Diablo II: Resurrected brought back the genre-defining classic in style, a true-to-its-roots remaster with an impressive 3D coat of digital paint. Remaining faithful was the goal for Blizzard from the word go, but now that it’s been a few months the studio is planning to make substantial balance changes to Diablo II. Yeah, the first in over a decade. Over the weekend we got full details on what to expect with Diablo II: Resurrected’s Patch 2.4.

From a high level Patch 2.4 is all about adding more, more ways to play, more gear to find, and more improvements made to the core experience. In terms of how, it’s about fundamental balance changes coming to all classes, new Rune Words (high-level items), new Horadric Cube Recipes, and Set Item Bonus changes.

New Class Balance Changes: To ensure that the most significant class changes receive an ample amount of attention, we'd love feedback on changes affecting our seven unique classes.

New Rune Words: We encourage you to experience the new Rune Words that can be created and inserted into correlating socketed gear. Please share your feedback on these new items.

New Horadric Cube Recipes: New Horadric Cube Recipes have been implemented to complement Set items, we encourage you to craft these and share your feedback; especially in tandem with new improvements being made to Set items that are generally underused by players.

And much more: Mercenary changes, Set Item Bonus Changes, New Level Area changes, Item Tooltip changes, and other changes to gameplay have been implemented for testing in this PTR. Your impressions and insights on how these changes affect your experience would be very appreciated.

Patch 2.4 is massive, so much so that it will hit the new Diablo II: Resurrected PTR for wider testing before going live. And with that Blizzard is keen to hear any and all feedback. Seeing buffs come to melee Amazon and Assassin Skills is great, as is the fine tuning of Synergy requirements to free up points for even some of the most popular builds. For those expecting that Blizzard might have only made a handful of changes, well, that’s definitely not the case. In terms of the Assassin’s Martial Arts Skill Tree, 10 Skills are changing in some meaningful way - from increased damage values through to how they behave.

Good news for more casual players that have just dipped their toes into the game’s challenging Hell difficulty, Mercenaries are getting buffed across the board with new abilities and better resistances. And with the new ability to upgrade Set Items and even equip new Rune Words, it’s going to be very interesting to see where Blizzard goes next. At this stage we wouldn’t be surprised if there’s also an Act VI of some kind on the cards.

We're only scratching the surface, Head Here for the full Patch Notes.