Diablo 4 season 5's return to hell supercharges its most overlooked loot to game-breaking levels

Although Blizzard's sweeping changes to loot in Diablo 4's last season successfully revitalized the action RPG, there was one problem: An entire tier of loot was rendered more or less obsolete. The unique items with the most creative effects, like a wand that teleports sorcerers to random locations, couldn't compete with the renewed power of normal legendary items.

In season 5, which starts next week, Blizzard has taken every single unique in Diablo 4 and boosted their power. The goal, it says, is for unique items to rival Diablo 4's ultra-rare 'uber' uniques, for the specific build they enable. When these items drop in season 5, you're going to be tempted to wrap your entire build around them.

The few uniques Blizzard has shown (and catalogued by Wowhead) look absurdly powerful compared to what they were before. Here are a few examples:

• Howl from Below (necromancer): Now boosts the speed and damage of corpse explosion instead of giving you a small chance to stun and fear enemies
• Staff of Lam Esen (sorcerer): Now adds a 75% chance for charged bolts to cast twice instead of a tiny critical strike damage increase
• Saboteur's Signet (rogue): Now causes bigger and more powerful grenade explosions instead of giving you a little more health and damage
• Fields of Crimson (barbarian): Now increases the size of rupture's explosion and boosts your damage against bleeding enemies instead of a small damage increase 
• Greatstaff of the Crone (druid): Now causes storm strike to always hit two enemies for heavy damage instead of giving you a few small damage increases

The new stats on uniques mirror some of the ones you can now add onto your legendary gear with Diablo 4's new tempering system. Uniques aren't customizable, however, which lets Blizzard curate what kind of powerful stats it wants to give you. And with masterworking upgrades, you can raise these bonuses way higher than their base values, incentivizing you to find a way to work them into your build.

'Uber' uniques—now known as mythic uniques—are changing too, and Blizzard's season 5 blog post gave us a peek at what's changing with the most sought-after one. The coveted Harlequin Crest, known by its Diablo 2 name "shako" in the community, has had its most powerful stat almost tripled. Lucky players who find the helmet will have a baseline 20% cooldown reduction for every skill they use, which can then be raised up to 54% with masterworking—a number so ridiculously high that I almost don't believe it's real. But since regular uniques are getting stronger this season, it makes sense for the rarest items in the game to jump up in power too.

Blizzard is also introducing a new wave-based roguelite dungeon called Infernal Hordes in season 5, which will be a permanent addition to Diablo 4's buffet of endgame activities. Infernal Hordes are sort of like playing Hades if it took place in one hellish room: You fight waves of demons with the option to make them harder to improve your rewards at the end. Die too many times and the run is over. Infernal Hordes are the centerpiece of season 5 and will be the main source of over 50 new legendary and unique items Blizzard is adding to the game.

The Season of the Infernal Hordes starts next week on August 6 and will run right up until the release of the Vessel of Hatred expansion on October 8, making it one month shorter than the previous seasons.