Diablo 4 PTR: Season 16 Opens With Bugs and a Slow Climb

Twenty-four hours after the Diablo 4 PTR opened for Season 16 (the public test server for patch 3.3.0, open from October 27 until November 3), the official forum is mostly about bugs and a season start that players find slow. Blizzard posted its official known issues list on October 27, and the PTR Feedback category has about twenty topics opened since. What follows covers those reports, without going back over the new features already detailed in our October 24 article.

What Blizzard already acknowledges

Community manager filthierich posted the list on October 27, with a promise: the listed points will be addressed “by the official release of 3.3.0”. First on the list, character copy from the live servers does not work. Player Invent0r found out the hard way: after the copy error, creating a character made the option disappear.

The Diablo 4 PTR list mixes several of the season's systems:

• Warlock, Flesh of Abaddon: the bonus damage in demon form may only apply after leaving and re-entering the form.
• Warlock, Fulcrum of Mephis: the chance to turn slain enemies into lesser demons only works with the real set bonus, not with the one from the Horadric item.
• Paladin: the bonus damage against weakened enemies does not apply.
• Druid, Song of the Old Mountain: the 5-piece bonus still gives 200% damage to the petrify explosion, instead of the intended 300%.
• War Plans: an alternate character may show no shared points until you change zones.
• The Lair of Runes node does not increase the runes dropped by lair bosses.

The Diablo 4 PTR starts with a slow 1 to 70 climb

Player Baggins leveled a Whirlwind Barbarian from 1 to 70 without a boost, to get “as close as possible” to a season start. His October 28 report is harsh: without the 14 points carried over from a previous season or the Seasonal Journey, leveling becomes a long chore. He points to rare and legendary drops that are almost absent, Helltide chests that only give unusable blue items, and Pits unavailable before level 70. The Cube was no use either, for lack of dust to change an affix, and he could not place glyph points on reaching 70, a defect he says he has reported for three seasons. He also notes he could not test the new skills, which were missing from the PTR when he tried.

One account is not a consensus, and another player, Teapea, adds nuance in the same thread: he reached 70 in three hours, stacking Helltide cinders to skip War Plans, but felt weaker than last season. A third topic, about skipping the campaign, got an answer from players: the option is only offered after finishing the campaign once.

Horadric Cube, Horadric items and runes

On the Diablo 4 PTR, Horadric items and the Cube come up in several topics. Jigoku reports in a dedicated thread that the reroll fails on unique and set charms with the message “This material combination could not change the item's affix”, even though the materials are there, and that Kullean's Tuning Prism freezes mid-craft. Another player argues in a topic on their power that 10% multiplicative damage or 8% cooldown reduction on armor and weapons is not exciting: in his view, only jewelry is interesting, because it opens new talisman combinations.

On the nostalgia side, Jigoku also asks for the return of the runes and the uniques crafted from them from Season 15, which made him play more than in other seasons. A druid asks for the same in his class feedback, where he also reports that companion level does not drop on unique charms through the Cube reroll.

Druid and warlock: interactions going off the rails

The druid's Inner Beast legendary node was reworked, and Malfisar finds it “greatly improved” on damage. His complaint is about the cooldown: to get it, you have to change form, and some players do it by casting an emote. Avatara agrees in the same thread: with Grizzly Rage, which locks a single form, the emote or the town portal remain the only ways to trigger the bonus.

On the warlock side, the most precisely measured bug involves Tyrant's Grasp. According to SomeGuy, each summoned hand triggers its own burning instance with Destruction Demon, instead of one per cast: eight hands give eight instances, and the Inescapable Grapple variant produces more than fifty. He adds that this bug was reported some time ago and persists on the PTR.

The same warlock player opened several topics on October 28: Terror Demon's duration caps at 24 seconds from 31 skill ranks, and the Dominion node, limited to 20 seconds, drops when summons extended by Netherstep run past that delay. One message goes the other way: the Dread Claw changes are judged excellent, with a request to keep them for the season.

Necromancer, paladin and Spiritborn

The necromancer's new Mortacrux is appealing on paper, but BeigeHawk points out a flaw: the effect spends its charges on every Sever with Inexorable Reaper, the class's only reasonably reliable mobility. He proposes limiting the trigger to core skills that are not movement skills.

For the paladin, gh0st-22643 argues overnight between October 27 and 28 that the few planned improvements will not be enough to make the class viable, and asks for buffs to Supplication and to all basic skill aspects. The topic has four likes, and the bonus against weakened enemies is already on the known issues list. On the Spiritborn side, stinkyjim reports that picking “Strength of the Forest” on Ravager breaks the Minimum Ferocity passive.

The Diablo 4 PTR topics are barely read, a few dozen views for most, far from the 1,547 of the official thread. The PTR stays open until November 3, and that is the window in which Blizzard can still fix these points before the season ships, after a PTR we already judged risky on October 21.