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Season 17 Start Date and More!

by - 5 years ago

Hello all! Just off the pipeline, we finally have the Season 17 start date and more!

Season Start:

Friday, May 17 at 5:00 p.m. PST in North America, 5:00 p.m. CEST in Europe, and 5:00 p.m. KST in Asia

Season End:

We are no longer providing anticipated end dates for Seasons. However, we are committed to keeping Seasons roughly three months in length (give or take a few weeks based on development needs) and will continue to provide a minimum of two weeks advance notice for when the Season will be ending.

For the full blog post, see below!

Editor’s Note: Patch Notes were pulled from the blog post below and placed into a separate article for ease of finding and reading.

Season 17 begins May 17, alongside the latest Diablo III patch. Read on to learn more about upcoming legendary item updates, new Torment levels, a slew of quality of life changes, and a nightmarish Seasonal buff!

Table of Contents

New Season Theme

Season 17 is introducing an all-new buff that’ll change up the way you evaluate your gear! For the duration of Season 17, all Seasonal players will benefit from the Set bonus provided by Legacy of Nightmares. This means that everyone will enjoy the powerful benefits of the “no Set” Set and any and every Ancient Legendary you find is that much more valuable.

Classes with especially powerful Legacy of Nightmare builds will be able to experiment with new combinations, particularly ones centered around their ring slots. Meanwhile, classes traditionally dependent on a heavy amount of survivability from their ring slots have more freedom to experiment with build-changing Legendaries that don’t rely on a Class Set.

We’re looking forward to seeing the strange and unusual things players put together at all Torment levels, so let your creativity run wild and see what combinations of Ancients you can combine to play your own way!

Season 17 Cosmetic Rewards

For the first time, we are re-introducing previous Seasonal rewards to make them available to players who may have missed them the first time around. Awards originally available in Season 5 will be available for Season 17 by progressing through the Season Journey.

In addition to the Pants and Boots slots of the exclusive Conqueror Set, players will be able to earn a series of portrait frames themed around the nightmarish Greyhollow Island. If you’re a pet collector and missed out on it the first time around, the adorably creepy Wickerman will be available to add to your collection.

We’ll continue to cycle through previous Seasonal rewards going forward, but we also have something new to chase for the player who has everything! Players who complete all nine chapters of the Season Journey will be rewarded with a new cosmetic item—and for Season 17, that means the Galactic Wings could be yours!

Season Journey Rewards

If you’ve been diligently slaying demons for the past few Seasons and reached Conqueror in the Season Journey each time, you’ve surely accrued a few extra stash tabs. You’ll earn one additional tab each Season by finishing the Conqueror tier, up to a maximum of five:

  • Guardian of Sanctuary: Finish a level 70 Nephalem Rift on Torment XIII within five minutes
  • Gem of My Life: Level three Legendary Gems to level 55
  • All I Do IS Win: Complete two Conquests this Season
  • Show Me What You Got: Kill Diablo at level 70 in under 1 minute and 30 seconds on Torment XIII difficulty
  • Money Ain’t a Thang: Slay Greed on Torment XIII difficulty
  • Take U There: Reach Greater Rift level 60 Solo
  • Power Amplification: Use Kanai’s Cube to augment an Ancient Legendary item with a level 50+ gem
  • Cubic Reconfiguration: Use Kanai’s Cube to reforge a Legendary item

Seasonal Conquests

The Seasonal Conquest rotation continues! For the speedy, Sprinter and Speed Racer return, challenging you to complete all five Acts of the campaign in under 1 hour. Greedy nephalem might be more suited to completing Avarice or Avaritia, where you’ll need to rack up a gold streak of 50,000,000 outside of The Vault. Complementing our Seasonal Buff, The Thrill and Superhuman request that you complete a Greater Rift Level 45 without the assistance of any equipped Set Bonus. It’ll be a Season for alt-aholics, as Years of War and Dynasty requires completing a Greater Rift Level 55 with the set bonuses of six different Class sets, while Masters of the Universe and Masters of Sets ask you to complete eight different Set Dungeons. Flex those muscles and show us your class mastery, heroes!

Haedrig’s Gift

Finally, the Class Sets rewarded for completing certain chapters in the Season Journey courtesy of Haedrig’s Gift have rotated once more. We’ve listed the available Sets below. For those new to Seasons, here’s how it works:

Completing Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the Season Journey will reward you with three of Haedrig’s Gifts. Each Gift contains a few pieces from one of your Class Sets. Players can only unlock one Class Set in this manner per Season across Hardcore and Non-Hardcore, so choose wisely!

The set you will receive depends on the class of the character you’re playing when you open each Haedrig’s Gift. To collect a full Class Set, you’ll need to open all three on the same character.

Here are the sets granted by Haedrig’s Gift in Season 17:

  • Barbarian – Might of the Earth
  • Crusader – Thorns of the Invoker
  • Demon Hunter – The Shadow’s Mantle
  • Monk – Monkey King’s Garb
  • Necromancer – Grace of Inarius
  • Witch Doctor – Raiment of the Jade Harvester
  • Wizard – Firebird’s Finery

Quality of Life Changes

Several major quality of life changes are also incoming to Season 17 in Patch 2.6.5. We want to address some of the longest-standing and most requested quality of life features that the community has brought to us.

First, we’ve added three new Torment levels to the game, so that there’s more variety and efficiency in farming for players deep in late-game content.

Higher Torment levels means more experience, gold, and Blood Shards, along with improved rewards from activities like Bounties and Nephalem Rifts. Don’t worry; we’ve made some tweaks since the PTR to ensure that additional rewards abound, including a higher drop rate for Greater Rift Keys for these new difficulty settings.

We’ve also added a new search functionality to the Stash (on PC only). You can search by the name of any item to highlight it in your Stash space—sure to help you organize, equip, and get back out there fighting demons more quickly than ever.

There are a few other small changes coming, such as an Expand/Collapse All button for recipes on Crafters (PC only), most Bounty indicators appearing immediately after entering the Bounty area, and Death’s Breath now dropping from Horadric Caches. With all these changes, Season 17 is sure to be the greatest Season yet!

FAQ

Q: When does Season 17 start?

A: Season 17 begins Friday, May 17 at 5:00 p.m. PST in North America, 5:00 p.m. CEST in Europe, and 5:00 p.m. KST in Asia. For time zone conversion, see this site.

Q: When do Seasons go live for players on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch?

A: Seasons go live for all console players globally Friday, May 17 at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time, regardless of which regional version of the game you may have. Please note that Seasonal Leaderboards for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch are still separate by hardware platform.

Q: When will Season 17 end?

A: We are no longer providing anticipated end dates for Seasons. However, we are committed to keeping Seasons roughly three months in length (give or take a few weeks based on development needs) and will continue to provide a minimum of two weeks advance notice for when the Season will be ending.

Q: When are the non-Seasonal Leaderboards being wiped?

A: Non-Seasonal Leaderboards are tied to what we call “Eras,” each of which lasts about 6–12 months. The most recent era began January 8. For more information on Eras, please see this post.

Q: What will happen to older Seasonal and Era records?

A: Starting with Season 10, we removed old personal bests from Season 1. When Season 17 arrives, we will remove old personal bests from Season 8, and so on. We will be doing the same for personal bests from the previous Era when the next one goes live.

Seasonal Leaderboard records are not being cleared and will remain archived both in game and on our website.

Q: I saw something about additional stash tabs being added. Why isn’t that in the patch notes?

A: During the course of the 2.6.5 PTR, we encountered technical issues that caused us to have to step back from adding additional stash tabs to Diablo III. Specifically, it caused performance issues for the game and, while we know stash tabs are highly valued and desired by our community, we strongly believe in providing a smooth and enjoyable gameplay experience first. For more information about the issues we experienced, please refer to this forum post.

Themed Seasons are continuing to evolve as we venture into the future, and we’re quite excited to see where this one leads. Are you looking forward to the Season of Nightmares? Is there a Legacy of Nightmares build you plan on using? Share your thoughts below and we’ll see you in Season 17!


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Robert G.

Robert a.k.a “Dredscythe” has been on the Diablo 3 scene since closed beta with a passion to play the game. He brings a fresh perspective, grounded in sound ideas, based on true development concepts to give ideas to improve and push the game forward. Current Diablo Site Manager, News Reporter and Graphic artist here at Blizzpro.


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