After releasing a bummer of a Diablo 4 season, Blizzard swoops in with an update that fixes some of its worst issues

Blizzard took a big swing at loot in Diablo 4's latest season and completely whiffed it—at least in terms of keeping players driven to grind for its most powerful items. Today, it dropped a patch to try to remedy some of the problems, starting with a...

Blizzard took a big swing at loot in Diablo 4's latest season and completely whiffed it—at least in terms of keeping players driven to grind for its most powerful items. Today, it dropped a patch to try to remedy some of the problems, starting with a noticeable boost to everyone's loot drops. The biggest criticism over the new Season of Death Awakening was that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze when it came to Diablo 4's new Mythic Unique items.

These build-defining items just weren't dropping at a rate that made them realistically attainable for anyone, not even streamers who play all day. According to the patch notes, this might've been caused by a bug that prevented Mythic Uniques from dropping from popular sources like bosses. Following this update, everything seems to be working as intended, or at least as you'd expect.

Players are already finding noticeably more of them a few hours after the patch. Mythic Uniques are still pretty rare, especially if you haven't reached the highest Torment difficulty yet, but they seem to drop at a rate that is reasonable for an action RPG that is usually good about respecting your time. I've been keeping an eye on streamer Wudijo since the update landed and he's found a handful of Mythics even while playing a weaker character who can't blast through a dozen bosses in a few minutes.

This tells me normal people like you and me can expect to see some purple drops before Diablo 5. There are also scattered reports of players finding a whole new type of Mythic loot that didn't exist before the patch. Reddit user Meansingleguy found a Mythic Unique Charm, which is basically an alternative version of the item that can be equipped on your Talisman instead of your character.

A few players found some of these around the launch of the Lord of Hatred expansion but they were believed to be unintended drops due to a bug. Nobody knows if the ones people are finding today are intended to be in the game or not, but hey, we'll take what we can get.

Some issues with the season still remain, like the limit on wearing only one "crafted" Mythic Unique. You're supposed to complete the new seasonal events for materials to craft them, but once you have the one you want there's no reason to keep doing it. The patch also doesn't fix the fact that Mythic Uniques still have largely random stats on them, which kind of kills the excitement of finding one when it's terrible.

I would bet some changes are probably going to be saved for next season. Even if I still think the Season of Death Awakening was a surprisingly lukewarm follow-up to an excellent expansion, I'm happy to see Blizzard has put in the work to make it less of a slog. Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

Tyler has covered videogames and PC hardware for 15 years. He regularly spends time playing and reporting on games like Diablo 4, Elden Ring, Overwatch 2, and Final Fantasy 14. While his specialty is in action RPGs and MMOs, he's driven to cover all sorts of games whether they're broken, beautiful, or bizarre.

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