Diablo 3 Season 26 patch notes: Echoing Nightmare mode & Greater Rift changes

Diablo 3 Season 26 sees the addition of a new limited time game mode, Echoing Nightmare, alongside a slew of changes to the game’s Greater Rifts, so here’s a rundown of the patch notes.

Casting the Soul Shards of Season 25 back into the abyss, Diablo 3 Season 26 sees a first in the game‘s extensive history: a new themed limited-time game mode.

Entitled Echoing Nightmare, players are tasked with following in the footsteps of their Nephalem ancestors in a fight to the death. Facing off against increasingly powerful waves of enemies, you may not walk out alive, but you’ll be scoring a whole plethora of different rewards.

In order to participate though, you’ll need to survive the new and improved Greater Rift Guardians, as well as some different maps. There’s still even more coming with this patch, though, so let’s dive into all of the details we have about Diablo 3 Season 26.

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Contents

• Season 26: Theme & Echoing Nightmare mode
• Item changes
• Full patch notes

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Diablo 3 Season 26 theme: Echoing Nightmare mode

Season 26’s theme centers around the all-new Echoing Nightmare mode. Inspired by the likes of CoD Zombies and other survival titles, players can group up to face increasingly powerful waves of monsters, or even try to take on the horrors alone.

• Read More: When is Diablo 3 Season 26?

In order to access this shadowy realm, you’ll need to beat out Greater Rift Guardians to collect a Petrified Scream, they key to this forsaken place. These fearsome foes have received a bit of an overhaul for the Season in terms of EXP, with new maps in play as well.

Diablo 3 Season 26: Item buffs

While the Monk and Crusader have both received a few item set buffs, the most significant changes are to the Barbarian‘s Raekor’s Legacy set.

Granting huge damage increases to Furious Charge, Weapon Throw, and Ancient Spear, maybe we’ll see the classic warrior rise up the Diablo 3 tier list following these changes.

Diablo 3 patch notes: Season 26

Below are the full Diablo 3 Season 26 patch notes courtesy of Blizzard.

Seasons

Season 26 introduces the Echoing Nightmare, an optional and rewarding end-game challenge where players fight within the memories of Nephalem who fell in a Greater Rift. Today’s Nephalem must stand their ground until they are inevitably Overwhelmed or defeated. Players must collect a Petrified Scream from defeated Greater Rift Guardians to gain entry to the Echoing Nightmare. Transmuting a Petrified Scream in Kanai’s Cube summons a portal that players can enter to face the horrors of the Nephalem’s past.

Season Theme Details:

• Petrified Screams and the Echoing Nightmare can only be accessed with seasonal characters.
• Only one player is required to transmute a Petrified Scream to open an Echoing Nightmare in a multiplayer game.
• Similar to a boss encounter, all players in a multiplayer game must accept a prompt to enter.
• While within an Echoing Nightmare, the difficulty scales as players progress in the encounter. Players can progress faster by defeating monsters quickly.
• Players receive the following rewards upon completing an Echoing Nightmare: EXP, Legendary Items, Blood Shards, Gems, and a new Legendary Gem, Whisper of Atonement.
• The Whisper of Atonement is a Legendary Gem used exclusively for Augmenting Ancient Legendary items. It drops pre-ranked based upon the player’s performance in the Echoing Nightmare.
• Rare monsters now spawn within an Echoing Nightmare.
• Meteors now fall from the sky.
• Hellish Machinations now appear, which spawn streams of Exploding Lunatics.
• Rift Guardians now spawn.
• Increased the frequency of which monsters spawn.
• Updated the Shadow Clone explosion to better reflect the area of effect.
• The exit timer has been increased to 60 seconds.
• Increased the possible rank a Whisper of Atonement can drop to 125 based on the Tier completed.
• Monsters in Echoing Nightmares can no longer be Frozen, Stunned, Rooted or Knocked Back.
• Fixed a bug that caused Conduit Shrines to deal less damage than intended.

New Updates (Post-PTR)

• Monsters from the Echoing Nightmares no longer drop gold, items or health globes.
• Adjusted the damage done by Exploding Lunatics and Meteors to be more deadly.
• Adjust Meteor and Fallen Lunatic Molten damage to be Physical.
• Adjusted the difficulty of Tiers 100+.
• Replaced the Shield Pylon with a Speed Pylon.
• Adjusted the EXP rewarded by Echoing Nightmares to be aligned with Greater Rift turn-in rewards.
• Reduced the Echoing Nightmare closing timer to 30 seconds.
• Prevented Echoing Nightmares from being opened in games lower than level 70.
• Adjusted Exploding Lunatic and Meteor damage to Physical.
• Adjusted the drop rate of Petrified Screams from Greater Rift Guardians.

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Greater Rift Updates

We wanted to improve the Greater Rift experience through quality of life updates, balance changes and addressing community feedback. We reviewed all of the maps and monsters that appear in Greater Rifts and reworked the probabilities overall to make sure players spend more time with the content they enjoy. Less spaghetti and more chickens!

Orek’s Dream: Greater Rifts have a small chance to roll as Orek’s Dream. These dreamlike rifts have a curated list of maps and monster compositions.

• 3 maps have been added and 2 maps have been removed from the Greater Rift pool.
  • Added: Fields of Misery, Desolate Sands and Briarthorn Cemetery
  • Removed: Sewers of Caldeum, and Hidden Aqueducts
• The probability of Greater Rift maps has been adjusted.
• The probability of monster groups has been adjusted.
• The following monsters have been adjusted to grant more progression and EXP within Greater Rifts.
  • Blazing Guardians
  • Smoldering Guardians
  • Frost Guardian
  • Noxious Guardian
  • Shock Guardian
  • Blood Clan Spearman
  • Dark Moon Clan Impaler
  • Moon Clan Impaler
  • Blood Clan Impaler
  • Ice Clan Impaler
  • Hell Witch
  • Vile Temptress
• Players can speak to Orek to close an active Greater Rift. This option is only available when in a single player game.
• Further increased the progression granted by some monsters in Greater Rifts.
• Additionally, increased the progression granted by Fallen Shaman, Fallen Conjurer, Fallen Prophet and Fallen Firemage.
• Updated visual effects upon entering an Orek’s Dream.
• Updated the Orek’s Dream vignette to be more pronounced.

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Items

Barbarian

• Legacy of Raekor (4-piece Bonus): Furious Charge gains the effect of every rune and deals 1000% increased damage. For every 1% Life you are missing, the damage of your Ancient Spear is increased by 2%.
• Legacy of Raekor (6-piece Bonus): Hitting enemies with Furious Charge or Weapon Throw increases the damage of your next Ancient Spear by 5500% and causes it to release multiple spears from its target. This effect stacks and each spear throw consumes a maximum of 5 stacks.
• Arreat’s Law: Weapon Throw and Ancient Spear deal 150-200% increased damage.
  • Weapon Throw generates up to 25 50 additional Fury based on the distance of the enemy hit. The generated Fury can go above the maximum cap by 200 Fury.
  • Ancient Spear refunds up to 25 50 Fury based on the distance of the enemy hit and resets your Fury cap to its base maximum.
• The Three Hundredth Spear: Increase the damage of Weapon Throw and Ancient Spear by 150-200%. The attack speed of Weapon Throw is increased by 200%.
• Skular’s Salvation: Increase the damage of Ancient Spear by 150-200%. If your Ancient Spear – Boulder Toss hits 5 or fewer enemies, the damage is increased by 100%.

Crusader

• Thorns of the Invoker: The attack speed of Punish and Slash are increased by 100% and deal 67,500% of your Thorns damage.
• Norvald’s Fervor: Gain 200% increased damage while using Steed Charge and for 5 seconds after it ends.

Monk

• All Mystic Allies spawned by Inna’s Mantra 6-piece bonus now have their duration refreshed with each attack.
• Mystic Ally – Fire Ally: Mini allies now have Passability.
• Mystic Ally – Earth Ally:
  • Earth Ally boulders speed has been increased. Boulders always leash to the player regardless of how many monsters are on screen.
  • Prevented Earth Ally boulders from being slowed by missile dampening.

• Bindings of the Lesser Gods: Enemies hit by your Cyclone Strike take 150%-200% more damage from your Mystic Ally for 5 seconds.

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Bug Fixes | 2.7.3

• Prevented players from changing difficulty while an Echoing Nightmare is active.
• Fixed a bug where Boon of the Hoarder allowed gold to drop in Echoing Nightmares.
• Fixed a bug where Orek’s Dream vignette sometimes goes away on Shrouded Moors and Festering Woods when entering anything other than level 1.
• Fixed a bug that caused Orek’s Dream opening VFX to display inconsistently.