You may have missed this in the midst of all the exciting content coming to Diablo 4 with Season 7 – the PTR for which starts next week, but Blizzard does have bonuses planned for Vessel of Hatred owners.
This goes for Season 7, which kicks off in late January, as well as future seasons. Assuming the developer isn’t hiding any last-minute surprises, however, the bonus is, well, not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.
This trend actually started with Season of Hatred Rising, Diablo 4’s currently-active season. Diablo 4 introduced the concept of Runewords with the start of that season, but the feature was (and remains) only available to players who own Vessel of Hatred.
The concept of Runes isn’t entirely new to Diablo, of course. Like a few things in Diablo 4, it was borrowed from Diablo 2. Runewords are socketable gems that require a condition to be met for their effects to be triggered. Many of the few that currently exist in the game allow certain previously class-exclusive skills to be activated by other classes.
Now that Season 7’s whole deal has been revealed, we know that more Runewords (and Runes) will be introduced to the loot pool. Once again, they’re going to be exclusive to owners of Vessel of Hatred.
This obviously isn’t accidental. Indeed, Diablo boss Rod Fergusson told Polygon that the plan is to continue offering bonuses of this nature to anyone who bought the expansion. Fergusson didn’t directly reference Runewords in the interview, so it’s possible more rewards are on the way, though I don’t imagine Blizzard would want to widen the gap between owners and non-owners of the expansion.
The bigger reason one would want to buy Vessel of Hatred, of course, should be what’s actually included in the expansion, such as the (currently meta-breaking) Spiritborn class, the new explorable zone, the game’s first raid, and of course all the narrative content.
Blizzard will very likely host one last livestream prior to the launch of Season 7 to clarify any remaining details, but don’t count on much being kept under wraps. The patch 2.1 PTR will, for the first time, also include seasonal content.