Diablo II Resurrected’s second season – and new sundering charms – won’t actually release until October 6th, but the 2.5 patch is live as of last night, just in time for the game’s first anniversary today. At the core of the update is terror – terror zones, that is.
“The journey to level 99 is a celebrated experience for players and quite the milestone if achieved – a rite of passage, even,” Blizzard says. “We want the journey to level 99 to be accessible to a larger population of players, offer more variety other than repeatedly farming Baal, Diablo, and Nihlathak, and most importantly, remain challenging. This is where Terror Zones come in. As we get into details, please note that players can choose to opt-out of Terror Zones if desired. To unlock the Terror Zones feature, you must defeat Baal per character, per difficulty using any expansion character—existing characters that have already fulfilled the requirements will automatically have this feature unlocked. Once Ladder Season Two begins, players will need to meet the aforementioned requirements to unlock Terror Zones for their new ladder characters.”
Players should check out the full patch notes for a run-down of additional quality-of-life tweaks in the update, in addition to the season two layout come October. There’s also a bit of a tease at the very end of the blog; Blizzard tucked in a secret message in the final image and asked, “What does it all mean?” You won’t need a secret decoder ring to figure it out; Reddit’s already done it.
“It’s a Vigenere cipher, and the key is: Resurrected. It translates into ‘so many gems what do these orange numbers mean’,” says clever Redditor kenana1229, which is followed up by an explanation from FedwinMorr.
“When you play on Bnet, in the lobby there is a blue gem that you can press, which will prompt a message in the chat saying “activated” and another push on the gem will indicate “deactivated”. So there is a thing, pressing that gem button may also result in the occurrence of the third text prompt – a string of random orange numbers. Nobody has any idea what they mean, however Blizzard always replied “Gem works as intended” when they were asked about it.”
