Diablo Immortal has spent years wrestling with a rather uncomfortable question: how do you make competitive PvP feel fair in a game where two players can arrive on the battlefield with dramatically different levels of character power?
Blizzard has tried matchmaking adjustments, new tournament formats and increasingly complicated calculations involving Resonance and secondary stats. Now, with the November 2026 update, it is handing some of that responsibility directly to the players. Diablo Immortal War Games now allow match hosts to impose limits on Resonance, Combat Rating and several other attributes, creating opportunities for organized battles where raw character investment does not necessarily dominate everything.
The new options arrived on November 4 and are available until February 17, 2027, while Blizzard evaluates whether they should become permanent. This is not a complete overhaul of Diablo Immortal's PvP system, but it could be one of the more interesting experiments the game has introduced in quite some time.
Diablo Immortal War Games Let Hosts Limit Resonance and More
The new Character Settings menu gives War Games lobby hosts control over several combat systems. Organizers can enable or disable Familiars, restrict the number of active Familiars and switch Awakened Legendary Gems on or off. They can also establish individual upper limits for Resonance, Combat Rating, Life, Damage, Potency, Resistance, Armor Penetration and Armor.
Importantly, those restrictions apply to every character participating in the match. A host could therefore arrange a battle with a Resonance ceiling, remove certain progression advantages and establish a more controlled environment for testing builds or organizing guild competitions. These are adjustable limits rather than a promise that every character will automatically become identical.
That distinction matters. Two players operating under the same Resonance limit may still have very different builds, equipment interactions and levels of experience. Nevertheless, giving organizers control over several sources of character power creates possibilities that ordinary competitive matchmaking cannot always provide.
We have already seen how controversial uneven competition can become. In September, we examined the debate surrounding Bout of Realms matchmaking, where lower-Resonance teams questioned the value of competing against significantly more powerful opponents. Blizzard's new War Games tools do not directly change that tournament, but they offer community organizers another way to approach the same fundamental problem.
Could Custom War Games Make Diablo Immortal PvP Fairer?
There is something faintly amusing about the situation. Diablo Immortal has spent years building increasingly elaborate systems for measuring character power, only to arrive at a feature that effectively allows players to say, "All right, but what happens if we turn some of that off?"
The idea is not entirely new. Earlier this year, Blizzard introduced Challenge of Equals, a competitive format designed to reduce progression-based advantages. The difference here is flexibility. Rather than relying exclusively on a predefined tournament ruleset, War Games hosts can choose which restrictions make sense for their particular match.
Guilds could use the settings for organized practice, community tournaments or experiments comparing class performance under controlled conditions. They might also discover that reducing Resonance differences does not automatically solve every balance problem. Certain class abilities, skill combinations and equipment effects could still produce remarkably unpleasant surprises. Sanctuary has never been particularly interested in equality.
Meanwhile, regular Battlegrounds are receiving separate improvements to matchmaking ratings and skill evaluation. Blizzard says those changes should better reflect competitive performance and make rating adjustments more consistent. We previously explored the difficulties of evaluating player strength in our look at Resonance, Armor Penetration and Battleground matchmaking.
The two developments should not be confused. War Games hosts can configure custom restrictions for their own matches. Ordinary Battleground players do not suddenly receive a menu allowing them to decide how powerful their opponents may be.
According to Blizzard's official November update, the Character Settings experiment will continue through February 17, 2027. The developers will evaluate its performance before deciding whether to retain the options permanently.
For now, the most interesting question is not whether these settings can make every PvP encounter perfectly fair. They cannot. It is whether players will discover that a different set of rules produces a more enjoyable competition.
And perhaps, after years of arguments about Resonance, someone will finally organize a fight where the most impressive thing on the battlefield is what the player actually does.
That would be a rather refreshing change.
