Shortly before Christmas, Blizzard Entertainment published a new blog entry on Diablo IV and in it reveals a lot of new information about the game and item systems.
In regular quarterly updates, Blizzard Entertainment informed about the progress of Diablo IV and kept gamers up to date on certain areas and features. Shortly before the end of the year, a corresponding blog entry for the fourth quarter has been pushed in and goes into detail on various systems of the Action RPG hopeful.
Game Director Joe Shely and Lead Systems Designer Joe Piepiora, together with lead visual effects artist Daniel Briggs, will dedicate themselves to several topics. The really long and very detailed entry gives first insights into the implemented updates for the item system for legendary equipment. The most important innovation: Legendary properties can now appear on several equipment slots. So if you’re looking for a legendary trait now, like martial arts, you can find it on rings, breastplates, or helmets. So you don’t have to go hunting for a certain type of item anymore. It will even be possible to destroy legendary items to extract their properties and transfer them to another rare or legendary item.
Furthermore, the class skills, the character progression system in the late game and the visual effects of monster slaughter are discussed. Diablo IV will focus more on customizing the battles through skill trees and legendary items. There will again be item affixes for skill ranks in order to unlock or improve skills with collected equipment.
The endgame relies on a paragon system again, but with a big innovation: The paragon board is unlocked for each class at level 50 and contains countless branched paths in which you can invest points. You can also find glyphs all over Sanctuary, which give additional bonuses when placed in the Paragon Board.
You can find the full blog post with examples, pictures and more details here on the official Diablo IV website.