Diablo 3's first major content patch detailed

4.7

According to Blizzard in a few months time, as part of their first big content patch for Diablo 3, a season system will launch for the title. The system will feature season specific and exclusive legendary items alongside tiered difficulty challenge secenarios. The full announcement from Blizard's Josh Mosqueira which details the modes and gives broad ETAs can be found below.

Seasons

One of the features you guys have asked about a lot, that we have done a lot of research for, is something called ladders. I'm happy to say that as part of our first big content patch in a couple of months, we will be releasing Seasons, which will include a ladder-like aspect to them. We're still working on them, but the general gist is that you'll level up a new character, we'll have specific ladders for Seasons, and also some goodies that will drop along the way. There's more information of that to come, and we're not making an announcement of when, but that's coming in the first major content patch - not the first patch, but the first major content patch.

Seasons-Exclusive Legendaries

There will be more legendary items in the future, both for rewards of Ladders, and also rewards from the Tiered Rifts. For the current ones, we probably are not going to revisit them. They all take time to do and I'd rather we were adding new legendary items, and the time is better spent on new legendary items than going back to refit old ones.

Tiered Rifts And Leaderboards

There is another major feature in the patch 2.1, which is going to be what we're internally calling tiered Rifts. The idea is a challenge scenario, where players do increasingly hard Rifts, to see who can get the farthest. You do your bounties, you do a Nephalem Rift. If you clear it, there's a chance to get a Greater Rift Token. If you successfully do that, you'll get a Greater Rift Key (rank 2), then Rank 3, etc.. Much like seasons, we're going to have a leaderboard as well, so you can see who got to the highest tier Rift, and what time were they able to obtain on that.