2.5.0 PTR Patch Notes Season 11 Overview
What does Masterworking Improve Now
Previously, Masterworking increased the value of affixes on items, including Tempering affixes such as cooldown reduction and bonuses to skill ranks. With the new system, Masterworking will instead apply Quality to an item, and only affect its base damage, armor, or resistance. Take these pants as an example:
In Season 10, Masterworking affected all the affixes, Strength, Maximum Life, Resistance to All Elements, and even the Ground Stomp Cooldown. In the future, the new Quality stat will only increase the Base Armor stat at the top of the item. This is true for weapons and jewelry as well, increasing base damage and resistances.
After reaching maximum Quality on an item (20 levels), the final step of Masterworking is available, the Capstone Bonus. This Capstone bonus upgrades a random non-greater affix on the item into a Greater Affix. This would imply that temper stats can no longer be upgraded in any way. Players can re-roll the Masterworked Greater Affix, without resetting Masterworking Quality, but re-rolling will cost Obducite and Neathiron. It won't be cheap!
Gearing in Season 11
Gearing in Diablo 4 is seeing a massive shakeup. It's unclear how the monsters have been rebalanced to account for all of these changes, but one thing is for sure: players are trading in a lot of Offensive power in exchange for a Defensive boost. With the total Tempering Affixes being cut down from 2 to 1, and the inability to improve affixes in any way aside from turning them into Greater Affixes, a lot of scaling has been chopped off.
Cooldown Reduction breakpoints will be much more challenging to hit, as will other capped effects, such as Size bonuses or Doubling effects, such as the "Chance to Cast Twice" or "Chance to Hit Twice" tempers. Common Stacking Affixes like Critical Strike Chance and Attack Speed will also see huge reductions. On the other hand, a lot of builds that have previously struggled to reach Resistance or Armor values will be brought in line, and most classes have the same defensive progression. Weapons, while losing out on powerful temper bonuses, will have a stronger baseline due to the Quality system.
