Diablo 4 Season 9 PTR Summary: How Does It Compare To Other Seasons?

Barbarian is a class that many players love to use. It can not only do crazy damage, but also has good survivability. But in Season 9, Barbarian was nerfed. Can it still be as powerful as Season 8?

There is no doubt that Barbarian can still do it easily. Season 8’s Boss Powers are indeed very powerful, but difficult to use. Season 9’s Horadric Spells are much more flexible than Boss Powers. With this new power, Flay Bleed Barbarian Build can easily do terabytes of damage, even entering The PIt at lv 150 is not a problem for it.

Pros And Cons

Pros

• Very high damage
• Very fast farming speed
• Easy damage accumulation

Cons

• Damage cap depends on your base damage
• Requires a very high lucky hit chance (preferably 100%)
• Takes a little time to accumulate damage
• Price comparison depends on Diablo 4 items

Barbarian Season 9 Adjustments

We all know that Overpower mechanic was greatly weakened in Season 9. Any build that relies on this mechanic basically has a significant reduction in damage. Barbarian is naturally also affected, but generally speaking, the impact is not too big because Barbarian’s damage sources are more diverse.

Many of Barbarian’s skills have been enhanced, and the one with the largest enhancement is Flay. Its continuous damage has increased from 48% to 115%, which is one of the reasons why this build uses it as the core.

Barbarian gets a new unique item in Season 9:

Unique Boots: Hooves of the Mountain God

Affixes

• Inherent: Attacks reduced by 2.5 seconds
• Increases movement speed by 17.5-23%
• Increases base attack speed by 16-25%
• Increases Fury by 7-10 per second
• Increases Ranks to Belligerence by 2-3

Unique Power

• When max Fury is reached, your Fury will drain rapidly until depleted, and all your basic skills will now cleave and deal bonus damage.

This unique item adds a cleave effect to the Flay Bleed Barbarian Build’s base skill Flay, significantly increasing Barbarian’s efficiency in farming Diablo 4 gold. However, it is not irreplaceable.

Horadric Spells

Catalyst

• Disintegrate: Summons an Arcane Conductor that fires a continuous beam between the character and it, dealing damage over 8 seconds.

Infusions

• Smoldering Ember: Causes your Catalyst to deal Fire and Burning damage, and you have a 10% chance to set it on fire.

Arcana

• Bloody Charm: Your Catalyst will execute low health non-boss enemies, doubling the execution threshold for non-elite enemies, and increasing with higher Catalyst levels.
• Fractured Core: When you use your Catalyst, it temporarily cancels the monster’s damage resistance aura, and you take a minor DoT.
• Siphoning Gizmo: Lucky Shot converts 100% of your damage over time into instant damage.

The real thing that makes Barbarian’s damage reach trillions in this Flay Bleed Barbarian Build is Siphoning Gizmo. By constantly triggering Lucky Shots, you can stack the burning damage of Catalyst skill with the bleeding damage of Flay skill to create amazing damage numbers.

Flay Bleed Barbarian Build Skill Equipments

• Helm: Ugly Bastard Helm (Ruby + Ruby)
• Chest Armor: Rage of Harrogat (Ruby + Ruby)
• Gloves: Fists of Fate
• Pants: Aspect of Bul-Kathos (Ruby + Ruby)
• Boots: Hooves of the Mountain God
• Amulet: Aspect of Adaptability (Scornful Light)
• Ring 1: Ring of Starless Skies (The Starflux)
• Ring 2: Aspect of Inner Calm (Elemental Brand)
• Slashing Weapon: Aspect of Earthquakes (Ahu + Qax)
• Bludgeoning Weapon: Aspect of the Moonrise (Igni + Tec)
• Dual-Wield Weapon 1: Shard of Verathiel (Emerald)
• Dual-Wield Weapon 2: Ramaladni’s Magnum Opus (Emerald)

In terms of equipment selection, although Ugly Bastard Helm has been weakened, whether it is rage, fire damage or enhanced lucky hit, it is the effect needed for this build.

Ring of Starless Skies can provide 12.5% Lucky Hit chance, which is very important for Flay Bleed Barbarian Build. Because you’d better be able to reach 100% Lucky Hit chance to ensure that you can trigger the effect of Siphoning Gizm every time.

In addition, the higher the base damage of this build, the faster you can deal damage, so you’d better use Diablo 4 gold and materials to Masterworking your equipment, which will further increase the damage of these builds.

Flay Bleed Barbarian Build Skill

• Flay: Rank 5
• Dropdown Arrow: Rank 1
• War Cry: Rank 1
• Challenging Shout: Rank 1
• Rallying Cry: Rank 1
• Wrath of the Berserker: Rank 5
• Rupture: Rank 1
• Technique: Two Hand Axe

In terms of skill selection, Flay is the core of Barbarian damage. You need to use other skills to increase damage and reduce the opponent’s defense.

This build has very low skill requirements. You can get the skills and Horadric Spells you need very early, but you’d better upgrade Horadric Spells as soon as possible.

It’s just a test at present. It’s not known whether Flay Bleed Barbarian Build will be weakened after Season 9 is launched. If it is not weakened, then it may become one of Meta Barbarian Builds of season 9, and you can perform like a superman in The Pit.

Necromancer has always been one of the most popular classes in Diablo 4, not only because it is powerful, but also because many players are obsessed with being a summoner. But in Season 7 and Season 8, the summoning style has never been the main choice for players in the endgame, even though the developers have been trying to strengthen this gameplay. Players still choose to use Blood Wave or Bone Gun as the core of builds.

Summon Necromancer builds are usually used to farm gold in the early game, and sometimes they are not as efficient as Blood Wave Necromancer build. But in Season 9, an equipment overturned this situation, allowing the minions Necromancer to play a powerful role in the endgame.

Necromancer Adjustments In Season 9

Necromancer received a unique glove in Season 9, which is the main reason the Minions Necromancer has been greatly improved. Here are the effects of this item:

Unique Gloves: The Hand of Naz

Modifiers:

• Increases Skeletal Mage damage by 77.5-100%
• Increases attack speed by 10.5-15%
• Increases maximum lifespan by 424-457
• Increases Skeletal Mage Mastery by 2-4

Unique Powers:

• Sacrifice Skeletal Warriors and Golems to gain an additional Skeletal Mage for each minion sacrificed.
• When a Skeletal Mage successfully kills 25 enemies, it upgrades to a Skeletal Arch-Mage.

Skeletal Arch-Mages automatically teleport to safety when attacked, and their attacks occasionally shatter on impact, dealing extra damage to the target and up to additional targets.

Of all Necromancer summons, the most powerful are the Skeletal Mages. While they don’t have the high health of Skeletal Warriors, they do have more powerful damage. With Hand of Naz, you can easily create an army created by Skeletal Mage. And they can teleport and will not die easily.

Many of Necromancer’s skills have been buffed, such as Reap, Hemorrhage, Decompose, and Bone Splinters. But one key skill has been nerfed, Soulrift. Its barrier was removed in Season 9, which made Necromancer’s survivability decrease a lot.

In addition, Necromancer’s Passive and unique equipment, Deathless visage and Indira’s Memory, have also been nerfed. Coupled with the significant nerf of Overpower mechanism, all of these have led to a decrease in the damage that Necromancer builds can cause in Season 8.

Necromancer Equipment

• Helm: Heir of Perdition (Topaz + Topaz)
• Chest Armor: Shroud of False Death (Nagu + Ohm)
• Gloves: The Hand of Naz
• Pants: Blood Moon Breeches (Ahu + Qax)
• Boots: Aspect of Occult Dominion
• 2H Weapon: Aspect of Reanimation (Emerald + Emerald)
• Amulet: Aspect of the Great Feast (Reverie Horn)
• Ring 1: Ring of Mendeln (Scornful Light)
• Ring 2: Aspect of Grasping Veins (Elemental Brand)

Since the survivability of Necromancers has been reduced in Season 9, if you want to move freely among monsters, you must ensure you have enough survivability. The two Mythic Uniques equipment can greatly improve your survivability, and you’d better take some materials and Diablo 4 gold to Masterworking them.

Elsewhere, The Hand of Naz is the core of this build, and Ring of Mendeln can increase the damage of summons.

Necromancer Skills

• Golem: Rank 1
• Corpse Tendrils: Rank 1
• Raise Skeleton: Rank 1
• Soulrift: Rank 5
• Corpse Explosion
• Decrepify: Rank 1
• Skeletal Warriors: Reapers
• Skeletal Mages: Shadow
• Golems: Iron

In terms of skills, since The Hand of Naz needs to sacrifice summons to transform into Skeleton Mages, you need some skills that can increase summons, and Corpse Explosion can be used as a means of supplementing damage.

Horadric Spell

Catalyst

Cosmic Anomaly: Manifest up to 5 Anomalies, these Anomalies will emit particles that deal damage within 4 seconds, and you can actively command Anomalies to gather and implode, and each explosion can deal damage.

Infusion

Glacial Nimbus: Your Catalyst skill now causes enemies to receive damage that causes cold and/or frostbite, which triggers on enemies every second.

Arcana

• Invigorating Helix: Damages each enemy once every 5 seconds. Using a Catalyst skill restores your health.
• Bottled Wind: Using a Catalyst skill grants a barrier equal to 30% of your maximum health for 4 seconds.
• Fractured Core: Your Catalyst skill temporarily reduces the damage resistance aura of monsters, but you will receive DoT damage for the same amount of time.

Since Super Skeletal Mage Necromancer can summon a large group of Skeletal Arch-Mages, it is not a big deal for it to challenge the boss. Therefore, the choice of Horadric Spell is mainly focused on enhancing the survivability of Necromancer.

Advantages And Disadvantages

Advantages

• Faster gold farming
• The more monsters you have, the more Skeletal Arch-Mages you can summon
• Simple operation

Disadvantages

• Diablo 4 summons’ AI is not smart enough
• It takes a while to wait for Skeletal Mage to transform into Skeletal Arch-Mage
• High equipment requirements

Super Skeletal Mage Necromancer Build has a certain combat power in PTR. You can directly convert from leveling build to this build in the early game, which saves your Diablo 4 gold required to reset skills and Paragon. You can also use Skeletal Arch-Mage as a component in the build instead of as the core, which is another way to play.

Spiritborn has been silent for too long in Diablo 4. The most powerful Spiritborn was in Season 6, and in Season 7 and Season 8, Spiritborn was basically reduced to the same status as Rogue.

In Season 9, Spiritborn received a new unique item, which changed the situation for Spiritborn. At least in PTR, this build can deal hundreds of billions of damage. Let’s have a look at what exactly makes Spiritborn so much better.

Spiritborn In Season 9

First, let’s have a look at the changes to Spiritborn in Season 9. The new unique item is undoubtedly the reason for the qualitative change in his damage. Here are the properties and effects of this unique item:

Balazan’s Maxtlatl

• Increases Dexterity by 107–121
• Increases Max Health by 424–457
• Increases Thorn Damage by 268–373
• Increases Bastion Rank by 2–3

Unique Power:

• Each attack deals the damage equal to 200-300% of your Thorns to close enemies, and poisons them for 100% of that damage over 3 seconds.
• Each time you use Thorns to counterattack, the poison damage doubles over 5 seconds, up to a maximum of four times.

In terms of skills, Thrash, Withering Fist, Thunderspike, Rock Splitter, and Exalted Hunter have received damage or cooldown increases. Spiritborn’s Passives also received a damage increase.

Compared to other classes, Spiritborn is the biggest beneficiary of the basic skill balance in patch 2.3.0.

Thorns Spiritborn Pros and Cons

Pros

• Can deal the amazing damage
• No Mythic Items required
• Farms gold quickly

Cons

• Takes time to stack damage
• Low survivability
• Requires melee to deal damage

Thorns Spiritborn Equipment

• Helm: Loyalty’s Mantle (Ahu + Qax)
• Chest Armor: Razorplate (Poc + Que)
• Gloves: Conceited Aspect
• Pants: Balazan’s Maxtlatl (Diamond)
• Boots: Duelist’s Aspect
• Weapon: Aspect of Plains Power (Amethyst + Amethyst)
• Amulet: Vehement Brawler’s Aspect
• Ring 1: Ring of Starless Skies (Seal of Denial)
• Ring 2: Rebounding Aspect (Idol From Below)

The two most important unique items in this set are Razorplate and Balazan’s Maxtlatl, they are the core equipment that increases the damage of Thorns. The most important one is Balazan’s Maxtlatl, and even if Razorplate’s attributes are slightly worse, you can still stack hundreds of billions of damage.

Although Ring of Starless Skies is a Mythic Item, its importance is not that high. You can make it after you have enough Resplendent Sparks and Diablo 4 gold. Before that, you can use other rings instead.

Thorns Spiritborn requires you to have a high attack speed to continuously trigger the effect of Balazan’s Maxtlatl. The attack speed higher, the faster the damage stacks. Therefore, when you choose to replace equipment, the first choice of affix is attack speed, followed by critical strike.

Skills

• Quill Volley: Rank 1
• Toxic Skin: Rank 1
• Armored Hide: Rank 1
• The Hunter: Rank 1
• Ravager: Rank 1
• Vortex: Rank 1
• Primary Spirit: Jaguar
• Secondary Spirit: Jaguar

Thorns Spiritborn build is all about combining poison damage with thorn damage, so Quill Volley is the core skill you want to use. After you use Vortex to group enemies together, you can use Quill Volley to quickly harvest them. Even the enemies in The Pit on Torment 4 difficulty cannot resist your damage, which is why the Thorns Spiritborn build is fast in farming gold and materials in any dungeon.

Horadric Spells

Catalyst

Disintegrate: Arcane Magic. Disintegrate creates an Arcane Conductor, which will shoot a continuous beam between you and it, damaging enemies passing through it over 8 seconds.

Infusion

Corrosive Vapor: Your Catalyst now deals poison, and poison damage equal to your character’s highest damage type bonus. And applies once every three seconds to each enemy, and the damaged enemy will take 150% poison damage over 4 seconds.

Arcana

• Fractured Core: Your Catalyst temporarily disables the damage resistance aura of the monster, but you will take some stacking damage for the same time.
• Bottled Wind: After using Catalyst, you will gain a barrier for 4 seconds, which is equivalent to 30% of your character’s maximum health.
• Reactive Ooze: After Catalyst skill is activated, the character will gain more resources per second for the next 10 seconds.

Horadric Spells can play a strong auxiliary role. They can help you gather monsters and provide you with damage reduction, which can make up for the weaknesses of this build to a certain extent.

Besides this, in this Season we have Horadric Jewels which can further increase the damage of Horadric Spells. I recommend you to choose Tyrant Bane which can permanently damage the enemy with DoT, which is very suitable for this build.

Thorns Spiritborn build can at least help you reach over than 110 floors in The Pit. Don’t forget that you can also use Paragon and mercenaries to further increase your damage. Paragon can provide you with a good damage increase, but it is best to plan your route in advance, otherwise you will have to use gold to reset Paragon.

This build is probably the best Spiritborn build at present. If you give it some time to accumulate damage, it can even cause up to 1 trillion damage, but don’t forget that this build is actually very fragile.

What? Is it already the second anniversary of the game? Yes, Diablo 4 was released on June 5, 2023, and you are now in the eighth season of the game. The developers released a trailer to celebrate with players.

The developers are sincere this time, and they launched a free Reliquary, or almost free. Players can use Diablo 4 gold to unlock new appearances, and gold is a consumable item that players can hardly use up. It seems that these developers have heard the player community’s dissatisfaction with their monetization strategy.

Date

2 Year Anniversary lasts for two weeks, starting on June 3 and ending on June 17.

Event Content

Anniversary Event Reliquary

• Sunflame Lantern Mount Trophy
• Burning Dawn Banner Mount Trophy
• Sunraiser Sword Cosmetic
• Sunflame Sword Two-Handed Sword Cosmetic
• Burning Barbs Polearm Cosmetic
• Burning Dawn Bow Cosmetic

Diablo 4 2nd Anniversary last for two weeks, players can use gold to unlock items in Anniversary Event Reliquary. In previous events, it was not so easy to get these new appearances, and you need to collect event tokens, defeat monsters, or even use platinum. This event omits these useless steps, which is commendable.

Many players don’t know where to get Anniversary Event Reliquary, and you can go into the Reliquary tab, and it's to the right of "Battle Pass" tab on top, same place as Berserk event.

Each item is worth about 10,000 to 40,000 gold. It takes about 200,000 Diablo 4 gold to get all the rewards. You can use the gold of the eternal character to unlock the rewards.

Mother’s Blessing

Mother’s Blessing will also return during the 2 Year Anniversary event, a classic event that will benefit both your Season and Eternal characters. Mother’s Blessing provides all players with a buff that increases experience and gold:

• Experience: +35%
• Gold: +50%

This buff is stackable, and players can use elixirs to get more XP bonuses to speed up your leveling of different classes.

During Mother’s Blessing, players can also offer Grim Favors to Tree of Whisper to receive Gift of the Tree cache, which contains a variety of items. The higher the world difficulty, the better the rewards.

Are Players Satisfied With The 2 Year Anniversary?

You know that players will not be satisfied with these little 2 Year Anniversary content (except for Anniversary Event Reliquary, which is indeed a pleasant change). As one of the most famous IPs in the history of games, it is also a talent and courage to make the anniversary event so boring.

Even the 1st anniversary event has much more playable content than the 2nd anniversary event. At least players could kill some treasure goblins. After watching the 2nd anniversary trailer, my impression was: That’s it? That’s the end? I believe most players have the same idea.

In sharp contrast to Diablo 4 is Diablo Immortal, a mobile game released a year earlier than Diablo 4, and now it is its 3 Year Anniversary.

Diablo Immortal 3 Year Anniversary not only includes a wealth of free gifts including pet transmogrification, anniversary avatar frame, Legendary Crests, random set items, and random legendary items. Players can also challenge rotating bosses such as Tutcher, Baal, Skarn, etc.

It can only be said that the production team of Diablo Immortal is more attentive than Diablo 4. In addition, Diablo Immortal and Diablo 4 are not completely operated by the same company. It is a joint development of Diablo 4 and a Chinese company, and the team size is much smaller than that of Diablo 4. However, in terms of the frequency of game updates and the output of new content, Diablo Immortal is far better than Diablo 4.

Before the release of Diablo Immortal, the spokesperson once asked: “Do you guys not have phones?” He won boos from the audience. Now Diablo 4 is even worse than a mobile game in terms of new content, which is really sad.

This does not mean that Diablo Immortal is a better game than Diablo 4. As a mobile game with continuous operation services, Diablo Immortal has serious P2W shortcomings. Unless you are a whale player, you can’t get happiness from this game.

Players hope that the production teams of Diablo Immortal and Diablo 4 can communicate or even merge to speed up the development of new content for Diablo 4. The current update method of updating a little bit of content every few months makes players feel painful.

In short, the anniversary event of Diablo 4 is not only just simple, but also there is nothing amazing about it. Each event is very ordinary, so ordinary that it is surprising. Players can’t feel the enthusiasm of the production team for Diablo 4 at all, and can only feel their perfunctory attitude towards the 2 Year Anniversary, and this is also one reason why Diablo 4 players are constantly losing.

Anniversaries with almost no new activities are almost not appeared in any other games. Anyway, I still hope that any player who still loves this game can have fun at this anniversary event.

The developers of Diablo 4 never figured out math, so they needed PTR to find out what mistakes they made in numerical calculations, which is why PTR is much more fun than the official game, and you can experience some OP builds that you would never play under normal circumstances.

Recently, a particularly interesting gameplay appeared in PTR. With the help of Horadric Spells in Season 9, your character can teleport on the map or in the dungeon non-stop.

How Does It Work?

Teleporting non-stop on the battlefield is not a new gameplay. As early as Season 5, Sorcerer players were such a group of battlefield shuttles.

But the funny of this gameplay is based on the fact that it is not limited to class and is completely driven by Horadric Spells. Every class can farm dungeons at an extraordinary speed and earn Diablo 4 gold, but this construction method is not suitable for dealing with bosses.

Here are the Horadric Spells needed for this gameplay:

• Propulsion (Catalyst): Creates a blast of mana that deals tremendous damage and knocks back all enemies. Enemies hit a second time will take extra damage.
• Floaty Bobble (Arcana): Allows you to flash once when using Catalyst and becomes unstoppable.
• Bloody Charm (Arcana): Catalyst can hit non-boss enemies below 20% health, and resets Catalyst after a successful execution.
• Gleaming Conduit (Arcana): Catalyst has a range of 150% of its original.

When you use Propulsion, you deal heavy damage to an enemy and immediately execute a low-health enemy. Because of Bloody Charm, you can immediately reset Propulsion and teleport to the next monster area.

You can basically teleport and trigger Propulsion all the time. You can also use it with AOE skills to help you reduce monster health faster and trigger executions.

To enable controller players to use the arrow keys to quickly move in the direction you want to move, and non-controller players to disable mouse aiming in the game settings, this will make the game automatically aim at the nearest enemy you are facing and set it to WSAD movement. This will make you move even faster.

Any class can use this Horadric Spells combination, and in actual combat testing, the speed of teleporting is even faster than Sorcerer, which can almost subvert the gameplay of the character. Because of this, this gameplay will hardly make it out of PTR alive, and the developers will definitely make some adjustments to it.

Maybe Floaty Bobble will get a CD, or Bloody Charm’s execution cap will be reduced, but in any case, if you want to try this gameplay, you’d better try it on PTR now.

Recommended Builds

This gameplay can help you speed through dungeons, The Pit, or Infernal Hordes. The more monsters there are, the more fun this gameplay will be. Here are two builds that take advantage of this mechanism.

Speed ​​Hack Necromancer Build (S9 PTR)

Equipment

• Helm: Heir of Perdition (Neo+Qax)
• Chest Armor: Shroud of False Death (Cir+Jah)
• Glove: Aspect of the Damned
• Pants: Blood Moon Breeches (Topaz)
• Boots: Aspect of the Cursed Aura
• Amulet: Ebonpiercer
• Ring 1: Aspect of Ultimate Shadow (Scornful Light)
• Ring 2: Osseous Gale Aspect (Elemental Brand)
• Weapon: Sacrificial Aspect (Emerald)
• Offhand: Lidless Wall (Topaz)

Skills

• Blight (Rank 1)
• Corpse Explosion (Rank 1)
• Sever
• Bone Storm (Rank 5)
• Decompose (Rank 1)
• Reap (Rank 5)

Horadric Spells

• Catalyst: Propulsion
• Infusions: Corrosive Vapor
• Arcana: Propulsion, Bloody Charm, Gleaming Conduit

Lunging Strike Barbarian Build (S9 PTR)

Equipment

• Helm: Ugly Bastard Helm (Ruby+Ruby)
• Chest Armor: Rage of Harrogath (Ruby+Ruby)
• Gloves: Fists of Fate
• Pants: Tibault’s Will (Ruby+Ruby)
• Boots: Hooves of the Mountain God
• Amulet: Aspect of Adaptability
• Ring 1: Ring of Starless Skies (Luminate Eye)
• Ring 2: Bold Chieftain’s Aspect (Idol From Below)
• Slashing Weapon: Aspect of Earthquakes (Moni+Qax)
• Bludgeoning Weapon: Aspect of the Moonrise (Igni+Tec)
• Dual-Wield Weapon 2: Ramaladni’s Magnum Opus (Emerald)
• Dual-Wield Weapon 1: Shard of Verathiel (Emerald)

Skills

• Lunging Strike (Rank 5)
• War Cry (Rank 1)
• Challenging Shout (Rank 1)
• Rallying Cry (Rank 1)
• Wrath of the Berserker (Rank 5)
• Ground Stomp (Rank 5)

Horadric Spells

• Catalyst: Propulsion
• Infusions: Smoldering Ember
• Arcana: Propulsion, Bloody Charm, Gleaming Conduit

Barbarian and Necromancer are two of the most commonly used classes by players. Although their performance in Season 9 is slightly inferior to that in Season 8, they still retain quite interesting gameplay.

Players who use these two classes can prepare the above two builds in your arsenal to experience the pleasure of rapid farming gold. They have low requirements for Diablo 4 items, and even if you don’t have the above weapons and equipment, you can still quickly make a patchwork version. As one producer said, we only need “It just works”.

The above is the latest news about Horadric Spells in PTR. This method can be used in all classes. You can find any leveling builds, and then put Propulsion and other Horadric Spells. Then finally, you can flash in the monster pile and make some explosions!

The best build for Sorcerer in Season 9 has already appeared, and it is Hydra Sorcerer. In PTR, Hydra Sorcerer build shows amazing damage and speed of clearing dungeons. But in season 8, Hydra was not a very powerful skill, even Fire Bolt Sorcerer build and Flame Wall Sorcerer build did not always carry this skill.

Why Is Hydra Sorcerer Build So Powerful?

There are two reasons why it has become very strong in PTR. The first is naturally that it has been strengthened. The damage of Hydra has increased from 23% to 35%. This is equivalent to the damage caused by this skill being 150% of the previous damage.

The second is naturally the improvement brought by the new unique item of Season 9, Ophidian Iris. It can make the three-headed Hydra have two more heads, and the Hydra with over than three heads will have a larger head, causing double the damage, and the enlarged head can create explosions when attacking.

After you equip this item, Hydra becomes a core skill, which means it can get more amplification.

In the endgame, if you equip two one-handed weapons and upgrade them with Masterworking, you can summon up to 12 heads to deal 1200% AoE damage. But this is a theoretical value, and most of the time you can deal 700% to 800% damage. Hydra is basically constantly making damage bombs, and you can imagine how fast it will farm Diablo 4 gold.

However, it is worth noting that in season 9, releasing Hydra no longer just consumes your 20 mana, but will continue to consume your mana. As the mana consumption increases, the damage of Hydra will also increase. There is a cap on this increase, so you need to increase the maximum mana of Hydra Sorcerer or prepare some way to restore mana.

Horadric Spells

Catalysts

Propulsion: Create a shock wave to push enemies away, and make enemies that hit the surrounding terrain suffer second damage.

While Astral Pillar is probably stronger, the reason to choose it is that it has a short cooldown, allowing you to trigger the effect more often and fill in some skill gaps. It can also help avoid some melee attacks from enemies that are afraid of getting close to you.

Infusions

Smoldering Ember: Allows Catalysts to deal Fire damage, and has a chance to set enemies on fire, creating a burning area under their feet.

Hydra Sorcerer deals primarily Fire damage, so this is pretty much the only choice.

Arcana

• Reactive Ooze: After using a Catalysts skill, increase resource regeneration for 10 seconds.
• Frigid Heart: Freezes enemies that collide twice.
• Siphoning Gizmo: Lucky hits from Catalysts consume damage over time and deal 100% damage directly.

Arcana acts like Boss Powers modifier from Season 8. The reason for choosing these three is that they can increase resource recovery speed, control monsters, and increase the damage of Catalysts.

In addition to the above Season Powers, Season 9 also has Horadric Jewels that can increase the power of Horadric Spells. Among them, the most noteworthy is Tyrant Bane, which will make the enemy suffer DoT damage forever. At present, this Horadric Jewel has not been weakened. In theory, you can keep stacking until a very scary DoT damage.

But it is expected that it will definitely be weakened by the developers, perhaps by setting a stacking limit. But at present, it is still one of the best Horadric Jewels for poison and burning builds. You need to enter the dungeon in Torment Difficulty to get Horadric Strongrooms to unlock Horadric Jewels.

After that, you need to use gold and materials to make it. Horadric Jewels will not drop in the dungeon.

Skills And Equipment

Skills

• Basic: Fire Bolt
• Core: Elemental Dominance/Ice Shards
• Ultimate: Inferno (Prime, Supreme)
• Teleport (Enhanced, Shimmering)
• Ice Armor (Enhanced, Shimmering)
• Conjuration: Hydra (Enhanced, Invoked)
• Key Passive: Esu’s Ferocity

Hydra Sorcerer builds have a relatively fixed skill selection, but you can also switch the core skill from Elemental Dominance to Ice Shards in exchange for different elemental damage. And you also need to make some adjustments to your equipment.

Equipment 1

• Weapon: Serpentine Energy Staff
• Helm: Harlequin Crest
• Armor: Shroud of False Death
• Gloves: Runic Gloves of Three Curses
• Pants: Tibault’s Will
• Boots: Runic Cleats of the Bounding Conduit
• Amulet: Ophidian Iris
• Ring: Tal Rasha’s Iridescent Loop and Battle Caster’s Soulwatch Hoop

Equipment 2

• Weapon: Serpentine Aspect
• Helm: Hail of Verglas
• Armor: Shroud of False Death
• Gloves: Sidhe Bindings
• Pants: Tibault’s Will
• Boots: Aspect of the Orange Herald
• Amulet: Ophidian Iris
• Ring: Tal Rasha’s Iridescent Loop, Battle Caster’s Aspect

One of the two sets of equipment focuses on the balance between crit and summoning hydras, and the other focuses on crit. You need to pay attention to your mana consumption. Hydra Sorcerer builds are very much based on Diablo 4 items. You can use other leveling builds as a transition until you get Ophidian Iris.

PTR is running now, so you can check out the damage cap of Hydra Sorcerer build, and it will definitely not disappoint you.