Diablo IV has spent thirty years teaching players that finding rare loot is one of life's great pleasures. Season 15 introduced an interesting qualification: finding the loot is wonderful, provided you haven't already found one.
For weeks, players hunting Prime Evil Splinters have been dealing with a peculiarly frustrating restriction. You could carry one Splinter of Terror, one Splinter of Destruction and one Splinter of Hatred. Find another of the same type, and the game would refuse to let you pick it up.
Not because your inventory was full. Not because the item was useless. Simply because you already owned that particular fragment of supernatural evil.
Blizzard has finally decided that this arrangement might not be ideal.
Diablo IV Patch 3.2.4, scheduled for October 28, 2026, increases the maximum stack size of Prime Evil Splinters from 1 to 99. The change applies across PC, PlayStation and Xbox, according to the official patch notes.
It is an enormous improvement to a very small number. But the timing raises an awkward question: why did players have to spend so much of Season of Hell's Legacy fighting their own inventory before Blizzard decided to remove the restriction?
One of Season 15's Rarest Rewards Was Being Left on the Ground
Prime Evil Splinters serve two important purposes in Diablo IV's anniversary season.
They allow players to change their chosen Prime Evil Powers, switching between the seasonal abilities associated with Diablo, Baal and Mephisto. They are also required to create Wirt's Lucky Coin, the special item that opens the hidden Uber Tristram encounter.
That second purpose makes the original inventory restriction particularly painful.
As we explained when players discovered Uber Tristram and the returning Hellfire Torch, the secret encounter requires one of each Prime Evil Splinter:
- Splinter of Terror – associated with Diablo.
- Splinter of Destruction – associated with Baal.
- Splinter of Hatred – associated with Mephisto.
Combine all three in the Horadric Cube to create Wirt's Lucky Coin, then take that coin to the fountain in Old Tristram to access the hidden Prime Evil Council encounter.
Defeating the council offers a chance to obtain the Hellfire Torch, one of Season 15's most desirable Mythic Charms.
Naturally, players want to repeat the process.
The problem was that a character holding a Splinter of Destruction could not collect another one until the existing copy had been consumed. If a valuable duplicate dropped during farming, it could end up abandoned on the ground.
This was especially irritating because players could not simply guarantee that the next Splinter would be the one they actually needed.
We previously examined how the restriction was making Prime Evil switching unnecessarily difficult. Some players reported receiving repeated copies of the wrong Splinter while trying to change their seasonal powers.
The new 99-item stack limit does not make Splinters more common. Blizzard has announced no drop-rate changes in Patch 3.2.4.
What it does is allow players to keep duplicates instead of wasting them.
That is a rather important distinction when every successful drop might represent another future Uber Tristram attempt.
The Community Had Already Invented a Remarkably Awkward Workaround
Perhaps the best illustration of how frustrating the original restriction had become is what players were willing to do to avoid it.
On October 20, community investigations documented a workaround involving a second character and a cooperative friend.
The method was wonderfully absurd.
When a duplicate Splinter dropped, the player could leave it on the ground while a friend remained inside the same game instance. The original player would then switch to another eligible character that did not already possess that Splinter.
If everything went correctly, the friend could invite the alternate character back into the original instance, allowing it to collect the abandoned item.
The method required compatible characters, access to the relevant difficulty and careful management of the game instance.
All to pick up something that had already dropped.
You can read the details in D4Guides' investigation into saving duplicate Splinters.
There is a certain historical charm to Diablo players inventing elaborate methods of preserving valuable items. Diablo II's community developed entire trading economies around Stones of Jordan, and generations of players have discovered inventive ways of working around inventory restrictions.
But there is a difference between an interesting limitation that creates meaningful decisions and a limitation that encourages players to organize a small multiplayer rescue operation every time valuable loot drops.
Patch 3.2.4 should make that particular ritual unnecessary once the new stack limit is live.
The reaction has not been universally celebratory, however.
On Blizzard's official forums, some players have welcomed the change while questioning its arrival so late in the season.
That criticism is understandable. A quality-of-life improvement has its greatest value when players are actively progressing through the content it improves.
Fixing a frustrating restriction weeks after players have already completed much of their seasonal farming is still useful. It simply cannot restore the rare drops they previously had to abandon.
Better Splinter Stacking Won't Fix Every Hellfire Torch Problem
There is another reason not to celebrate Patch 3.2.4 as the final solution to Season 15's problems.
Prime Evil Splinters have been connected to several different issues, and the October 28 update addresses only one of them.
Earlier this month, Blizzard released Patch 3.2.3 to prevent a bug that could permanently block seasonal quest progression when players used a Prime Evil Splinter too early.
That fix prevented new cases but did not automatically repair characters already affected. Blizzard instead instructed those players to complete the seasonal questline on another character in the appropriate partition.
Increasing the stack limit to 99 does not replace that workaround or repair previously broken quest states.
The Hellfire Torch farming process also has its own complications.
As we reported in our investigation into Uber Tristram's hidden loot cooldown, players discovered that repeated Prime Evil Council kills could produce greatly reduced rewards while the encounter remained subject to an undisclosed cooldown.
Blizzard has not announced any change to that cooldown in Patch 3.2.4.
Players will therefore be able to stockpile more ingredients for Wirt's Lucky Coin, but that does not necessarily mean they should immediately spend every coin on consecutive Uber Tristram runs.
There is also no announced change to the chances of obtaining Hellfire Torch itself.
The official notes for Patch 3.2.4 are unusually short. Beyond the Splinter stack increase, Blizzard lists only general stability, visual and interface improvements.
That is all.
No major class balance overhaul. No new seasonal feature. No dramatic changes to the Horadric Cube.
Just a small adjustment to how many copies of a rare item the game is willing to acknowledge.
And yet, for players who have spent hours hunting the three Prime Evils, it may be one of the more welcome changes of the season.
There is something deeply appropriate about the situation. Diablo IV has revived the Hellfire Torch, Uber Tristram, secret Runewords and several other pieces of Diablo II history for its anniversary celebrations.
It has also accidentally revived one of the less beloved traditions of old action RPGs: spending far too much time worrying about where to put your loot.
From October 28, at least one part of that problem should finally disappear.
The Prime Evils will still be dangerous. Their Splinters will still be valuable. And the Hellfire Torch will still require a considerable amount of effort.
But when a rare Splinter drops, you should finally be able to pick it up without calling a friend, changing characters or negotiating with Sanctuary's inventory department.
For a game built around collecting loot, that seems like a fairly reasonable expectation.
