Diablo 4 patch 3.2.3 fixes the quest, not your character

You picked up a Splinter of Evil a little too early, and ever since, your Season 15 character has been going in circles: the seasonal questline refuses to finish and the Prime Evil Powers stay greyed out. The Diablo 4 patch 3.2.3, scheduled for Wednesday, October 14, finally fixes the bug. It does not repair characters that are already stuck, and Blizzard says so in black and white in its notes.

A Splinter picked up too early, a seasonal quest that never ends

Splinters of Evil are the core mechanic of the Season of Hell's Legacy. Once Deckard Cain's seasonal questline is done, you choose the Splinter of Hatred (Mephisto), Destruction (Baal) or Terror (Diablo). Each one opens its own Reputation board, which eventually unlocks Prime Evil Powers: ground effects that periodically erupt from your character and boost a specific activity. Hatred for the Pit and Nightmare Dungeons, Destruction for the Undercity and Lair Bosses, Terror for Helltides and Infernal Hordes.

The bug fits in one sentence. A character could use a Splinter before finishing the seasonal questline, and doing so then prevented it from completing the questline. No Prime Evil Powers, on a character that went all the way to the echoes of the three demons. Icy Veins, in a piece by Fallen Mesiah on October 10, calls it the biggest problem with Splinters since the season launched on September 15.

On October 14, Blizzard closes the door without reopening yours

Build 73883 of patch 3.2.3 fixes the problem at the source. But the developer's note attached to it is blunt: “This change prevents this bug from happening but does not reset quest progress on characters who are already bugged.”

After October 14, nobody can fall into the trap anymore, but those already in it stay there. Blizzard offers no reset tool and no support intervention. The only way out is another character.

Stuck character: what to do

The good news hides in the same note: Prime Evil Powers unlock per partition, not per character. A partition is the group of characters that share the same season and game mode. There are four: Normal, Hardcore, Normal Solo Self-Found (SSF, no trading or grouping) and Hardcore SSF.

• Create a new seasonal character in the same partition as your stuck character. A Normal character will not unlock anything for a Hardcore one, and vice versa.
• Take its seasonal questline all the way without using a Splinter before the end, if you play before October 14. After the patch, the order no longer matters.
• Once the questline is done, Prime Evil Powers open up for every character in the partition, including the one that was stuck.

That second character is no throwaway: the questline takes it to face the echo of Baal at Arreat's summit, Mephisto's in the prison of Hatred, then Diablo's in Tristram Cathedral, according to the walkthrough published by JVFrance. Might as well make it count. A class you wanted to try, levelled with a build designed for speed such as the Blessed Hammer express leveling Paladin or the Searing Scream express leveling Warlock, makes the detour worthwhile.

The other October 14 fixes

The rest of the notes, relayed in full by Miril on Icy Veins on October 9, deals with annoyances more than disasters:

• Baal's loot: Tyrael sometimes spawned right on top of the pile of items dropped by Baal, which made picking them up a chore.
• The Sandstone Golem in the Horadric Library could fail to respawn if you died during the fight.
• The Countess in the Forgotten Tower sometimes passed through the fog wall, which blocked the encounter's progression.
• The Horadric Cube refused to reroll four affixes: Barrier Generation, +Healing, Critical Strike Damage and Impairment Reduction. That is fixed.
• The Necromancer class mechanic quest, Call of the Underworld, where not every monster dropped the Unbroken Bones it requires.

The Cube fix matters more than it looks: rerolling a bad affix on a nearly perfect piece is one of the main uses of the Cube late in the season. And Critical Strike Damage is on the list, a stat most damage-focused builds try to push as high as possible.

What the Diablo 4 patch 3.2.3 leaves untouched

Two frustrations around Splinters remain. Switching Splinters to benefit from another activity's bonuses is still tedious, and Splinters do not stack: a duplicate that drops cannot be picked up and is simply lost. Icy Veins points this out in the same article, and no fix has been announced.

The interaction of the Hellfire Torch does not change either: Blizzard acknowledged it goes beyond what was intended, and chose not to touch it before the end of the season. This Diablo 4 patch follows the two early October hotfixes, which closed an elite farm and unlocked Horadric Parcels. Three interventions in two weeks, all maintenance: the season has settled in, and Blizzard has moved on to polishing it.