntlet into the game.
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Gauntlets are often delayed end-game dungeons, similar to Diablo 3’s Rift. The dungeon is available to world level 4 players (monster level 100+, no less!) and has a fixed layout that changes every week.
Your goal is to kill as many monsters and open as many treasure chests as possible within eight minutes. Doing so earns you a Proof of Strength, which ultimately determines your score. As you’d expect, Gauntlet is designed to run repeatedly, and the idea is that you should make each successive run more efficient.
Depending on your final score, you can earn any of the four seals. The threshold for each score will change each week as the dungeon itself changes. When it comes to loot, each successful attempt will earn you a Trial Treasure, and higher scores will reward better treasures over the weekend.
The important thing to note here is that while groups will have an easier time passing challenges, the leaderboards will be separated by class, party size, and normal and hardcore ladders.
If all this endgame nonsense doesn’t get you excited, there’s another neat addition included in the mid-season update that should make everyone happy. Some of the vampire powers from Season 2 will return, in the form of legendary powers dropped from everything in the world.
As expected, there will also be some class balance updates in the March 5th patch. The full changelog hasn’t been released yet, but Blizzard says some of it was made with The Challenge in mind.
Despite the disappointing performance of Season of Constructs, March looks to be a good month to get into Diablo 4. The game will be coming to Game Pass on March 28, and will also receive a long-awaited ray tracing update on PC sometime in 2019. Same month.
