We’re just days away now from the end of Diablo 4’s Season 7, and the start of Season 8: Belial’s Return. The new season kicks off on Tuesday, April 29 right alongside patch 2.2.0, now that it’s been through the PTR fires.
We’ve known pretty much everything there is to know about Belial’s Return for a while, thanks to the initial, pre-PTR reveal, and the PTR itself. But Blizzard recently solidified a few of those suggested changes, and revealed a new battle pass system being introduced with the new season.
But anyone who plays a lot of Diablo 4 knows that some of the more exciting stuff is often found in the patch notes that don’t get a lot of attention.
Following the final pre-Season 8 livestream for Diablo 4, Blizzard published the full change log for patch 2.2.0 (Build #64236), complete with all the changes made based on PTR feedback. Now that we have the whole thing, we get to see what smaller changes will be making it into the game.
Blizzard loves to implement undocumented changes into its patches, and players have developed a habit of hunting for them the first time they launch the game after installing the patch. We’re going to have to wait until next week to see how many (if any) are included in the Season 8 patch. For now, let’s dig deep into the patch notes we have for some of the items that didn’t generate a lot of noise in all the pre-launch hype.
Starting off with the Party Finder, inarguably one of the best features introduced to the game post-launch. The state of it at release was… functional, but clearly in need of a lot of work. Blizzard has been building upon that, and the work continues in 2.2.0. The Party Finder menu will now automatically close after you successfully join a party, and the party listing will now automatically go back up if the party leader changes, or if the difficulty level changes so it’s more clear to players what’s actually going on.
Something Blizzard barely put any work into since launch, however, is the behaviour of automatic sorting in players’ Stash. Now, hitting that button will push “the most relevant items to the front”, which the developer says will take into account rarity – and crucially – whether Greater Affixes are present on those items.
A big feature in patch 2.2.0 is the ability to teleport directly to party members, which I cannot believe took the developer this long to implement. This is something Blizzard actually touched on in earlier streams, so we’re glad to see it finally in the game.
A couple of other miscellaneous changes will help out those of us with a lot of anxiety. The ever-present pip on your Map tab that never seems to go away no matter what you do, will no longer appear if it’s only trying to alert you about a new cosmetic.
And, on that subject, you can now activate/unlock cosmetic items regardless of the class you’re currently playing as. In other words, you won’t have to switch to Barbarian (for example) to “consume” their class-specific cosmetic when you’re playing as a different class.
Now, the big one: Conduit Shrines. Any longtime Diablo 4 player will tell you how practically useless these have been for months. Blizzard made a few tweaks here and there, but never really got them into a state that made you feel powerful when you activated one, so players just avoided them. It doesn’t sound like the developer has found a solution quite yet, either, because patch 2.2.0 takes Conduit Shrines out of the game entirely!
“We have heard feedback on the Conduit Shrines. We are disabling them until further notice while reworking them,” a note from the development team reads. Hopefully that means far fewer Reddit posts from players complaining about activating a Shrine, only to find out it’s a Conduit.