It’s normal for any Diablo 4 player to always look forward to the new season. After all, it’s almost impossible for any current season to maintain its freshness for three months, so I guess you must have invested all your free time during the 2.2.0 PTR to explore all Season 8 content in it as much as possible.
To be honest, the performance of the PTR should not disappoint you. At least it lets you know the biggest feature of Season 8 – boss power, and the return of the most representative boss Belial. Or it can be considered that the season will be themed around Belial’s Return, and the season power and most of the new season mechanics will be associated with it to create a “boss” season.
In the past, various Diablo 4 bosses were one of the main sources of your Diablo 4 Gold, but Season 8 will further enrich the availability of bosses. Based on this, we will introduce these new boss-related Diablo 4 content one by one based on 2.2.0 PTR.
Season Power: Boss Power
Most Diablo 4 seasons will set a season power as an additional combat gain, besides you use class skills or gear in this season. In Season 2, it is vampire power, in Season 7, it is witchcraft power, and for the yet-to-come Season 8, it should be preliminarily determined to be boss power.
Different season’s powers are unlocked in different ways. Taking S7 witchcraft power as an example, they require you to find the corresponding NPC to learn or farm special altars after completing the pre-tasks to obtain them. However, as the name suggests, boss power is essential to set the main skills of all combatable bosses in the game as a kind of obtainable resource for you. As long as you defeat the corresponding boss, you can obtain its power.
According to the PTR, there are expected to be 24 bosses that can provide power in Season 8. Some of them are regular world bosses, some are extremely difficult Uber bosses like Lilith, and even the ultimate boss Belial added this season can provide you with his unique skills!
How To Use It?
When you defeat any of these 24 bosses, it will give you two powers, namely the main power and the modifier (the main function of the latter is to enhance the former). Although you can only activate 1 main power and 3 modifier powers at a time, you can find the boss power combination that suits you best by trying different combinations to give full play to the effect of your Diablo 4 builds.
Belial’s Return
Whether it is the boss power or Apparition Incursion event that we will continue to introduce later, Belial is present. There is no doubt that he will be a core of Season 8, and all stories and events should revolve around him.
Belial has appeared in the main quest of Diablo 3 and the storyline of the entire game series in the past. His return in D4 may bring new content related to the main plot and further expand the storyline. On the other hand, it also means that you need to learn and familiarize yourself with the new final boss battle mode in order to farm Diablo 4 gold and his power by defeating Belial, especially if you haven’t played Diablo 3.
In Diablo 3, Belial’s encounter consists of two stages. Perhaps D4S8 will increase the difficulty on this basis. After all, the difficulty of Diablo 4’s endgame is expected to increase overall from S8. If you want to prepare for this boss battle, it is best to understand and learn about Belial’s encounter in Diablo 3 while preparing resources through Season 7.
Apparition Incursion
Just like you had to hunt down Headrotten enemies in Season 7, in Season 8 Belial will bring his Apparition monsters into Sanctuary, and all you have to do is do your best to clear these illusory foot soldiers – the game calls this clearing activity Apparition Incursion event.
This event will refresh every few minutes in different parts of Sanctuary, and any Diablo character of any difficulty level can participate. Once you arrive in the event area, you can identify these monsters by the green eye mark on Belial. There will be 1 Apparition boss in the monster team in a single event, killing him can unlock the corresponding boss power and obtain loot such as gold or gear. It is expected that you can obtain 10 Apparition boss powers by farming this event.
New Lair Boss System
In addition to the new mechanism, another significant change in Season 8 is that the previous endgame boss is changed to a lair boss, and it is further divided into three levels: initiate, greater, and exalted. The bosses corresponding to each level are:
- Initiate: Beast in the Ice, Grigoire, Lord Zir, Varshan, and Urivar.
- Greater: Andariel, Duriel, and Harbinger of Hatred.
- Exalted: Belial.
It is worth noting that you must enter Torment I or higher to fight these bosses. In addition, the summoning and looting mechanism of the lair boss has also changed. It is expected that in Season 8, you will no longer need to cultivate summoning materials in advance to summon the boss to fight, but the ordinary loot dropped directly after winning will also be reduced, and a chest called Hoard will be the main drop.
To unlock Hoard of different lair bosses, you need to get the corresponding key. Although this sounds troublesome, fortunately, all initiate lair bosses will drop Stygian Stone for you in addition to providing boss power and Diablo 4 Gold, which can be used to convert into keys for higher-level lair boss Hoards.
In fact, in addition to the above boss-related mechanics, Season 8 will also bring other new content, such as adding new unique Diablo 4 items for sale, but there is no doubt that boss-related is the top priority. So if you want to prepare for Season 8, this introduction we provided should be very useful!
