Diablo 4 Season 7 Preparation Guide
13.01.2025 - 02:06:27
Diablo 4 , Game Guides
Diablo 4 Season 7 is going to launch on January 21 and we’re more than excited. If the PTR tells us anything, it’s there are lots of new features and powers to play with this next season. To help you prepare, we’ve come up with a preparation guide that you can do before launch.
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Join a Clan
The first thing we wanted to cover with you all is join a clan. Now is the time to do this, especially since we’re nearing the end of the current season.
This gives you a major advantage as you’ll be able to team up right from the start. You can go out in a party, find loot together, share loot, and level up together.
If you’re on console and you find it difficult to communicate by typing, don’t worry! You can hop into a voice channel and hang out with the group you’re going to be playing with. It’s a great way to enjoy the new content together.
Preparing for the End of the Season
Next up, we want to talk about what happens when the season ends. If you’re new to Diablo, welcome! If this is your first time playing a seasonal character, there are some things you need to know about what’s going to happen at the end of the season.
Your seasonal character will switch from seasonal to Eternal. Don’t worry – you can still play with your character, and you’ll still have all of the gear and mats you’ve collected, as well as your gold. However, that gold and those mats cannot be used on the new seasonal characters that come with the next season.
A lot of people hear this information and think, “Well, what was the point of me playing a seasonal character if it just switches over to Eternal?”
Let me tell you, though – the real fun of the season is in the journey. Right when the season starts, everyone is on the same playing field. Nobody is stronger than anyone else, and everybody is out there discovering brand new builds and changes. It’s a really fun experience!
Seasonal Character to Eternal Realm Transition
Now, there are some things you should know about the transition from your seasonal character to the Eternal realm. When the season begins, it’s going to look a little different, and you’ll see the changes as you go.
Personally, we’ve never actually gone through and cleaned out my stash at the end of a season, but there are plenty of people who take their stash management very seriously. I’m not one of those people, but I know many players are.
What you’ll want to do is head into the stash, because that’s one of the most important things when transitioning your character. Make sure you’re prepared for this next step as the season ends!
Manage Your Stash
When you bring your seasonal character to the Eternal realm, all of the items that were in your stash will go into a "withdrawal-only" tab. This tab is separate and will contain everything that you’ve accumulated over the course of the season.
For example, right now, our tab has 249 items in it. You’ll have a few options when it comes to managing these items: you can either leave them there, knowing they’ll be deleted at the end of the season, or you can start moving them into your character's inventory.
You can take this opportunity to organize your stash, delete unnecessary items, or salvage anything that you no longer need. If you want, you can go ahead and salvage all of the uniques, legendaries, and everything else you’ve gathered.
This could give your Eternal character a nice boost, which can be especially fun if you want to test your old character in the new setup, without the seasonal powers.
Testing Out the Old Characters
Now, this is an interesting part of the season-ending transition. If you’re curious about how your old character feels without the seasonal powers, this is the perfect opportunity. This season will be the first time since Season 2 that we’ve had seasonal powers, and we’re genuinely excited about this.
So, if you want to feel the difference, you can give your Eternal character a test run and see how things feel after the seasonal changes. It’s a good way to check out how your character fits into the new meta and how everything shifts once the season ends.
If managing your stash and planning ahead for this shift is something that matters to you, be sure to clear enough space in your stash and organize things so that you’re ready.
We’ve personally never been too serious about this part of the game, but we know a lot of people who do take it seriously. If it’s important to you, then by all means, go ahead and set up your stash management plan. It could make a big difference when you jump into the Eternal realm after the season ends.
Choosing Your Class
Now, let’s talk about something else you’ll want to think about before Season 7 kicks off – choosing your class. Whether you’ve been playing this season, maybe started late in the season, or are a seasoned veteran from Season Zero like us, you likely already have a good sense of your class.
But here’s the thing about seasonal classes – they change every time a new season rolls over. The meta always shifts, and there are adjustments that happen with each season. So even if you’re familiar with your class, you might find that it’s time to adjust your build.
So, how do you go about building your class for the new season? Well, there are a lot of different ways to approach it, and not every build planner site is going to be updated right away. But for those who have never used a build planner before, let me quickly explain what it is.
Build planners are tools where you can map out your character’s abilities, skills, and talents before diving into the game. These tools help you plan out the most effective build for your class, and they’re incredibly useful when you want to optimize your performance for the upcoming season.
There are many build planner websites out there, and they can be a huge help in determining what changes you need to make to your class. Whether it’s adjusting your gear, talents, or skills, a build planner is a great resource for making sure you’re ready for the new season.
It’ll also give you an advantage when you start exploring the new content and meta shifts that come with the season changes.
So, get ahead of the curve and start planning your class build.
That said, it’s still fun to take a look and see what’s popping up for each class. For example, when Dust Devils were first added, they were absurdly strong on the PTR. But once the season launched, they never quite played the same way on live servers.
It’s always exciting to experience these builds in a very specific version of the game, and it’ll be interesting to see how they evolve.
Necromancer Builds
Let’s start with the Necromancer. This class is currently the talk of the town, largely due to two different skills and one main reason: uncapped double-dip scaling on ultimates.
One of the largest changes coming in Season 7 is that all ultimate skills will gain a bonus effect when you reach rank five, giving you more benefits for investing in them. The goal here is to create more build variety by encouraging more focus on ultimate skills.
For Necromancer, two rank five upgrades have led to some absurdly strong builds. The first one is Army of the Dead, where the rank five upgrade increases all damage from the skill by 125% of your skeleton mage and golem damage bonuses, which can be stacked incredibly high. This allows you to hit for literally trillions of damage.
Then we have something even more insane: Blood Wave. Specifically, there’s a shadow variant build for Blood Wave that uses the new Kesm Legacy unique pants. These pants double the waves with each cast and add a stacking debuff that increases on enemies hit by the skill.
This build is able to pull enemies in as well, and it’s hitting for ridiculous numbers – most of which are coming from the rank five upgrade for Blood Wave. This upgrade makes the skill gain damage equal to 100% of your damage while healthy and damage while fortified bonuses. These bonuses can be scaled to insane levels, resulting in the currently outrageous damage output.
Although Blood Wave is extremely strong right now, I expect it to still be powerful when Season 7 launches, but the numbers will likely be adjusted. They clearly want Blood Wave to be a prominent feature in Season 7, but they don’t want it clearing Tier 150 content as easily as it is right now.
Druid Builds
Next up is the Druid, which is also causing quite a stir at the moment. It’s doing something truly crazy – literally negative damage! That’s because it hits the damage calculation cap for what’s allowed to show on the screen.
This is most commonly being abused in Boulder builds, which you can play while staying in Bear Form or even in Hurricane form. The reason for this is a bug in the Survival Instincts passive, which interacts with the Overpower mechanic.
This passive gives bonus damage in Bear Form at full life and also gives 1% bonus overpower damage up to a 25% maximum for every 1% difference between your current life and the fortified life percent of your enemies.
Our guess is that this is similar to the Vicious Shield interaction with Spear of the Apocalypse in Season 6, where it was calculating based on Base Life instead of Max Life, leading to insane damage scaling.
Despite this bug, two builds are still looking strong for Druid. Cataclysm, especially with the new changes to make it count Lightning Bolt effects with a new aspect, and of course, the Boulder build with Survival Instincts once the bug is fixed and it caps at 25%.
Spiritborn Build
The Spiritborn build is another one doing crazy things, but in entirely new ways. This is coming from a new scaler, which is supposed to have a cap but is seemingly not capped yet on the PTR.
This scaler is tied to the Razer Wings legendary aspect, which makes the Razer Wings build far stronger than all other Spiritborn builds currently on the PTR. Specifically, this comes from the Endless Talons aspect, which increases Eagle skill damage for 3 seconds with bonus stacks on critical hits with Razer Wings.
At max stacks, this is supposed to provide a 50% multiplier, but the cap is not properly in place on the PTR. As a result, you can see the buff stacking to thousands of stacks, and this leads to an absurd damage increase. It’s an obvious bug that the devs will likely fix before launch, but even with the bug, this build is clearly intended to be a strong one for Season 7.
Rogue Builds
Next up, we have the Rogue, and their Rain of Arrows ultimate build is pulling out a surprising amount of power compared to previous Rogue builds from Season 6. The base damage of Rain of Arrows has been increased, the delay to the arrow impact has been reduced, and the lucky hit chance has been increased.
At rank five, it gets another one of those infinitely scaling double-dip bonuses, giving it 100% of your damage to distant enemies as a bonus.
This is a build we’ve always loved, but it’s been difficult to make it strong in the past. Right now, though, it’s doing some solid numbers, reaching around Pit Tier 120 on the PTR. It’s not breaking the game, but it’s strong compared to the general state of Rogue builds at the moment.
Barbarian Builds
For the Barbarian, there are a couple of interesting developments. The main build that’s looking good right now is Hammer of the Ancients, which causes exploding earthquakes on the floor.
This build has quite a bit of long-term potential, especially when you can maximize it with the right gear. However, Mighty Throw is still looking like the main contender for the best Barbarian build for Season 7, assuming nothing changes with it.
There’s also another one of those infinite scaling double-dip ultimates, this time from Rank 5 of Iron Maelstrom. It scales with 80% of your damage to injured and healthy stat bonuses, making this skill viable to build around. It’s still hard to say if anyone has really hit its limit yet, but it’s definitely one to watch.
Sorcerer Builds
Lastly, we have the Sorcerer. There’s both good news and bad news here. Fireball and Firebolt Shatter are likely still going to be the best builds for Pit Tier runs, as their main issues have not been fixed yet.
However, Inferno paired with Incinerate now has a genuine place in builds, and you can even build around them entirely. With far from perfect gear, you can still clear at least Tier 100 pit runs, which is great to see.
Unfortunately, Ball Lightning is a bit underwhelming. The Strike of Stormhorn unique focus is not currently functioning correctly, and this is preventing the build from reaching its full potential. Once this issue is fixed, the build could easily double its current output on the PTR.
Patch Notes and Witch Powers
The patch notes are coming up soon, and we’re also going to get another campfire chat. We had the PTR, and once that’s wrapped up, they’ll take all the feedback we provided, compile it, and make necessary changes.
We know there was a lot of feedback sent up, and we’ll get all the updates in the patch notes for what’s coming in Season 7. This will include what we’re actually going to see versus what we saw in the PTR.
For anyone who got to experience the PTR, you know it’s a ton of fun – though, things tend to be a little broken. But that’s the whole point of a PTR! We get to find the bugs and issues before they make their way into the live season.
Even though bugs are inevitable in any game that’s released live, we do our part to make sure the experience is as smooth as possible.
Once we get the patch notes, you’ll be able to visit your build planner and adjust your character’s build based on the new information. This is especially important for Season 7, as we’re going to see witch powers being introduced – something we’ve never had before.
These witch powers will serve as seasonal powers and will add new layers of buffs and bonuses to your character.
Returning Seasonal Powers
The last time we had seasonal powers was back in Season 2, and many players considered that to be one of the best seasons Diablo 4 ever released. We’re really hoping that Season 7 can hold up to that reputation. For the next season, there’ll be the redeeming witch tide. Witch tide will be a zone similar to Hell Tides, and it will be active 100% of the time during the season.
There will be four different zones inside this area, and each of these zones will feature a ton of whispers. These whispers will play a much bigger role than they currently do, and they’re going to be far more engaging and interactive than what we have right now in the game.
The developers have clearly put a lot of thought into the whispers, and it’s going to be a lot of fun. The whole zone is going to look a little different – instead of being red, everything will have a green hue, creating a fresh atmosphere.
Witch Tide and Monster Spawn Mechanics
The exciting part about witch tide isn’t just the look and feel of the area, though – it’s also what happens when you explore it. You’ll encounter roots scattered throughout the zone, which you’ll see marked on the mini-map with little bubbles.
These roots will be popping out of the ground, and when you click on them, they’ll start spawning monsters.
There’s even a chance that these roots will spawn a monster very similar to the Blood Maiden from Hell Tides. This massive creature will pop out of the ground, and everyone in the area will get a notification when it does.
Players will then converge on the spot and work together to defeat it.
When you’re leveling in this area, you’ll notice that this boss has a lot of health, but it’s still a really fun fight. If you’re looking to level up quickly, witch tide is going to be the premium spot to do so.
There’s a crazy high monster density here, and there are tons of whispers happening all over the place. It’s a chaotic environment at first, but that’s part of the fun.
Leveling in Witch Tide
When you first get into witch tide, we highly suggest that you take your time. Follow one whisper at a time, learn the mechanics, and focus on mastering those whispers. Ignore the chaos around you until you get the hang of things.
As you progress, you’ll realize that the monsters here are practically endless. Sometimes, you’ll be in an area with multiple people who have spawned different roots, and before you know it, you’ll be surrounded by an unlimited amount of monsters to kill.
This will be the absolute fastest way to level up during the season. Everyone is going to be here, so if you want to take full advantage of witch tide, get ready for some serious action.
Ready For The Next Season?
Once the new season drops, one of the first things you should do is to start farming d4 gold for your character. Until then, just follow our preparation guide above so you’ll be set and ready.