Here, we’ll discuss the latest changes to Uber Unique drop rate in Diablo 4 and how it affects the game.

I feel like many of you are probably not fully up to date on every latest change to the game. Since it’s the end of the season, there usually aren’t vast changes at this point.

And Christmas event that just released is boring and uninspired, to say the least. So you have good reason not to listen closely to what’s going on with Diablo 4 right now, at least until they start announcing details about Season 3.

That being said, one recent change to the game that you may have noticed is that the drop rate for Duriel’s Uber Uniques has doubled. That’s what I want to talk about here, because this change has serious implications for both future and past events.

Hardcore Diablo fans should be very aware that doubling things in a game rarely has the desired effect. Before we talk about this change, we also have to talk about Uber Uniques’ system of dropping a boss throughout the game. Because the system itself is highly questionable, to say the least.

Everyone praised the developers for their decision when they announced that Uber Uniques would be more suitable for the average player. Because the drop rates for these items have been so low since the launch of the game that only a handful of players in the world are lucky enough to get them.

Anything is better than this system, so that’s why everyone cheered when Duriel could drop Uber Unique items with about a 2% drop rate.

But little did we know it was another horrible system that players grew to hate over time. In order to fight Duriel and have a 2% chance of receiving one item, players must go through a heartbreaking grind.

The time varies depending on the class you play. But I think it’s safe to say that summoning Duriel at a time requires at least an hour of farming time.

Now, if a player kills Duriel in a group, it can increase the number of summons by 4x. But the problem remains: long hours of soulless grinding with a slim chance of getting really good items.

Trust me, 2% chance is small, especially if you want a specific Uber Unique. You can easily kill between 5 and 800 Duriel without dropping your target Uber Unique. And you can get multiple other unique items that are actually useless to your class.

It filled Reddit with posts, complaining about how many times they ran it without getting Unique drops they wanted. Other types of posts are where players post screenshots of the items they ultimately earned as proof of some kind of achievement.

But is beating a simple, easy-to-kill boss repeatedly really a tremendous accomplishment? Players are frustrated, and rightfully so. Wouldn’t it be better if it could drop Uber Uniques from any mob, but the chance of a drop didn’t limit them to a handful of players in the world?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the addition of Uber Bosses is completely useless. They serve their purpose well by letting players aim to farm regular unique items, such as Tempest Roar and Malignant Rings. But bundling Uber Unique items with Duriel is a huge mistake in my opinion.

Now let’s get back to the present and look at the recent changes to Uber Uniques drop odds. The fact that the developers made such a change, especially in the middle of the season, upset more people.

First, this doesn’t solve the problem of Duriel being a single semi-reliable way to get Uber Uniques. But that’s not the only problem. Let’s see how some player groups react to this change.

Players who have gotten Unique items they wanted despite tedious grinding without buffs may feel betrayed by the developers. Because it takes new players half the time to get the same items.

The second category of players are those who obtained Unique by purchasing Duriel summoning materials using Diablo 4 Gold or even real money. I personally see nothing wrong with using gold to purchase materials. But since duping is available to certain groups, material prices can become very low due to the excessive number of duped items being sold.

So, while buying with gold isn’t inherently a bad thing, duping is questionable. As for paying real money to get summoning materials, I do understand the reasoning: people want to skip dozens or hundreds of hours of grinding to reach Duriel by paying. I understand the motivation, but it’s still bad for the game as this is clearly a case of pay-to-win and will ruin the game in the long run.

So, the target group that should benefit from the double drop chances are players who have never obtained unique items and plan to get them later in the season. However, at the end of the season, the number of these players was not as high as the developers thought.

It’s entirely possible that some players who never got Uber Uniques evaded this chore, and they still have to do it after the change. At least the price of summoning materials is expected to drop due to increased drop rates.

So, overall, the developers made a controversial change to an objectively terrible system. They could have redesigned the entire system, or at least they could have waited until next season to introduce the change.

Regardless, this is yet another in a long line of terrible decisions from Diablo developers. Looking at this trend, they really have to do better to compete with the upcoming Path of Exile 2. What are your thoughts on this topic? Are you planning to take advantage of Uber Uniques? See you next time!

Diablo 4’s next major addition to the endgame, Abattoir of Zir was finally officially added to the game on December 5th! To help you better experience this newly introduced endgame content, I will introduce everything about it!

The Abattoir of Zir is a new level 100 piece of endgame content that, at the start, is going to be more difficult than level 100 Nightmare Dungeons. This new system is going to be very similar to Rifts from Diablo III.

You need to enter one of these dungeons and you’ll have 10 minutes to defeat enough enemies to summon a boss and then defeat that boss to actually complete that run of the Abattoir of Zir.

If you die once, the run’s over. And if you don’t defeat the boss within that 10 minutes, the run’s over. Even if you’re in a group of 4 people, if any person in the group dies, the run’s over. Even looking past that, just the difficulty of the enemies is going to be higher than nightmare 100 dungeons. It’s also only going to be one light. So, this is going to be very difficult.

To even start this new system, you will have had to complete the entirety of the Season Journey. So you’ll basically have to be level 100 and pretty progressed into the endgame to even get into the first level of this new system. And it’s going to work in a similar way to Nightmare Dungeons.

Once you complete that Season Journey, you’ll get a new recipe to craft Tier 1 of the Abattoir of Zir. And it’ll take sigil dust like your normal Nightmare Dungeon Keys.

Once you go in and complete the first tier of the Abattoir of Zir, you’ll then get a recipe to craft Tier 2. And you can go all the way up to Tier 25. But this is going to be much more difficult than going from level 66 to 67 in Nightmare Dungeons.

The difficulty increase from Tier 1 to Tier 2 is going to be a substantial jump. So, getting up all the way to Tier 25 is something that the vast majority of players will not accomplish.

One of the biggest saving graces of the system is how they’re going to be scaling that difficulty. Because they’re not actually going to be scaling the damage that enemies do to you very much.

In fact, we’re not actually certain if they’re going to be increasing the damage enemies deal at any point during the Abattoir of Zir. It did sound like they’re going to be slightly increasing it. But the primary way they’re increasing the difficulty is increasing the health of these enemies.

The reason this is actually really good is that these enemies are already going to be dealing ridiculous amounts of damage. In fact, Tier 1 of the Abattoir of Zir is going to be equivalent to level 104 of Nightmare Dungeons. That’s already going to be doing a lot of damage to you. But primarily scaling the health is going to allow a lot more builds to be able to do this.

And remember, you’re on a timer. Even if you have a super tanky build that can survive everything, you need to be doing enough damage to be able to kill enough things and then kill the boss to be able to beat that 10-minute timer or you fail. So, I think they’re actually scaling this difficulty in a much better way that’s going to actually allow a lot of builds to at least attempt some of these higher tiers.

The rewards from Abattoir of Zir are also going to be pretty substantial.

Now, we don’t actually know how gear drops are going to work in the system. Presumably, you’re going to be getting a lot of really high item level gear. Presumably, you’ll have really good chances to get 925 item level. But there are going to be some more specific rewards.

First off, you’re going to be getting a lot of glyph XP. Completing a Tier 1 of Abattoir of Zir is going to reward you with 1,000 glyph experience that you can either use on all of our normal glyphs right now or you can use on the other new reward of this system, which is going to be the first unique glyph ever added to Diablo 4 called Tears of Blood. This glyph is going to work in a completely different way than all of the other glyphs.

It’s going to start at level 1, but you’re going to be able to level it to level 200 or maybe even more. So, instead of being capped at 21, you’re capped at 200 or more, which is pretty crazy. This is also another reason why you need that massive amount of glyph experience. This glyph is also going to start at radius 4 and we know you’re at least going to be able to increase the size of this glyph at level 50 up to 5, which is bigger than any other glyph. We don’t know if you’ll be able to increase the size past that as well.

Now, the actual effects of this glyph are for every 5 core stats purchased within range. You gain 2% increased multiplicative damage. And again, this is at level 1, so that increase is also going to be increasing every time you level it up.

And then, it grants a 50% bonus to all rare nodes within range. This bonus is increased by 10% every 10 levels. Every 10 levels you put in, it’ll go up by another 10%. So, 1% per level, but it probably won’t actually increase until you get the full 10 levels. All in all, massively increased bonuses to rare nodes and just absurdly high damage increases.

What’s really interesting is this is just for every 5 core stats within range. This doesn’t mention the main stat for your class. This just says any core stat. This could potentially still mean that it’s just your main stat for your class (Willpower for a Druid). But it’s seeming like it’s meaning just any of the primary stats in the game, which would be pretty ridiculous.

And either way you look at it, either way this is going to play out, this thing is going to be giving you pretty much the biggest damage increase you can possibly get. This is probably going to give you close to infinite progression for the rest of the season, because getting like 200 levels on this one glyph is still going to take a lot of time and it’s just going to give you absurdly high damage increases.

Because of how the Abattoir of Zir is going to be scaled, where they’re scaling enemy health more than anything else, and because this glyph is tied into this, you’re probably going to actually need to continue to heavily progress this glyph to even have a chance to do higher tiers of the Abattoir of Zir. Because you’re getting such absurd damage increases with this glyph, that they would need to balance the higher tiers in a way to where you legitimately could not get enough damage without this glyph.

I do think this is actually a pretty good way to give more content and more progression halfway into a season, to continue to give you new and more difficult things to do. Because when this comes out, we’re going to be relatively halfway into the season and getting this is basically going to give you another tier of progression in the endgame.