Diablo 4 Season 11 Guide

Item Journey Reworks: A New Era for Tempering and Masterworking in Diablo IV

The item journey in Diablo IV is receiving one of its most significant upgrades to date. Driven by extensive community feedback, these changes reshape how players progress through each difficulty tier—making the path to power more intentional.

What is changing?

A More Purposeful Approach to Item Crafting

Tempering and Masterworking have both been redesigned to emphasize clarity, customization, and a genuine sense of achievement. This new system ensures you always know what you’re working toward and gives you more direct control over the upgrades that define your build.

Tempering: Precision at Your Fingertips

Tempering has undergone meaningful refinement with a focus on reducing randomness and empowering player choice.

Key Changes:

  • Direct Affix Selection: You can now choose the specific affix to apply from your Tempering Recipes—no more random rolls or wasted attempts.

  • One Tempered Affix Per Item: To sharpen build identity and balance, items can now hold a single tempered affix.

  • Unlimited Charge Restoration: Tempering Charges can be restored endlessly, giving you the freedom to perfect your gear without fear of burning through finite resources.

This system ensures every decision feels deliberate and every upgrade feels earned.

Masterworking: A Clear Path to Quality

Masterworking now provides a more defined and rewarding progression. Instead of enhancing affix values, it elevates the Quality of the item itself.

How It Works Now:

  • Quality Is the Core: Masterworking boosts an item’s base damage, armor, or resistance rather than modifying specific affixes.

  • Progression to Level 20: Items can be Masterworked up to a Quality level of 20. Each upgrade grants between 2 and 5 levels of progress.

  • Reaching the Peak: Once you reach maximum Quality, you gain a final opportunity to roll for a Capstone bonus.

Capstone Bonus

This final roll upgrades a random non-greater affix to a Greater Affix, giving your item a powerful finishing touch. If you're not satisfied with the Greater Affix you receive, you can re-roll it using Obducite and Neathiron, and doing so does not reset your Quality level.

A Renewed Item Chase for Every Player

These reworks create a more transparent, empowering, and rewarding item journey for all players—casual adventurers and dedicated grinders alike. With clearer goals and more control over your upgrades, every step toward perfecting your gear now feels meaningful.

Sanctification: Ascending Your Items with Celestial Power

The High Heavens have taken notice of your heroism, wanderer. In the upcoming season, a sliver of angelic power is descending upon Sanctuary—granting you the chance to infuse your gear with divine strength through a new system known as Sanctification.

This feature represents the final, triumphant step in an item’s journey. It is your opportunity to channel celestial might directly into your equipment, creating pieces that stand apart through their purity, strength, and heavenly craftsmanship.

What Sanctification Brings to Your Items

When you choose to sanctify an item, you’re drawing on the ascendant power of the Angels. Each Sanctification attempt has the potential to grant one—or several—impactful benefits.

Your sanctified item may gain:

  • A bonus Legendary power

  • An improved Affix upgraded into a Greater Affix

  • A bonus affix pulled from a unique pool of Sanctification-only affixes

  • A replaced affix, swapped for a random Sanctification affix

  • Indestructibility, preventing any future durability loss

This process elevates your item to its absolute peak. However, once an item is sanctified, its journey ends—it can no longer be modified or upgraded. Sanctification is designed to be the final and most definitive enhancement you apply.

Earn Divine Gifts: Harness the Power of the High Heavens

This Season, Sanctuary receives a long-awaited visitor: Hadriel, an angel who brings with him fragments of celestial strength to aid in the battle against the returning Lesser Evils. These fragments manifest as Divine Gifts—unique boons that offer powerful rewards, meaningful choices, and opportunities to shape your journey through the Season.

Divine Gifts introduce a dynamic reward system centered around risk, reward, and refinement. Each one contains three components:

  • A Reward

  • A Corrupted Gift

  • A Purified Gift

How you choose to channel each Divine Gift determines the benefits—and challenges—you’ll face.

How Divine Gifts Work

Inside your inventory, you’ll find the Divine Gifts panel, where each Gift can be slotted in one of two ways:

  • Interior Slot – Purified Gift:
    Removes the negative effect, grants a positive one, and doubles the Reward bonus.

  • Exterior Slot – Corrupted Gift:
    Applies a challenging negative effect, but still provides the Reward bonus.

Every Divine Gift also offers a passive Reward bonus when slotted in either position, enhancing the activity tied to that Gift.

Unlocking Divine Gift Slots

Corrupted Gift slots are unlocked automatically.
Purified Gift slots must be earned by progressing through the Seasonal Reputation system. These unlock at the following Divine Favor Ranks:

  • Rank II – Duriel

  • Rank IV – Andariel

  • Rank VI – Azmodan

  • Rank VIII – Belial

Defeating each Lesser Evil for the first time awards their Corrupted Essence. Returning this Essence to Hadriel unlocks the two Divine Gifts associated with that boss.

From there, you’ll level each Gift by defeating that Lesser Evil or any of their aligned minions.

Beat Back the Lesser Evils: Sanctuary Under Siege

The Lesser Evils have waited patiently for their moment to strike. Now, with Sanctuary vulnerable, they unleash their schemes in full force. This Season will challenge every wanderer, demanding strength, strategy, and the support of the High Heavens to drive back their corruption.

Sanctuary Invaded

Throughout the Seasonal Realm, familiar activities have been tainted by the influence of the Lesser Evils. Each one imposes their own brand of chaos across different game modes:

  • Duriel dominates Helltide

  • Belial infiltrates The Pit

  • Andariel corrupts the Kurast Undercity

  • Azmodan prowls the open world as a powerful new World Boss, appearing in multiple locations

Azmodan’s presence is especially notable. Aside from his appearance as a World Boss, he can also be summoned at will in an area south of Zarbinzet. There, three Summoning Altars await—each tied to one of the other three Lesser Evils.

How the Summoning Works

  1. Choose one of the Summoning Altars, each infusing Azmodan with the powers of another Lesser Evil.

  2. Survive and defeat the wave of enemies required to complete the ritual.

  3. Battle the empowered Azmodan, along with monsters carrying affixes tied to the chosen Lesser Evil.

  4. After victory, open the nearby chests using Corrupted Essence to claim your rewards.

The Lesser Evils Across Sanctuary

Below is a full breakdown of how each of the Lesser Evils alters their claimed game mode—and what to expect as you push back against their influence.

Duriel’s Infestation of Helltide

Duriel burrows deep into Helltide, bringing with him swarms of parasitic horrors and a more punishing experience overall.

What to Expect:

  • Duriel replaces the Blood Maiden as a summonable boss within Helltide.

  • Upon reaching maximum threat, Pangs of Duriel spawn instead of Hellborne—constant reminders of his tightening grip.

  • Slaying these Pangs awards Baneful Hearts, which are used to summon Duriel.

  • Helltide monster packs now contain maggots, including new Portent of Pain mega-maggots.

  • The Hellwyrm and falling meteors spew waves of maggots across the battlefield.

Duriel’s takeover transforms Helltide into a writhing, chaotic encounter where infestation is as much a threat as the demons themselves.

Belial’s Deception in The Pit

Belial brings confusion and trickery into The Pit, turning an already brutal activity into a labyrinth of misdirection.

New Hazards and Mechanics:

  • Belial Eyes appear randomly—destroying them stuns nearby enemies and spawns Belial Apparitions, which count toward Pit progress.

  • Destroying enough Eyes replaces the final boss of the run with Belial himself, granting an additional Glyph upgrade and extra rewards.

  • Enemy clones appear throughout the dungeon, spreading uncertainty and forcing quick decision-making.

Belial’s influence makes every run unpredictable, pushing players to stay alert and adapt on the fly.

Andariel’s Corruption of the Kurast Undercity

Andariel’s flames seep into every corner of the Undercity, corrupting its mechanics and enemies while raising both the challenge and the reward.

Key Changes:

  • Tormented Spirit Beacons become more dangerous but provide significantly increased attunement when used.

  • Three new Andariel-specific Undercity Tributes guarantee her appearance as the final boss and increase Undercity rewards—while also adding dungeon affixes to the run.

  • Shades of Andariel roam the depths and drain your time with powerful attacks.

  • Andariel can appear as the final boss, granting elevated rewards upon defeat.

  • Enemies may be infused with Wailing Spirits, firing homing attacks that pressure your movement and positioning.

Andariel reshapes the Undercity into a frantic, hazardous battleground where every decision has consequences.

Progress Through Divine Favor

Defeating enemies empowered by each Lesser Evil—whether through their Purified or Corrupted Gifts—grants Divine Favor, which progresses your Seasonal Reputation board and levels your Divine Gifts.

This creates a powerful loop: battle the Lesser Evils, grow stronger through Hadriel’s blessings, and push back harder than before.