Diablo 4 Season 7 PTR unveils powerful new abilities and a much-requested tool

The Diablo 4 Season 7 PTR will let you get hands-on with patch 2.1 early, which includes the heavily requested Armory tool and new powers.

The Diablo 4 Season 7 PTR has been unveiled, and along with it some of the major features for the next season of Blizzard’s world-beating RPG. While it’s still early days, the initial glimpse suggests that this next update may be one of the best yet – it takes inspiration from the second and best Diablo season so far, with powerful new abilities to learn and additional unique gem types and runes to further amplify your builds. Even better, the much-wanted Armory feature is finally making its long-awaited appearance.

Diablo 4 Season 7 takes after one of the most popular temporary leagues yet, Season of Blood, and its vampiric powers in particular. These bonus abilities were a great way to tweak and amplify builds, helping to create a more unique set of seasonal loadouts. In the next season, we’ll be using new Witchcraft abilities, which should bring a wealth of additional options to the RPG.

These new Diablo 4 powers are split into three schools. Eldritch powers mostly allow you to deal or amplify your elemental damage, Psyche powers disrupt and debuff enemies, and Growth and Decay powers include minions, poisons, and stat-draining skills. You’ll need these to take on a series of dangerous new enemies known as the Headrotten, which come as both regular and boss enemies.

Alongside this, and again reminiscent of Season of Blood, are Headhunts. These are essentially the ‘green Helltide’ of Season 7, turning some zones into areas where the Headless Husk and Fugitive Head bosses can appear, along with other Whispers of the Dead challenges to complete.

Completing these tasks and hunting the Headless will earn you both Restless Rot – used to unlock and upgrade the Witchcraft powers – and new Occult Gems, which are essentially unique, powerful gems that can be socketed into any of your gear for additional boons. On top of this, several new runes have been added to the pool for players that own Vessel of Hatred, along with new unique and legendary items for each of the classes.

All of that combined should massively amplify the potential for buildcrafting, and personally I’m very excited to see what players create. There’s just one problem. Swapping between builds on a single character has typically been a big pain in Diablo 4, requiring you to fully respec your skill and paragon trees, along with changing all your equipment. But rejoice, for the much clamored-for solution is finally upon us.

The Diablo 4 Armory, frequently teased as an in-development feature that would arrive eventually, is finally ready. It gives you five loadout slots for each character, and will save your equipped items, your paragon board and glyphs, your skill tree and selections, and your class-specific mechanic. Even better, once a loadout is saved you won’t have to spend gold to swap between them, even if they require differing paragon loadouts.

The Diablo 4 Season 7 PTR will run from Tuesday December 3 to Tuesday December 10. You’ll need to be on Battlenet to join, but can use an NPC to boost your character to endgame in order to quickly test out various builds. Read more about the individual powers and other PTR features in the full blog post courtesy of Blizzard.

Alternatively, dive into more of the best games like Diablo – with the Path of Exile 2 release date just around the corner, we’re in for a big holiday season for ARPG enjoyers.

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