Diablo 2 Players Say the Party Invite Button Has Been Broken for Months

Diablo II: Resurrected has added a new class, reworked old Uniques, expanded its endgame and somehow found room for entirely new systems inside a game whose foundations were poured when Windows ME still seemed like a reasonable idea. It is therefore slightly unfortunate that some players are still struggling with something rather more fundamental: clicking Accept on a party invitation. A bug report dating back to May has become active again after the Season 15 Ladder reset, with players saying the manual Accept button can simply refuse to do anything when another player invites them to a group.

The problem appears particularly common when the invitation comes from a party that already contains multiple players. Some affected users can invite other people without trouble. Some can accept an invitation from a single player. But once they try to join an existing group, the Accept button remains visible, looks perfectly normal and behaves approximately like a decorative painting of a button.

The Party Accept Bug Was Reported Back in May

The main Blizzard forum report dates back to May 20. The original poster said restarting Diablo II: Resurrected, changing characters and rebooting the computer did not solve the problem. Automatic party joining still worked for them, but clicking the manual party invitation button produced no response.

Other players quickly reported the same behaviour. One could accept an invitation from a single person but not from a group containing two or more members. Another said the problem appeared immediately following an update, while later replies through June continued describing an Accept button that was present but effectively impossible to interact with.

The thread then went quiet until August 31, when another player reported that the same problem had returned with the Season 15 Ladder reset. That is particularly awkward because Season 15 introduced a revised reset schedule and Blizzard has continued actively patching Diablo II: Resurrected through Patch 3.3. The game is not sitting abandoned in maintenance mode. Someone is still moving the furniture around. The party button is apparently hiding underneath it.

Auto Party Can Work Around It — Sometimes

The most commonly suggested workaround is enabling the game's automatic party option before entering a public game. Several players say this allows Diablo II: Resurrected to place them into the group automatically even when manually pressing Accept does nothing. That is useful if your immediate goal is simply joining a Baal, Chaos or Cow run.

It is not a perfect solution. One player specifically points out that they do not want to automatically join every party, particularly in trade games, while a separate August 22 report from the European servers includes another user saying the automatic option does not solve the bug in every case.

So the workaround is worth trying, but it should not be confused with the button actually working.

Diablo 2 Has Had a Strange Year for Persistent Bugs

The party issue fits rather neatly into Diablo II: Resurrected's peculiar 2026. Blizzard is still making substantial changes to the game, but several older technical problems have demonstrated impressive survival instincts. Earlier this month, Patch 3.3 finally appeared to fix a PlayStation offline stutter that players had reported for roughly six months. Meanwhile, the new Protector's Stone can still run into an Enhanced Damage interaction inherited from Diablo II's ancient item system.

There is, admittedly, something almost reassuringly Diablo II about a twenty-five-year-old ARPG continuing to produce obscure interactions nobody quite understands.

A party invitation is less charming.

The Bug Matters More During Public Runs

Manual partying may sound like a small UI problem until it happens during the activities Diablo II players repeat thousands of times. Public Baal runs, Chaos Sanctuary groups and Cow games depend on strangers entering, joining the existing party and immediately getting on with the business of murdering everything nearby. One player in the original thread even complained that people assumed they were deliberately refusing invitations during Cow runs when the button simply would not respond.

Blizzard has not publicly confirmed a specific fix for the current manual Accept problem, and player reports suggest the exact behaviour is not identical for everyone. But with reports stretching from May into the current Season 15 Ladder, this one has survived long enough to move beyond an isolated bad game session.

For now, affected players can try enabling automatic partying.

Everyone else can continue using the revolutionary multiplayer technology Diablo II has traditionally offered:

pressing the button.

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Diablo Immortal Players Say Custom Wing Rerolls Are Eating Thousands of Orbs

Diablo Immortal's customizable wings are supposed to give high-Resonance players considerably more control over how their enormous decorative back furniture looks. A new bug report suggests the system may instead be giving some players a very expensive lesson in probability. One player says they performed more than 30 Wing Customization rerolls without unlocking a single new option, leaving them questioning whether the interface is misleading, the system is malfunctioning or they have simply encountered an exceptionally unfriendly stretch of RNG.

The report becomes more interesting because it is not the first complaint of its kind. Another player previously documented going through 600 additional wing pulls without unlocking a new color or material, after already spending heavily on the system. That older report eventually saw progress resume after another 15 attempts, suggesting the system may allow extremely long gaps between meaningful unlocks even when nothing is technically broken.

More Than 30 Rerolls Produced No New Unlocks

The new bug report was posted on September 1. The player says they rerolled their wings more than 30 times without unlocking anything new and argues that information shown by the interface appears to imply that another material should become available after roughly ten rerolls.

They contacted Blizzard Customer Support and say several support responses suggested something may have gone wrong, but that support could not directly resolve the issue. The player estimates that the unsuccessful attempts consumed more than 4,800 units of premium currency.

There is a terminology wrinkle here. The post refers to “pearls,” but Blizzard's official Wing Customization explanation says rerolls use Astral Plumes, with each Plume costing 160 Eternal Orbs. Thirty rerolls at that price equals 4,800 Orbs, so that appears to be the relevant premium-currency figure.

Blizzard Doesn't Actually Promise a New Material Every Ten Rolls

This is also where the report becomes less straightforward than a simple missing-reward bug. Blizzard's published description of the system does not state that every tenth reroll guarantees a completely new Wing Material. It says Color variations are available initially, VFX variations unlock after two restyles and Shape variations become available after nine restyles. Blizzard also says that committing more rolls gradually unlocks additional variations.

That is not quite the same thing as guaranteeing a brand-new material every ten attempts.

If the current in-game interface communicates something stronger, then the problem may be the wording rather than the underlying randomization. Either way, a premium cosmetic system where players are spending thousands of Orbs needs to make the distinction remarkably clear. “You have unlocked the ability for this thing to appear” and “you will receive this thing after ten rolls” are two very different sentences when every button press costs premium currency.

Another Player Previously Went 600 Pulls Without Progress

The concern also has some history. In April, another player reported making 600 additional Wing Customization pulls without receiving another color or material. They estimated those attempts represented another $1,250 spent on the system after an earlier 600 pulls.

Interestingly, that story did not end with confirmation of a bug. The player later updated the thread to say that after waiting and eventually continuing, new traits started appearing again roughly 15 pulls later. Their conclusion shifted toward frustration with the system's undisclosed progression and odds rather than certainty that it was technically broken.

That context matters. Two complaints do not prove that Diablo Immortal's Wing Customization system is malfunctioning, and neither Blizzard nor NetEase has confirmed a new bug affecting unlock rates. What they do demonstrate is how difficult the system can be for players to understand once long streaks of unsuccessful rerolls begin.

Diablo Immortal Keeps Expanding Its Wing Economy

The timing is particularly noticeable because Blizzard is still expanding the system. August introduced Frost, Mother of Pearl and Voidrealm materials while retiring several older Wing Materials from random refinement, something we covered when Diablo Immortal removed three materials from the active customization pool. The maximum Wing Score also increased to 10,200, giving dedicated players even more progression to chase.

It is part of a broader push toward increasingly elaborate premium cosmetics. We recently saw Diablo Immortal introduce a 4,500-Orb cosmetic dye unlock, while another player reported spending 4,500 Orbs on a cosmetic enhancement they could not initially use.

Randomness is one thing when the reward is another pair of yellow boots from a demon.

It becomes rather more important to explain the rules when each spin of the wheel costs 160 Eternal Orbs.

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Diablo 4 Season 15 Has Great Ideas — But Players Still Want to Know Where the Game Is Going

Diablo IV's Season 15 PTR has been over for weeks, but one of its biggest feedback discussions is refusing to disappear. A detailed post evaluating the season's good, bad and considerably less attractive parts has now passed 9,000 views and remains active into September, with players continuing to debate a surprisingly fundamental question: what exactly is Blizzard trying to make Diablo IV become?

That does not mean Season 15 is being rejected. Quite the opposite. As we found in our original Season 15 PTR evaluation, several of its new systems were genuinely well received. Soul Splinters introduce real trade-offs, Legacy Uniques give familiar items an identity again, Rebirth removes an unnecessary seasonal annoyance and some of the Mythic changes move item progression in a more sensible direction. The uncomfortable part is that these good ideas are arriving on top of complaints players have now been making for several seasons.

Soul Splinters Show What Season 15 Gets Right

The strongest example remains Soul Splinters. Instead of simply handing every build another damage multiplier, many Splinters offer power with an actual cost. We previously looked at how Soul Splinters may have been the PTR's best idea, because deciding whether to sacrifice Movement Speed, Critical Strike Chance or another resource creates an actual build decision rather than an equipment tax.

Legacy Uniques achieve something similar from another direction. Stone of Jordan, Leoric's Crown, The Furnace and other returning items have recognizable identities before players even begin comparing affix percentages. Rebirth is less glamorous, but finally allowing existing characters to be reborn into a new season solves one of those small Diablo annoyances that had somehow survived long enough to become tradition.

None of these are bad additions. Season 15 may actually contain some of Diablo IV's better recent ideas.

That is precisely why the remaining complaints stand out.

Class Balance Is Still Moving in Circles

The continuing forum discussion repeatedly returns to class balance and build diversity. The problem is not simply that one class performs better than another. Diablo has never required every Necromancer, Sorcerer and Barbarian to produce identical spreadsheet results. The issue is how quickly the gap between a fun build and the mathematically correct build can become enormous.

Season 15 has already demonstrated both sides of that problem. Blizzard made broad changes to primary-stat scaling, including buffing several classes while reducing Barbarian's Strength scaling. Sorcerer received its own numerical assistance, yet players argued that larger numbers do not automatically solve weak skill design.

This is the familiar Diablo IV balancing carousel. A build becomes dominant. Blizzard reduces it. Another interaction takes its place. The seasonal mechanic arrives and provides an enormous new source of power. Eventually that mechanic disappears, balance shifts again and everyone returns to the spreadsheet to discover what survived.

Sanctuary has many circles of Hell. Apparently one of them contains patch notes.

RNG and Inventory Bloat Are Becoming Harder to Ignore

The less dramatic complaints may ultimately matter more. Diablo IV now asks players to interact with Greater Affixes, Tempering, Masterworking, Runes, Talismans, Charms, Mythic upgrades, War Plans and seasonal systems before Soul Splinters even join the cupboard. Individually, many of these systems make sense. Together, they increasingly resemble the contents of a drawer nobody wants to open because something will fall out.

The same applies to RNG. Random drops belong in Diablo. Finding something unexpectedly excellent is one of the basic pleasures of an ARPG. But when acquiring an item is random, its affixes are random, further upgrades introduce more random outcomes and another system then determines whether the finished item actually fits the build, player choice can begin to feel secondary to surviving enough dice rolls.

That tension is also visible in the current argument over rare loot. We recently looked at players asking whether Diablo IV needs truly rare items again. The answer is probably yes. But rare is not the same thing as administratively exhausting.

The Bigger Question Is What Diablo IV Wants to Be

This is where the Season 15 discussion becomes more interesting than another argument about whether a particular multiplier should be 70% or 85%. After years of changes to itemization, Mythics, progression, crafting, difficulty, endgame systems and character power, players are increasingly asking whether those revisions are moving toward a clear destination or simply replacing the previous experiment.

Experimentation is not inherently bad. Diablo IV is significantly different from the game that launched in 2023, and many of those changes improved it. Blizzard should absolutely keep trying new things when existing systems are not working.

But Season 15 illustrates the danger of building good seasonal mechanics on foundations players still consider unsettled. Soul Splinters can create interesting choices. Legacy Uniques can make loot memorable. Rebirth can make seasonal characters less tedious. None of those systems can permanently compensate for weak build diversity, excessive inventory management or progression that feels determined by too many layers of randomness.

The encouraging part is that Season 15 does not look devoid of ideas.

It has plenty.

Now Blizzard has to show that those ideas are going somewhere.

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Diablo Immortal Player Gets Account Back After Blizzard Admits Two-Year Ban Was an Error

A Diablo Immortal player who spent more than two years permanently banned for what Blizzard classified as severe exploitation has finally received his account back. The unusual part is not simply that an appeal succeeded. According to the player, numerous previous appeals had already been reviewed and rejected, the ban had repeatedly been described as justified and final, and Blizzard support had even warned him against continuing to contact the company about it. Then, after a new support ticket in August 2026 triggered another review, Blizzard reached a very different conclusion: the original penalty was an error.

The player, known as Kopova, originally lost access to his Diablo Immortal account in June 2024. At the time, he said Blizzard classified him as a “Severe Exploitator” without telling him which specific action had triggered the permanent closure. Kopova maintained from the beginning that he had not used bots, macros, hacks or exploits. He was a clan leader, produced Diablo Immortal videos, ran a community Discord and had used an officially supported Xbox controller since launch. More than two years later, Blizzard has reopened the same account and apologized for what support now calls a mistake.

One reversed ban does not prove Diablo Immortal has a widespread false-positive problem, and it certainly does not establish that every player who claims innocence after a suspension is telling the truth. But this particular case matters because we now have something these arguments rarely produce: Blizzard itself ultimately reversed the decision.

The Account Was Permanently Banned in 2024

Kopova's original forum post appeared in June 2024 under the title “From Loyal Player to Unsafe for the player base: A Diablo Immortal Tale.” He described himself as a highly active player with roughly 4,600 Resonance who had built the Ravens clan with friends on the Dark Wanderers server. Then his account was permanently closed.

The notice reportedly identified the offense as severe exploitation. Kopova said he received no detailed explanation of what he had supposedly done, leaving him to speculate about possible triggers. He wondered whether mass reports from rival clans might have contributed, whether opening a large number of saved reward mails and chests immediately following maintenance could have appeared suspicious, or whether some other perfectly normal behaviour had been misclassified.

None of those theories was ever established as the cause.

That distinction remains important today. The eventual reversal tells us the ban itself was erroneous. It does not tell us what triggered the incorrect detection in the first place.

Multiple Appeals Reportedly Said the Ban Had Been Reviewed and Confirmed

The part of the story that makes the reversal especially uncomfortable is what happened afterward. Kopova says he contacted Blizzard support repeatedly and received essentially the same conclusion each time: exploitative activity had been confirmed, the decision had been reviewed and the permanent ban would remain.

He says one support exchange even warned that continuing to submit tickets about the same issue could result in further action against his Battle.net account.

The public Diablo Immortal discussion from that period reflects Blizzard's broader stance on individual bans. In September 2024, community manager GhostSignals told players that forum staff could not investigate account-specific penalties and that those cases had to go through Player Support. Blizzard would also not reveal detailed reasons behind bans because doing so could help people circumvent detection methods.

By November, after the same thread had continued for months, GhostSignals explained that whether an account action would be reviewed again was up to the game and support teams. If they chose to uphold a suspension, that decision could effectively be final.

That is what makes the 2026 outcome so interesting.

The final decision was not final.

A Strange Account Page Change Finally Triggered Another Review

The eventual breakthrough did not come from a special ban appeal. Kopova says it began when Blizzard changed its Account Restrictions page in August 2026. His old penalty suddenly appeared under Past Penalties, while the page simultaneously told him that he had no active penalties. Battle.net itself, however, continued showing the Diablo Immortal account as banned.

Two Blizzard systems were now telling him two different things.

Instead of submitting another traditional appeal, he opened what he describes as a normal technical support ticket asking why the account pages disagreed. This time the case was escalated.

The response was dramatically different from the previous two years.

According to the email Kopova shared, Blizzard reviewed the evidence again and concluded that the original penalty action had been made in error. The company reopened his Diablo Immortal account and apologized for the mistake.

After more than two years of being told that the exploit finding had been reviewed and confirmed, one more review produced the opposite answer.

The Account Was Restored — The Missing Two Years Were Not

Kopova says his character and account were still there when he logged back in. Remarkably, his clan had kept him as a member throughout the entire ban, and several of the same people were still playing more than two years later. For a game built heavily around clans, Warbands and persistent social groups, that appears to have been the part of returning that mattered most to him.

What Blizzard did not restore was time.

The player says he received no compensation for the period he could not access Diablo Immortal, no explanation of what caused the false penalty and no information about whether the underlying detection issue had been identified. When another Reddit user joked about receiving compensation in the form of Crests, Kopova replied that he had received nothing — “not even a ruby.”

That lands differently in Diablo Immortal than it might in a traditional single-player game. Two years represents dozens of seasons, events, class updates, progression systems and limited-time rewards. It also represents two years separated from an active clan community.

Restoring the account fixes access.

It cannot reconstruct August 2024.

Kopova Also Says He Successfully Charged Back Some Purchases

There is another unusual element to the story. After the original ban, Kopova says he pursued chargebacks for purchases that were still eligible through his payment providers. He says Blizzard disputed those chargebacks, but that he ultimately won the cases after providing banks with his support correspondence, transaction records and his account of what had happened.

That does not mean the banks independently proved the Diablo Immortal ban was wrongful. Payment disputes operate under their own rules and are not equivalent to a game-account investigation. The two processes should not be conflated.

But the detail becomes more interesting in hindsight because Blizzard itself has now reached the conclusion Kopova had maintained since 2024: the penalty should not have been applied.

He also reports that returning to the account after those chargebacks did not leave him with negative Orbs, something he specifically checked after regaining access.

This Does Not Prove Every “False Ban” Claim Is Real

Gaming communities have a predictable relationship with ban stories. Somebody posts that they were banned “for absolutely no reason,” half the comments assume the anti-cheat system malfunctioned and the other half assume the player quietly forgot to mention the bot they had been running since Tuesday.

Both things happen.

Blizzard has legitimate reasons to enforce Diablo Immortal's rules aggressively. The company has publicly identified botting, gameplay automation, hacks, unauthorized third-party purchases, fraudulent transactions, market exploitation, account sharing, scams and win-trading as behavior that can lead to account action. For detected botting and similar automation, Blizzard has said that a first offense can result in permanent closure without warning.

Diablo Immortal absolutely needs an enforcement system. Anyone who has spent five minutes watching World Chat advertise suspicious platinum services already knows why.

The significance of Kopova's case is narrower. It demonstrates that a permanent Diablo Immortal ban can survive multiple reviews and still ultimately be wrong.

We do not have to speculate about that anymore. Blizzard reversed this one.

The Appeal Process Is the More Difficult Question

False positives are unavoidable in sufficiently large automated systems. Even an extremely accurate detection system will occasionally produce incorrect results when millions of players generate enormous amounts of behavioural data. The existence of one mistaken ban therefore does not automatically indicate negligent enforcement.

The more uncomfortable question is what happens after a false positive.

Kopova says his appeals repeatedly returned essentially the same answer for more than two years. The case was apparently only reopened properly after an unrelated discrepancy appeared in Blizzard's account-management interface and he submitted a technical ticket asking why.

That raises a very different concern from whether automated detection can make mistakes.

Can the appeal process reliably detect those mistakes?

If the same incorrect conclusion can be checked, confirmed, appealed and called final several times before eventually being reversed, players inevitably start questioning what “reviewed” means in practice.

Blizzard Has Historically Avoided Explaining Individual Bans

Blizzard's position on detailed ban explanations is understandable from an anti-cheat perspective. Revealing precisely which behaviour or technical signature triggered detection could help cheat developers reverse-engineer the system. Diablo Immortal's community team has repeatedly said that specific ban reasons are deliberately limited for this reason.

That policy becomes much harder to navigate when the penalty is wrong.

A legitimate player cannot appeal behaviour they do not know they have been accused of. They can say they did not cheat. They can list the software and hardware they use. They can explain unusual activity around the time of the ban. But without knowing whether Blizzard thinks the problem was automation, account sharing, market manipulation or something else, the player is effectively trying to disprove an invisible accusation.

Kopova spent much of 2024 doing exactly that.

He discussed his Xbox controller because controller users were a major part of the community's speculation around bans at the time. Blizzard publicly clarified that supported controllers themselves were not a reason for account penalties, and the community manager said he had personally looked at several controller-related claims and found other causes behind those cases.

Nothing in the 2026 reversal suggests Kopova's controller caused his ban.

The uncomfortable answer remains the same:

we still do not know what did.

That Uncertainty Matters in a Game Where Players Invest for Years

This is particularly sensitive for Diablo Immortal because accounts can represent enormous investments of both time and money. Kopova's roughly 4,600 Resonance account was already highly developed in 2024. Other players have characters they have progressed continuously since launch.

We recently covered how Blizzard plans to continue retiring old Legendary Essences as part of Diablo Immortal's long-term build management. That decision generated its own debate because players become attached to builds and collections developed across years of play. Account access sits one level above all of those systems. Lose the account and every Essence, Legendary Gem, cosmetic, clan relationship and carefully assembled loadout disappears with it.

The same long-term investment is why recent changes such as the reworked Boon of Plenty have prompted such intense arguments about value. Diablo Immortal continuously asks players to make decisions based on months or years of progression. Trust that the account itself will remain accessible is therefore not some abstract customer-service concern. It is foundational to the entire model.

There Is Also a Community Cost That Compensation Cannot Easily Fix

The most striking part of Kopova's return is not his equipment or Resonance.

It is that Ravens was still there.

He says logging in and discovering that his old clan had kept him throughout the two-year absence was genuinely emotional. Several familiar players remained, and the person who took over leadership had now been running the clan for longer than Kopova originally had.

That illustrates something Diablo Immortal sometimes obscures beneath Legendary Gems and competitive leaderboards: it is also a social game. Players form communities that outlive individual seasons and balance patches.

A wrongful two-year ban therefore does not simply pause character progression.

It removes somebody from a group of people.

Kopova himself says that was what he missed more than the game.

The Story Has Already Changed How He Approaches Games

After returning, Kopova told commenters that he does not intend to start spending heavily again. He described the experience as a lesson in how digital game accounts work: players can invest enormous amounts into something they ultimately access under a license rather than truly own.

That response is probably more damaging to a live-service publisher than a temporary burst of angry forum posts.

Trust is difficult to quantify on a quarterly chart.

It is very easy to see when someone stops opening their wallet.

Diablo Immortal has spent 2026 making significant changes to its economy and progression systems, including competitive formats such as Bout of Realms and its controversial six-match elimination structure. Those systems depend on players believing their long-term investment is worthwhile.

One wrongful ban does not collapse that trust across an entire playerbase.

But two years is a very long demonstration of what happens when the system gets one case wrong.

The Important Question Is Whether Blizzard Learned Why This Happened

The ideal ending would include more than an apology.

Blizzard does not need to publish the technical details of its anti-cheat detection. Doing so could genuinely make enforcement weaker. But internally, the company should be able to answer several questions.

Why was this account originally flagged?

Why did the earlier reviews uphold the penalty?

What changed in the final review?

Could the same false-positive condition affect another account?

And perhaps most importantly, is there a way for a genuinely innocent player to reach that deeper review without waiting two years for an account-management page to malfunction in a useful direction?

We do not currently know the answers.

Kopova does not either.

For Once, “I Was Banned for Nothing” Actually Has an Ending

There are thousands of gaming forum posts claiming unfair bans. Most never receive enough public evidence to establish what happened. Some almost certainly involve players withholding important details. Others remain impossible to evaluate from outside the company.

This one is different.

Kopova said in 2024 that Blizzard had made a mistake.

Blizzard said the ban had been reviewed and upheld.

More than two years passed.

Then Blizzard reviewed it again.

And this time, according to the reinstatement email, Blizzard agreed with Kopova.

The account is back.

The clan is still there.

The missing two years are not.

Sanctuary has plenty of resurrection mechanics.

Apparently customer support has one too.

It just has an extraordinarily long cooldown.

Sources

Reddit: Kopova's August 2026 Account Reinstatement and Blizzard Email

Diablo Immortal Forums: Original 2024 Ban Discussion

Diablo Immortal Community Manager on Account Ban Reviews and Explanations

Blizzard: A Statement on Cheating and Exploitation

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Diablo 4’s Nafain’s Bestiary Set May Not Give All Companion Upgrades

Diablo IV's Druid has spent a good portion of 2026 learning that having more animals does not necessarily make life simpler. A fresh bug report is now questioning one of the class's most interesting Talisman sets, Nafain's Bestiary, because its five-Charm bonus appears to promise more Companion upgrades than the game actually provides.

The current tooltip says the completed set lets the Druid gain an additional Bear and all other Companions of each type while also granting “all Companion Upgrades for free.” According to a report posted on August 30, however, the final upgrades at the end of the Companion skill branches are not being granted automatically. That leaves two possibilities: Nafain's Bestiary is not functioning as described, or the wording is broader than Blizzard actually intends.

There is an important wrinkle. This is not the first time players have investigated the set. A separate discussion from May suggests the intermediate Companion upgrades do work even though the skill tree does not visually show them as allocated. The final modifying upgrades, however, still require the player to spend skill points. So Nafain's Bestiary may not be completely broken. The real problem may be that “all Companion Upgrades” does not mean what most players would reasonably expect it to mean.

Nafain’s Bestiary Says You Get All Companion Upgrades for Free

The current five-Charm description is difficult to read any other way. Complete Nafain's Bestiary and the set grants additional Companions while telling the player that all Companion Upgrades are free. For a Druid building around Wolves, Ravens, Poison Creeper and the wider Companion package, that sounds enormously valuable because skill points normally spent completing those branches could theoretically be redirected elsewhere.

The new bug report specifically calls out the fact that the final upgrades are not provided. The player therefore asks whether the set is broken or simply phrased incorrectly, which is probably the most useful way to frame the issue until Blizzard clarifies the design.

If Blizzard intended every upgrade node attached to a Companion skill to become active, then part of the five-Charm bonus is missing. If Blizzard only intended the secondary or “side” upgrades to be granted, the current tooltip needs to say exactly that.

Those are very different bugs, but they create the same problem for somebody trying to build around the set: the item tells you one thing while the skill tree behaves as though the promise came with invisible fine print.

Players Already Tested This Earlier in the Year

A May discussion provides useful context because several Druid players initially believed the entire upgrade portion of Nafain's Bestiary was failing. They equipped the completed set, opened the skill tree and saw no indication that the Companion upgrade nodes had been activated. The nodes still appeared to cost skill points.

One player eventually tested the actual effects rather than relying on the interface. Their conclusion was more complicated: the side upgrades appeared to function despite not being visibly highlighted in the skill tree. They tested Poison Creeper and Ravens and found effects consistent with those secondary upgrades remaining active.

The final upgrade nodes were different.

Those apparently remained unavailable unless the player manually invested the required skill point. Another participant reached the same conclusion, explaining that Nafain's Bestiary provides the side upgrades but not the major final modifier at the end of each Companion branch.

That makes the August report particularly interesting. We are not looking at one player suddenly discovering that nothing works. Players have apparently understood for months that part of the set works invisibly while another part that appears covered by the wording does not activate at all.

The Tooltip Is the Real Problem Even If the Set Is Working as Intended

Diablo IV has a vocabulary problem here. If a tooltip says “all Companion Upgrades,” most players are going to interpret “all” as a fairly ambitious quantity.

Usually somewhere around all of them.

Blizzard may internally distinguish between normal Companion upgrades and the final skill variants, but that distinction is not obvious from the set description itself. A player should not need to visit a forum, read a three-month-old testing thread and manually verify Raven behaviour before understanding which part of their five-piece set bonus exists.

A clearer version could say something like “gain all secondary Companion upgrades for free” or explicitly state that final Companion variants are excluded. That would immediately tell players how many skill points Nafain's Bestiary actually saves and prevent them from planning a build around bonuses they were never supposed to receive.

If the final nodes are supposed to be included, of course, then the wording is fine and the implementation needs fixing.

The Skill Tree Not Showing the Free Upgrades Makes Everything Worse

The confusing tooltip would be easier to live with if Diablo IV clearly displayed which free upgrades were active. According to the earlier player testing, it does not. The side upgrades can function without being visibly allocated in the skill tree, leaving the player to determine their status through gameplay testing.

That is particularly awkward for a build-defining Talisman set. The entire point of these sets is to change how characters are assembled. If the set grants several skill effects without spending points, those effects should ideally be reflected somewhere in the interface so the player can see exactly what has changed.

Otherwise, every questionable interaction becomes a miniature laboratory experiment.

Does the upgrade work?

Equip the set. Find the correct enemy. Trigger the Companion. Watch the buff bar. Count the effect. Remove the set. Repeat.

That is useful work for theorycrafters. It probably should not be the normal onboarding process for an item tooltip.

Season 15 Is About to Make Nafain’s Bestiary Much Stronger

The timing matters because Blizzard is already buffing Nafain's Bestiary for Season 15. The official 3.2.0 PTR notes reduce the two-piece Battle Roar cooldown to five seconds, while the five-piece bonus is being expanded to provide an additional 250% multiplicative Companion damage. Blizzard is even making the Companions grow slightly in size.

In other words, this is not some forgotten leveling set Blizzard is preparing to abandon. Nafain's Bestiary is receiving direct attention in the next major balance pass.

That makes the upgrade wording worth fixing before the stronger version reaches live servers. If Season 15 pushes more Druids toward a Companion setup, substantially more players are going to complete the set and discover that “all Companion Upgrades” apparently excludes part of the Companion upgrade tree.

Blizzard is increasing the damage.

It would be a convenient time to increase the clarity as well.

This Is Another Talisman Problem Where the UI Cannot Quite Be Trusted

Nafain's Bestiary is unfortunately arriving in a system that has already given players several reasons to double-check what the interface tells them. We recently covered reports of Talisman set bonuses stopping during combat, while other players have encountered Seals that refuse to accept Charms or leave completed set bonuses greyed out.

A separate live bug thread has players reporting that some higher-quality Seals simply refuse to accept particular Set Charms at all. Others describe moving a completed five-Charm setup onto another Seal only to have its two-, three- and five-piece bonuses become inactive despite the Charms still visibly occupying the slots.

That issue is technically separate from Nafain's Bestiary, but the player experience is similar. The Talisman interface can show one configuration while the underlying bonus behaves differently.

We also recently looked at how generic Set Charms may effectively disappear from the expected loot pool once players move into Torment. Talisman power itself is interesting; understanding exactly what the system is doing has been the harder part.

The Druid Does Not Need More Invisible Build Math

Companion Druid is already full of interactions involving active and passive Companion effects, skill ranks, individual upgrade branches, multiplicative bonuses and equipment that changes how those Companions behave. Nafain's Bestiary is meant to consolidate some of that complexity by saying, in effect: complete the set and we will give you the Companion package.

Instead, players need to know that there may be three different categories hiding behind one sentence:

• Additional Companions, which appear to work.
• Intermediate Companion upgrades, which reportedly work but are not visually marked in the skill tree.
• Final Companion upgrades, which reportedly are not granted and still require skill points.

That is a lot of interpretation for six words.

It becomes more important when players are optimizing skill points. If a Druid believes Nafain's Bestiary covers an entire Companion branch, they may spend those points elsewhere and unknowingly miss a final modifier that their build guide assumes is active. Conversely, somebody who does not realize the side upgrades are being granted invisibly may waste points buying effects the set already provides.

Neither outcome is particularly satisfying.

This May Be a Wording Bug Rather Than a Mechanical Bug

The current evidence actually makes the conservative explanation quite plausible. Because the earlier testing suggests Nafain's Bestiary has behaved this way for months, Blizzard may have intentionally designed the set to grant only the side upgrades while leaving the final mutually exclusive modifiers under the player's control.

There is a reasonable gameplay argument for that approach. Final skill variants often represent meaningful build choices rather than simple passive improvements. Automatically activating every final Companion variant could create conflicting behaviour or remove choices Blizzard wants the player to make manually.

If that is the design, leaving those nodes out makes sense.

Calling the remaining benefits “all Companion Upgrades” does not.

That would turn this from a balance or functionality bug into something much easier to repair: rewrite the tooltip so it describes the mechanic that already exists.

But until Blizzard confirms that interpretation, we cannot rule out the other possibility — that the final upgrades genuinely should be granted and have simply never been applied correctly.

Blizzard Has Not Clarified the Set Yet

As of September 1, the August 30 bug report has not received an official Blizzard response. The thread is also extremely small, so this is not currently evidence of some widespread Druid failure affecting thousands of characters.

What makes it worth covering is not volume. It is reproducibility.

The set description is visible.

The final Companion upgrade nodes are visible.

Players can complete the five-Charm bonus and immediately compare what the tooltip promises with what the skill tree and abilities actually provide.

And, importantly, players were already doing exactly that in May.

This is therefore much easier to investigate than a random report that a build “feels 20% weaker.” Blizzard only needs to answer one question:

Does “all Companion Upgrades” include the final upgrades?

If yes, fix the set.

If no, fix the sentence.

Season 15 Is the Perfect Time to Clean This Up

Nafain's Bestiary could become much more attractive next season. A five-piece set that brings additional Companions, saves skill points and adds 250% multiplicative Companion damage has obvious potential for players who want the Druid fantasy to involve an entire wildlife documentary following them through Sanctuary.

That is exactly why Blizzard should clarify the current behaviour now.

Players can tolerate a complex build.

They can tolerate mutually exclusive skill choices.

They can even tolerate Wolves occasionally deciding that the safest route to an enemy involves three chairs and a staircase.

What they should not need to tolerate is the word “all” becoming a theorycrafting puzzle.

Sources

Diablo IV Forums: Nafain's Bestiary 5-Charm Bonus Either Broken or Phrased Incorrectly

Diablo IV Forums: Earlier Nafain's Bestiary Set Testing

Blizzard: Diablo IV 3.2.0 PTR Patch Notes

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Diablo 2 Players Are Still Waiting for a Proper Switch 2 Upgrade

Diablo II: Resurrected has spent 2026 proving that Blizzard is perfectly willing to modernize a 25-year-old game. Reign of the Warlock added an entirely new class, expanded the endgame, introduced new items and Rune Words, improved storage, added a loot filter and generally did things that would once have sounded dangerously close to sacrilege. Nintendo Switch 2 owners are therefore asking a fairly reasonable question: if Diablo II can get a Warlock in 2026, can the Switch version finally get 60 FPS?

The request has been circulating since Nintendo's newer hardware arrived, but it has become louder again in August. A current Blizzard forum thread started on August 12 with a very simple demand: 60 FPS and eight-player games on Switch 2. Players have continued bumping the topic through August 29, with others adding higher resolution, cross-play and improved graphics to the wish list. Blizzard has not announced a dedicated Diablo II: Resurrected Switch 2 upgrade, and Nintendo's current store page still lists the game as Nintendo Switch software that is compatible with Switch 2 rather than as a native Switch 2 version.

That distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore when the game itself just received its biggest expansion in years.

Diablo II Works on Switch 2 — But It Is Still the Switch Version

Nintendo's current Diablo II: Resurrected listing confirms that the game is supported on Switch 2. The file size is listed identically at 8.4 GB on both systems, while the product remains categorized as Nintendo Switch software. More importantly for multiplayer players, the technical specifications still list online play as one to four players.

That is essentially the experience players have been complaining about since Switch 2 launched. The stronger hardware can run the existing Switch game through backward compatibility, but Diablo II: Resurrected does not currently expose the sort of hardware-specific enhancements players associate with a genuine Switch 2 upgrade.

The most common request is 60 FPS. Forum users consistently describe the current Switch version as locked around 30 FPS and argue that Switch 2 should be capable of a substantially smoother presentation. Higher resolution comes immediately behind it, particularly in docked mode where the visual compromises designed around the original 2017 Switch hardware become much easier to notice on a large display.

Players are not asking Blizzard to remake Diablo II again.

They mostly want the remake they already own to notice that the console underneath it changed.

The Four-Player Limit Is Becoming Just as Important as 60 FPS

Performance gets most of the attention, but the multiplayer restriction may actually be the more interesting problem. Diablo II was built around games supporting up to eight players, and that remains standard on PC, PlayStation and Xbox. Nintendo Switch has historically been the exception, limiting Battle.net games to four players.

Nintendo's current Switch listing still explicitly states online: 1–4 players. That has become particularly conspicuous because the publisher description for Diablo II: Resurrected – Infernal Edition proudly advertises “Eight Classes, Eight Players, Endless Replayability” and describes eight-player co-op in the general product copy.

Scroll down to the actual Nintendo Switch specifications and the number becomes four.

That is not necessarily a mistake. The promotional description covers Diablo II: Resurrected broadly across platforms, while the platform specifications describe what the Switch release actually supports. But it produces a slightly comic result where the same store page essentially says:

Eight players!

And then, several lines later:

Not here.

Switch 2 owners naturally want the newer hardware to remove that old limitation.

The Original Switch Is Now Part of the Complication

One argument in the August discussion is that increasing the Switch 2 player limit could create compatibility problems with the original Switch population. Diablo II: Resurrected is currently one Switch ecosystem product rather than two completely separate versions. If one machine supports four-player games while another suddenly supports eight, Blizzard would need to decide how matchmaking, lobbies and cross-generation multiplayer should behave.

That does not make an upgrade impossible. Games routinely provide enhanced graphics and frame rates on newer hardware while maintaining multiplayer compatibility with older systems. Eight-player lobbies are more complicated because they change actual game rules rather than simply how the client renders the world.

Some forum players therefore suggest separating the requests. Give Switch 2 the easier hardware-level improvements first — 60 FPS and higher resolution — while treating eight-player support and cross-play as larger networking features that may require more engineering.

That is probably the most realistic version of what players are asking for.

Unlocking a frame rate is not literally a magical one-line switch despite what every internet forum eventually claims, but it is still a very different project from rebuilding console multiplayer architecture.

Reign of the Warlock Made the Missing Upgrade More Noticeable

The timing is what makes the situation feel strange. Blizzard launched Reign of the Warlock on Nintendo Switch in February 2026 alongside the wider Diablo II expansion. The new content includes the Warlock class, expanded Terror Zones, the Colossal Ancients endgame encounter, new items and Rune Words, Chronicle progression, improved stash organization and a customizable loot filter.

That is not maintenance-mode content.

It is a substantial investment in Diablo II: Resurrected.

We have spent much of this month covering how dramatically the expansion continues to reshape the game, from Blizzard continuing to rebalance the Warlock's Bind Demon mechanics to players experimenting with the new Season 15 endgame and debating how shorter Ladder seasons fit a game still built around enormous long-term grinds.

The Switch version receives that new gameplay.

It just receives it through the same basic hardware profile designed for the original Switch.

That is why several players say they expected the expansion to be the obvious moment for a Switch 2 patch. If Blizzard was already updating the game across every platform, packaging an Infernal Edition and selling new DLC on Nintendo hardware, the absence of a hardware upgrade became much more visible.

Some Players Are Choosing Steam Deck Instead

The handheld comparison is unavoidable. One player in the current thread says they deliberately chose a Steam Deck instead of Switch 2 for Diablo II because they expected the Nintendo version to remain constrained by its original performance profile. Earlier Switch 2 discussions make the same comparison, with players saying Diablo II feels considerably smoother on Valve's handheld while still providing the portable experience they want.

That should probably concern Blizzard more than angry forum posts.

Diablo II: Resurrected is unusually well suited to portable play. Runs are short. Offline characters work beautifully on a train or sofa. Cross-progression allows Battle.net characters to move between supported platforms. The game's basic control scheme adapted surprisingly well to controllers.

The Switch was therefore one of the most natural homes Diablo II ever found.

Switch 2 should theoretically be an even better one.

Instead, some players with both options are choosing another handheld because Diablo II can actually use its hardware.

Cross-Progression Works — Cross-Play Still Does Not

Another recurring request is full cross-play. Diablo II: Resurrected already supports cross-progression through Battle.net, allowing players to access the same online characters across supported platforms when their accounts are linked. Nintendo highlighted that feature when the original Switch release launched in 2021.

Actual multiplayer remains platform-specific.

A player can level a Sorceress on PC, continue that character on Switch and then return to PC later, but the PC and Switch players cannot simply join the same game together. The four-player Switch limit further separates the platforms because PC and the other console versions support the traditional eight-player structure.

Some players now see Switch 2 as an opportunity to solve both problems at once: increase the player limit and introduce cross-play between modern platforms.

That is a significantly larger request than a performance patch, and Blizzard has announced nothing suggesting it is coming. But if Diablo II: Resurrected is going to continue receiving major paid content, the argument for bringing its fragmented multiplayer ecosystem closer together becomes stronger.

There Is No Announced Switch 2 Upgrade Yet

As of August 31, Blizzard has not announced a Switch 2-specific edition, performance patch or upgrade path for Diablo II: Resurrected. Nintendo's store currently treats the game as compatible Switch software, and Reign of the Warlock itself is likewise listed as Nintendo Switch content that can be used on Switch 2.

That is important because community discussions occasionally drift from “the hardware should be able to do this” into “Blizzard only needs to unlock it.” We do not know what internal work would actually be required. Diablo II: Resurrected's Switch renderer, memory targets, UI and networking were all built with the original hardware in mind. A stable 60 FPS target could require optimization work beyond simply changing a configuration value.

But players are not unreasonable for wondering why Blizzard has not even announced that such work is happening.

Nintendo explicitly supports developers releasing free updates or paid upgrade packs that improve existing Switch games on Switch 2. The infrastructure exists.

Diablo II simply has not used it.

BlizzCon Is Now the Obvious Place to Watch

The latest forum conversation repeatedly points toward BlizzCon, and the timing makes that speculation understandable. BlizzCon 2026 takes place September 12–13, less than two weeks after the current discussion.

Blizzard's official event page promises major announcements during the Opening Ceremony, although it does not currently promise a Diablo II presentation or a Switch 2 announcement. Diablo IV and Diablo Immortal are explicitly included among the event's hands-on games; Diablo II is not listed there.

So there is no evidence that a Switch 2 patch will be revealed at BlizzCon.

But if Blizzard intends to announce one anytime soon, the company's biggest event of the year would be the obvious stage.

That hope is also part of why players are bumping the discussion now rather than quietly accepting the current version. We are close enough to BlizzCon for “maybe they are saving it for the show” to remain believable.

For another couple of weeks, anyway.

The Minimum Upgrade Is Pretty Clear

If Blizzard does decide to revisit Diablo II on Switch 2, the community wish list has remained remarkably consistent for more than a year:

• 60 FPS support
• Higher rendering resolution
• Eight-player online games
• Optional graphical improvements
• Cross-play
• Better console UI and control options

Not all of those belong in the same category. Cross-play and eight-player networking are major feature requests. Mouse support, interface changes and local co-op would require additional design work.

But 60 FPS and a resolution bump are the things almost every Switch 2 thread agrees on.

Even players asking for nothing else generally want those two.

Console Players Have Already Had a Rough Year

The frustration is amplified because Diablo II's console versions have already gone through performance problems this year. PlayStation 5 players spent months dealing with severe offline hitching before Blizzard finally corrected it, an issue we covered when players confirmed that the long-running PS5 offline stutter had finally been fixed.

That episode demonstrated both sides of Blizzard's current relationship with console Diablo II.

The bad news: console-specific issues can remain around for a surprisingly long time.

The good news: Blizzard is still fixing them.

Switch 2 players are asking for the next step to be proactive rather than corrective. They do not want to wait for something to break. They want Blizzard to make use of hardware that is already sitting underneath the game.

Diablo II Has Become Too Active to Hide Behind “Legacy Game” Anymore

There was a period where asking for significant Diablo II: Resurrected platform work might have seemed unrealistic. The remaster had launched, received several major patches and gradually settled into predictable Ladder resets.

Reign of the Warlock changed that argument.

Blizzard added an eighth class to Diablo II.

That sentence still sounds slightly illegal.

Once the company crossed that line, a Switch 2 performance mode suddenly stopped sounding particularly radical.

Season 15 is also producing constant balance changes, new item discussions and endgame experimentation. The game is not frozen in amber. Blizzard is actively designing around it.

If Diablo II: Resurrected is important enough to receive new classes and paid expansions, it is difficult to argue that one of the largest current console platforms is too unimportant to deserve an optimized version.

For Now, Switch 2 Is the Better Hardware Running the Same Old Version

The current situation is not disastrous. Diablo II: Resurrected works on Switch 2. Reign of the Warlock is available. Cross-progression remains useful. Players can take modern Diablo II with them anywhere, which would still have sounded like witchcraft when Lord of Destruction launched.

But backward compatibility and optimization are not the same thing.

Switch 2 owners have spent more than a year asking Blizzard to close that gap. The August thread shows they have not stopped, and with BlizzCon now approaching, expectations are starting to rise again.

Maybe Blizzard has a Switch 2 patch waiting behind the curtain.

Maybe Sanctuary will remain at 30 FPS and four-player parties for another year.

Either way, the community's request is no longer complicated:

The Warlock has arrived.

Now unlock the frames.

Sources

Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: Nintendo Switch 2 Upgrade — August 2026

Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: Long-Running Nintendo Switch 2 Patch Discussion

Nintendo: Diablo II: Resurrected Switch and Switch 2 Compatibility

Nintendo: Diablo II: Resurrected – Infernal Edition

Blizzard: BlizzCon 2026 Event Information

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Diablo 4’s 500-Reply Memory Leak Thread Is Still Hard to Ignore

Diablo IV has received new classes, expansions, seasonal systems, endgame redesigns and enough balance patches to make a spreadsheet nervous. Yet one of the most persistent PC complaints remains remarkably familiar: players launch the game, RAM usage climbs, VRAM fills up, performance begins to stutter and eventually something gives up.

One of Blizzard's largest dedicated PC bug threads for the issue now sits at 508 replies and almost 20,000 views. The thread itself dates back to May 2025, when players documented system memory jumping to 15–20 GB within minutes, VRAM increasing with town portals and zone transitions, and crashes arriving after 15–30 minutes. Blizzard acknowledged the reports at the time and asked players to submit crash IDs. More than a year later, the same thread remains one of the most viewed topics in Diablo IV's PC Bug Report section, while fresh August 2026 posts continue describing high RAM and VRAM usage, severe stuttering and performance degradation.

That does not mean every current Diablo IV crash comes from one giant unresolved memory leak. PC performance problems can involve drivers, DirectStorage, texture settings, hardware configurations, overlays and plenty of other variables. But it does mean players have been describing the same basic pattern for an awfully long time.

The Original Report Was Extremely Specific

The major thread began with a player who had already submitted a support ticket and included a crash ID. Their measurements were not particularly subtle. System RAM reportedly climbed to 15–20 GB within minutes, even while sitting at character selection. VRAM increased after town portals and zone transitions until it reached approximately 13–14 GB. Logging out did not release the accumulated memory, and the client eventually crashed with a Fenris dialog after roughly 15–30 minutes.

Other players quickly joined in with wildly different hardware. Reports included RTX 3070, RTX 4090 and RTX 5080 systems, Radeon cards, 16 GB systems, 32 GB systems, 64 GB systems and even one player with 128 GB of DDR5 memory. Some experienced complete crashes. Others reported enormous stutters, long freezes or degrading performance without the game actually closing.

One particularly useful reproduction involved simply teleporting between locations. A player with 32 GB RAM reported starting around 10 GB of system usage and watching another 500 MB to 1 GB disappear after each zone change until the system eventually crashed. That matches the original report's suspicion that old zone assets were not being fully released when new ones were loaded.

Blizzard responded on May 6, 2025, confirming that the team was investigating and specifically asking players to provide the crash IDs generated by the Fenris reporter. A second Blizzard post explained where those IDs could be found inside the Diablo IV installation folder.

So this was not merely a community theory that Blizzard never noticed.

Blizzard knew about the reports.

508 Replies Later, the Thread Is Still One of the Biggest PC Bug Reports

As of late August 2026, Blizzard's PC Bug Report category lists the memory leak thread with 508 replies and roughly 19,700 views. Its most recent activity is dated July 8, 2026, meaning the thread itself is not receiving daily replies anymore, but it survived through multiple seasons and remained active more than a year after the original report.

That longevity matters more than the raw reply count. A short-lived patch problem can produce hundreds of comments in a weekend before disappearing with the next hotfix. This discussion instead spans changes to the game, driver revisions, major content updates and entirely different hardware generations.

Players repeatedly return to the same description: Diablo IV starts normally, memory usage rises while playing, transitions make things worse, stuttering becomes more pronounced and restarting the client temporarily restores performance.

Temporary improvement after restarting is one of the classic reasons players interpret this behaviour as a memory-management issue. It does not prove the precise technical cause, but from the player's perspective the pattern is difficult to ignore. The computer has not changed. The build has not changed. Sanctuary has simply consumed enough memory for one evening and needs to be put back in its box.

Fresh August Reports Show the Broader Performance Problem Has Not Disappeared

The old mega-thread is not the only reason the subject is relevant again. On August 23, a new Technical Support post described severe stuttering and frame-time spikes in towns and crowded areas alongside high RAM and VRAM usage. The player was using an RTX 3060 with 12 GB VRAM and 16 GB system memory and specifically asked whether upgrading to 32 GB would meaningfully help or merely delay the underlying problem.

The discussion remained active through August 25.

Another July report is even more direct. A player with 32 GB RAM measured Diablo IV beginning with total system memory usage around 22 GB before steadily climbing until essentially all 32 GB were occupied. Windows eventually reported that Diablo IV had run out of memory. The player described this behaviour as returning after large content patches and expansions.

Those newer reports are not controlled proof that precisely the same bug from the 2025 thread remains untouched. They could represent related but technically distinct problems. That distinction matters. “Diablo IV has a memory leak” is a much broader claim than “multiple players continue reporting escalating memory consumption and performance degradation.”

The second statement is the one the public evidence supports.

Blizzard Has Been Making Performance and Stability Fixes

It would also be unfair to pretend Blizzard has spent the last year doing absolutely nothing about Diablo IV's PC performance. Patch notes throughout 2025 and 2026 repeatedly mention performance and stability improvements, and Blizzard has changed specific technology when it appeared connected to problems.

One particularly relevant example came in June 2025, when Blizzard disabled DirectStorage by default while investigating performance issues. Players with supported NVMe drives could manually re-enable it through a command-line argument, but Blizzard clearly considered the feature suspicious enough to remove from the default configuration during the investigation.

Later updates continued including general performance and stability improvements. The July 14, 2026 patch again listed “various performance and stability fixes.”

The problem is that broad stability notes make it difficult for players to know whether the particular RAM/VRAM behaviour they have been reporting is considered fixed, partially fixed or still under investigation.

That communication gap is part of why the memory leak discussion refuses to die.

Players Have Found Workarounds, but None Look Like a Universal Fix

Over the life of the thread, players have suggested almost every PC troubleshooting ritual imaginable: lowering texture quality, disabling Ray Tracing, rolling back NVIDIA drivers, clearing shader caches, increasing the Windows page file, disabling overlays, repairing game files, reinstalling Diablo IV and restarting the client periodically before memory usage becomes critical.

Some players report that lowering texture quality helps significantly. Others say disabling Ray Tracing reduces crashes. Some found better stability after changing NVIDIA drivers. Several report that increasing the page file allows Diablo IV to run for longer before failing.

The common problem is that these solutions are inconsistent.

A workaround that helps one RTX 3060 system may do nothing for another machine. A driver rollback can improve performance for one GPU generation while introducing completely different problems elsewhere. Increasing virtual memory can stop Windows from immediately running out of addressable memory, but if the game's memory consumption continues growing, the player may simply be buying more time before the same degradation occurs.

That is why “just add more RAM” is not a particularly satisfying answer. One contributor to the original thread reported the problem while using 128 GB of DDR5.

If Diablo IV can eventually make 128 GB feel nervous, the solution probably is not another trip to the RAM aisle.

This Is Especially Awkward for Steam Deck and Handheld Players

Memory pressure becomes even more obvious on handheld hardware, where system RAM and graphics memory effectively compete inside a much tighter budget. Earlier this year, Steam Deck owners reported Diablo IV crashing approximately every 30 minutes, with some players explicitly connecting the behaviour to the wider memory issue.

We recently covered how Diablo IV players say Steam Deck performance has become worse rather than better, despite the game having had years to mature on the platform. Memory management is particularly unforgiving there because a desktop PC with 32 or 64 GB has enormous overhead a handheld simply does not possess.

A desktop user can sometimes tolerate a leak by restarting the game every few hours.

A handheld crashing halfway through an activity every 30 minutes is considerably harder to call a workaround.

Zone Transitions Keep Appearing in Player Reports

One detail that repeatedly appears across reports is movement between areas. Town portals, entering dungeons, leaving dungeons, visiting crowded towns and moving through different zones are frequently associated with increasing memory usage or sudden performance drops.

That does not necessarily mean zone transitions themselves contain the bug. They naturally force Diablo IV to stream large amounts of textures, geometry, player cosmetics, monsters and environmental data. If a memory-management problem exists elsewhere in the pipeline, teleporting repeatedly is simply one of the fastest ways to expose it.

It also explains why a player can stand in one area for a while without obvious problems, then begin stuttering badly after an evening of Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, boss runs and trips back to town.

Diablo IV is a game built around constant transitions.

“Stop teleporting” would be an unusual endgame strategy.

Not Every Stutter Is a Memory Leak

This is the point where terminology becomes important. Players understandably use “memory leak” as shorthand whenever RAM or VRAM usage becomes enormous, but high memory usage by itself does not prove a true software memory leak.

Modern games aggressively cache assets because unused RAM is not inherently useful RAM. A game can occupy large amounts of system memory or VRAM without anything technically being wrong, provided it releases memory when required and performance remains stable.

The suspicious behaviour begins when usage continuously increases, old memory appears not to be released, performance degrades over time and closing the application immediately restores the system.

That is why the original thread's teleport reproduction was useful. It attempted to demonstrate a pattern rather than simply posting a screenshot showing “Diablo IV uses 18 GB.”

Likewise, not every Fenris crash is proof of a memory leak. GPU driver failures, unstable overclocks, shader problems and corrupted files can produce similar symptoms. Blizzard's PC client runs across an enormous range of hardware, which makes separating engine-level problems from individual configurations genuinely difficult.

But 500 replies across dozens of different configurations are also difficult to dismiss as one person's broken PC.

Current Patch Notes Do Not Declare the Major Memory Issue Resolved

Blizzard's current Diablo IV patch notes contain multiple references to general performance and stability work, but there is no prominent entry saying that the longstanding RAM and VRAM escalation reports from the major thread have been definitively resolved.

That does not mean Blizzard has made no progress. The experience clearly varies by system, season and patch, and some contributors have reported periods where their crashes improved significantly.

It does mean players have no simple official line they can point to saying:

“Yes, this specific problem has been fixed.”

That ambiguity matters because fresh users experiencing similar symptoms naturally find the enormous old thread through search, see hundreds of matching reports and conclude that the same issue has been running continuously for years.

Maybe technically it has.

Maybe several different problems have produced similar symptoms.

From the outside, those two possibilities look remarkably similar.

Performance Bugs Are Different From Ordinary Diablo Bugs

Diablo IV can survive a Set Charm behaving incorrectly or a War Plans point refusing to unlock. Those bugs are annoying, but the player can usually continue doing something else while waiting for a fix.

Performance degradation is different.

If the game eventually stutters into single-digit frame times, freezes for several seconds or crashes to desktop, every activity becomes affected. Boss fights, Hardcore characters, timed Pit runs and long sessions all become risky.

We have spent much of Season 14 covering small systems that appear to lose track of their own state, including Talisman bonuses reportedly switching off during combat and progression counters becoming stuck. Those are frustrating because the game stops calculating one part of the character correctly.

A performance issue is the same philosophy applied to the entire client.

The build might still work.

The computer would simply like Diablo IV to leave.

The 500-Reply Thread Is Really a Communication Problem Now

Perhaps the most useful thing Blizzard could do is not another generic line about “various performance and stability improvements.” It would be a specific update explaining the status of the memory-management investigation.

Is the original issue considered fixed?

Were several separate problems identified?

Are particular GPU configurations still affected?

Is high VRAM use considered expected behaviour while the stuttering has another cause?

Is Blizzard still collecting Fenris crash reports related to escalating RAM usage?

Players can deal with complicated answers. What creates frustration is not knowing whether the thing they are troubleshooting is something Blizzard believes it already solved twelve months ago.

The original forum response showed Blizzard was looking at the reports. The 508 replies that followed show players kept looking too.

Three Years In, Diablo IV Should Not Need a Restart Ritual

Diablo IV is now a mature live-service game. Some technical problems are inevitable when major seasons add new content, new assets and new systems. PC development is messy, and a problem affecting one particular combination of hardware and drivers can be extraordinarily difficult to reproduce internally.

But memory behaviour that repeatedly becomes a community talking point across multiple seasons deserves more than folklore.

Players should not have to memorize whether this is the season where they need medium textures, Ray Tracing disabled, an old GPU driver, a giant page file and a ceremonial client restart after every third Pit run.

Maybe Diablo IV no longer has the exact memory leak documented in May 2025.

Maybe today's reports represent something different.

But with fresh complaints about high RAM and VRAM usage still appearing in August 2026, Blizzard has not yet reached the most important technical milestone:

making players stop asking.

Sources

Diablo IV Forums: Major Memory Leak — RAM + VRAM Escalation

Diablo IV Forums: Severe Stuttering and High RAM/VRAM Usage — August 2026

Diablo IV Forums: Memory Leak on PC — July 2026 Report

Blizzard: Current Diablo IV Patch Notes

Blizzard: Diablo IV Patch 2.2 — DirectStorage Performance Investigation

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Diablo 2 Players Say Diablo Clone’s Stone of Jordan Mechanic Is Finally Too Old

Diablo II: Resurrected has changed quite a lot for a game built on machinery from the year 2000. We have Terror Zones, Sunder Charms, new Rune Words, major class changes and now an entire Warlock expansion bolted onto one of the most stubbornly preserved ARPGs ever made. Yet if you want one of the game's most famous endgame rewards, you are still participating in a ritual designed partly to solve a duping problem from more than two decades ago.

Diablo Clone still appears through the collective sale of Stone of Jordan rings. Sell enough of them within the relevant region and game type, and Uber Diablo eventually walks the Earth, allowing players already sitting in eligible Hell games to kill him for an Annihilus charm. Blizzard modernized the system in Diablo II: Resurrected Patch 2.4 by moving progression from individual server instances to regional tracking, but deliberately kept the Stone of Jordan trigger first introduced with Diablo II Patch 1.10.

Season 15 has now dragged that old design back into the spotlight. A fresh community discussion around the first reported Diablo Clone walks of the season quickly turned into the familiar question: why are we still selling one of Diablo II's rarest classic rings to trigger a world event in 2026?

Season 15 Is Already Showing the Awkward Side of DClone

A thread posted on August 30 announced what its author believed was the first Softcore Ladder Diablo Clone walk of Season 15, hosted by Korean streamer Muhangame. The event reportedly came with around five hours of notice, which was excellent if you happened to be awake, following the correct community channels and had a Hell game ready.

If not, Diablo apparently walked right past your bedroom window.

The thread immediately became confusing in a very Diablo II way. One player claimed Softcore Ladder had already seen four appearances in Asia and three in the Americas while Europe had seen none. Another insisted this was the first actual walk. Rather than trying to declare one community tracker definitively correct, the disagreement itself illustrates one of the weaknesses of the current system: players still rely heavily on external trackers, Discord communities, streamers and coordinated announcements to know when one of the game's most valuable events is about to happen.

Blizzard does provide in-game progression messages and the /uberdiablo command, but those tools tell you what is happening once regional progress is underway. They do not replace the community infrastructure that has developed around predicting, organizing and deliberately triggering walks.

An Americas Community Walk Is Trying to Collect 125 SoJs

A separate Season 15 thread makes the economic side of the mechanic even clearer. The D2R Clone Hunters community announced an Americas Softcore Ladder walk planned for September 5 and asked players to donate Stones of Jordan toward the event. When the thread was posted on August 29, the organizers were targeting 125 SoJs and had collected 31.

That number should not be mistaken for an official Blizzard-published spawn requirement. Blizzard's Patch 2.4 notes deliberately describe the trigger only as selling “enough” Stone of Jordan rings, while community groups work with their own understanding of the necessary range and organize around a target intended to guarantee the walk.

The community effort is actually rather wonderful. Players pooling valuable items so everybody in a region can fight Diablo is exactly the sort of weird emergent cooperation that makes Diablo II feel different from more tightly controlled modern games.

But it also exposes the central absurdity.

To deliberately trigger one boss, a Discord community is organizing a regional fundraiser in which the currency is 125 copies of a rare Unique ring.

Even Deckard Cain might ask whether there is a simpler administrative procedure.

The Stone of Jordan Requirement Was Created for a Very Different Diablo II

There is a historical reason for all this, and it made much more sense in the original game. Stone of Jordan became one of early Diablo II's most important trading currencies and was duplicated on an enormous scale. The economy became flooded with rings that were valuable partly because everybody agreed they were valuable and partly because there were far more of them circulating than legitimate drops alone could explain.

When Blizzard introduced Uber Diablo in Patch 1.10, selling Stones of Jordan became a giant item sink. Players could remove duplicated SoJs from the economy and, collectively, advance the hidden counter toward a Diablo Clone spawn. Killing him awarded Annihilus, giving players a reason to destroy the very currency that had become an economic problem.

It was wonderfully inelegant.

It was also aimed at a specific economy suffering from a specific historical problem.

That is the part players are questioning now. Diablo II: Resurrected is no longer trying to clean millions of old duplicated Stones of Jordan out of Battle.net's original economy. Yet the solution remains attached to one of the remake's major endgame rewards.

Blizzard Already Modernized Half of the System

The strange thing is that Blizzard clearly recognized the original implementation needed work. Patch 2.4 made a major change to Uber Diablo by moving its progression to regional databases. Previously, players hunted for specific server IPs where enough SoJs were being sold, then tried to create games on those servers before the event triggered.

That old experience was Diablo II archaeology in real time. Players were effectively reverse-engineering Battle.net infrastructure so they could stand in the correct copy of Sanctuary when a demon spawned.

D2R's regional system was a substantial improvement. Once the threshold is reached, Diablo Clone can appear for eligible players across the same region and game type rather than being tied to one particular server instance. Progress is tracked separately across combinations such as Ladder, Non-Ladder, Hardcore and Expansion, and Blizzard added six stages of in-game warning messages.

The infrastructure changed.

The currency did not.

Blizzard effectively renovated the entire house while keeping the original lock because somebody once had too many duplicated keys.

Some Players Want a Dedicated DClone Summoning Item Instead

The most common modern alternative is straightforward: stop using Stones of Jordan entirely and introduce an item whose only purpose is to summon Diablo Clone.

One player in the August 30 discussion suggested something similar to a Worldstone Shard with rarity around an Ist rune. Using it would summon Diablo Clone in that player's game, preserving Annihilus as something that requires meaningful farming without forcing players to coordinate regional SoJ sales.

The same idea appeared independently in a July discussion about adding a proper online solo or self-found mode. There, another player argued that a dedicated DClone consumable would be almost essential because a self-found character cannot reasonably participate in an economy-wide Stone of Jordan donation system in the same way as the open trading population.

The details could obviously vary. The summoning item could drop from Terror Zones, Heralds, Act bosses or another endgame activity. Blizzard could make it extraordinarily rare. It could require combining several fragments. A Cube recipe could consume an existing high-value item. The important difference is that individual gameplay would create individual access to the event.

That would also fit rather naturally with Reign of the Warlock's newer endgame structure. Season 15 already asks players to farm Heralds of Terror for some of its most desirable rewards. We have even seen players report killing more than 100 Heralds without receiving the Sunder Charm they were chasing. Diablo II clearly remains perfectly comfortable making players grind for rare things. The question is whether Diablo Clone still needs the regional economics seminar attached.

There Is Still a Good Argument for Keeping the Weird Old Mechanic

Not everybody wants it changed, and that side deserves more credit than simply calling it nostalgia. Diablo Clone's regional spawn is one of the few systems left in Diablo II where a whole trading community can collectively make something happen in everybody's games.

The Stone of Jordan requirement creates stories.

Somebody announces a walk. Communities start collecting rings. Players prepare characters capable of killing DClone. Other players rush to get a Hell game open before the final stage. The message appears:

Diablo has walked the Earth.

For a few minutes, the entire region reacts to the same event.

A personal summon token would be cleaner, fairer and dramatically easier to understand. It would also turn Diablo Clone into another boss key. Diablo II already has plenty of items that open doors to bosses. Part of DClone's identity is precisely that he does not work that way.

One response to the current criticism essentially makes that argument: if you remove the inconvenient old systems whenever they feel archaic, at some point you may be removing the things that make Diablo II feel like Diablo II.

That tension is becoming increasingly important as Blizzard adds modern content to a 25-year-old foundation.

Shorter Ladder Seasons Make the Old Mechanic More Noticeable

Season length adds another wrinkle. Players have already been debating whether Diablo II's increasingly short Ladder cycles leave enough time for ordinary players to develop characters and participate in the full economy. DClone depends directly on that economy becoming wealthy enough that players are willing to throw valuable Stones of Jordan into Akara's recycling bin for the benefit of everyone else.

Late in a mature Ladder season, that can happen frequently. Wealth accumulates. SoJs become easier to sacrifice. Organized communities have stockpiles. Annihilus charms eventually become common enough that another walk is almost routine.

Early in a fresh economy, every Stone of Jordan matters considerably more.

That makes the initial walks disproportionately dependent on wealthy players, highly organized groups, streamers and traders who can accumulate enough rings quickly. A casual player can participate simply by being online at the right moment, but they have very little agency over when that moment arrives.

The current discussion around Season 15's Ladder population makes that economic dependency worth watching. The fewer players participating in a particular region or mode, the slower a community-funded global trigger naturally becomes.

The Real Problem May Be Player Agency

That is ultimately the strongest argument for changing DClone.

It is not that Stone of Jordan is too rare.

It is not that Annihilus should be easier to obtain.

It is not even necessarily that regional walks are bad.

The problem is that a player can invest hundreds of hours in a Ladder character and still have almost no direct path toward triggering the event themselves. They can find a Stone of Jordan and sell it, but one legitimate ring represents only a tiny piece of a regional process. Their realistic options are therefore to follow external trackers, join organized communities or hope Diablo happens to walk while they are already playing.

That is an unusual design in modern ARPGs, where almost every major reward eventually has some form of targetable progression.

Diablo II does not have to become a modern ARPG.

But Blizzard has already demonstrated that it is willing to modify systems when the old implementation creates unnecessary friction. Terror Zones changed endgame farming. Sunder Charms changed immunity management. Patch 2.4 itself changed DClone's server architecture.

Questioning the remaining SoJ requirement is therefore not quite the same as asking Blizzard to redesign Diablo II from scratch.

Blizzard already redesigned half of Diablo Clone.

A Hybrid System Might Preserve the Best Part

There is an obvious compromise. Keep regional Stone of Jordan walks but add an extremely rare personal summoning method alongside them.

Community groups could continue organizing spectacular regional events. Selling SoJs would still have meaning. The familiar global progression messages would remain. Players who enjoy tracking walks would lose nothing.

Meanwhile, somebody playing largely solo could eventually farm a rare summoning item and fight DClone on their own terms. Make that item rare enough and Annihilus would remain a meaningful reward. Blizzard could even prevent the personal version from affecting regional progress, keeping the two systems completely separate.

It would not be pure Diablo II.

Neither are Terror Zones, Sunder Charms, the Warlock or regional DClone tracking.

At some point, “the original game did it this way” stopped being an absolute rule.

Twenty-Three Years Is a Good Run for an Anti-Dupe Solution

There is something deeply charming about the fact that modern Diablo II players are still sacrificing Stones of Jordan because early-2000s Battle.net had far too many duplicated Stones of Jordan.

Very few games preserve their historical accidents this faithfully.

But Season 15 is once again showing the cost. Players are watching Discord servers, debating which regions have already walked, organizing donations and scheduling community events around a mechanism whose original economic purpose mostly belongs to another era.

The argument is not that Diablo Clone should become trivial.

Quite the opposite.

Make the summon item rare. Make the fight brutal. Make Annihilus something players celebrate finding.

But after more than two decades, perhaps Diablo himself can finally stop waiting for somebody to sell enough rings to Charsi before he is allowed outside.

Sources

Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: First DClone Has Walked

Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: Season 15 Community DClone Walk

Diablo II: Resurrected Forums: Online Solo Mode and Alternative DClone Trigger Discussion

Blizzard: Diablo II: Resurrected Patch 2.4 — Uber Diablo Changes

Diablo Wiki: Stone of Jordan and the Historical SoJ Economy

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