Here we check out the D2R 2.6 Patch Notes and talk about all changes of runewords, terror zones, class skills, and gameplay coming to Ladder Season 3!

D2R 2.6 Patch Notes & Changes - Diablo 2 Resurrected Ladder Season 3 Update

Update 2.6 will roll out on February 15 on Diablo II: Resurrected. It is preparing for the launch of Tournament Season 3 on February 17 in Europe, which will add eight new Runic Words. Several changes will also be made to the Zones of Terror, alongside several improvements to the quality of life. Find all the details in the full patch notes below.

D2R Ladder Season 3 Launch Time

• North America - February 16, 5:00 p.m. PST

• Europe - February 17, 2:00 a.m. CET

• Asia - February 17, 10:00 a.m. KST

Withdraw Your Wanted The Ladder Items from Season 2

Ladder season 3 will begin on February 16th at 8 pm for us Eastern players, they give us a friendly reminder here about the shared stash, so make sure if you have any latter season one items still kicking around that you want to keep, you take those items out they're going to be deleted.

New Ladder-Only Runewords Changes from PTR

Previously the armor version of Hustle was rather forgettable but they have increased the faster run walk speed, added 40% increased attack speed. And the plus six to evade will force players to make a decision do you want to teleport around with Enigma or do you want to have a chance to completely evade your opponent's attacks ,that's also going to be very interesting on an evade sorceress. To the weapon version of Hustle, they reduced this to a level one burst of speed proc which is very underwhelming, but they've also added a level one fanaticism Aura that will boost up attack rating, damage, and attack speed. 

Hustle

Armor:

• +65% Faster Run/Walk

• +40% Increased Attack Speed

• +20% Faster Hit Recovery

• +6 to Evade

• +10 to Dexterity

• 50% Slower Stamina Drain

• +All Resistances +10

Weapon:

• 5% Chance to cast level 1 Burst of Speed on striking

• Level 1 Fanaticism Aura

• +30% Increased Attack Speed

• +180-200% Enhanced Damage

• +75% Damage to Undead

• +50 to Attack Rating against Undead

• +10 to Dexterity

Cure

• Level 1 Cleansing Aura when Equipped

• +20% Faster Hit Recovery

• +75-100% Enhanced Defense

• +10 to Vitality

• Increase Maximum Life 5%

• Poison Resist +40-60%

• Poison Length Reduced by 50%

Hearth

• +20% Faster Hit Recovery

• +75-100% Enhanced Defense

• +10 to Vitality

• Increase Maximum Life 5%

• Cold Resist +40-60%

• Cold Absorb +10-15%

• Cannot be Frozen

Metamorphosis

• Werewolf strikes grant Mark for 180 seconds

• Mark of the Wolf:

  +30% Bonus to Attack Rating

  Increase Maximum Life 40%

• Werebear strikes grant Mark for 180 seconds

• Mark of the Bear:

  +25% Attack Speed

  Physical Damage Received Reduced by 20%

• +5 to Shape Shifting Skills (Druid only)

• +25% Chance of Crushing Blow (No longer attached to Mark of the Bear)

• +50-80% Enhanced Defense

• +10 to Strength

• +10 to Vitality

• All Resistances +10

• Cannot be Frozen

Mosaic

• +50% chance for finishing moves to not consume charges

• When a finisher is executed this way, it now refreshes the expiration timer of the stack

• +2 to Martial Arts (Assassin only)

• +20% Increased Attack Speed

• +200-250% Enhanced Damage

• +20% Bonus to Attack Rating

• 7% Life Steal

• +8-15% to Cold Skill Damage

• +8-15% to Lightning Skill Damage

• +8-15% to Fire Skill Damage

• Adds 3-14 Cold Damage

• Prevent Monster Heal

Horadric Cube Recipes 

Additionally, we can now make Ladder Season 1 Runewords and use the Ladder season 1 Horadic Cube recipes in non-latter. This was actually a change that they talked about in the launch of the first ladder season and it looks like they've finally carried it through.

• Exceptional Version of Set Weapon: 1 Ral Rune + 1 Sol Rune + 1 Perfect Emerald + Normal Set Weapon 

• Elite Version of Set Weapon: 1 Lum Rune + 1 Pul Rune + 1 Perfect Emerald + Exceptional Set Weapon

• Exceptional Version of Set Armor: 1 Tal Rune + 1 Shael Rune + 1 Perfect Diamond + Normal Set Armor

• Elite Version of Set Armor: 1 Ko Rune + 1 Lem Rune + 1 Perfect Diamond + Exceptional Set Armor

Sundering Charms & Terror Zones in Single Player

They also made it so Sunder charms can now be dropped in single player, Terror zones are now available in offline games. 

New Terror Zones

They have upgraded some of these Terror zones and we do believe some of these are some good changes.  They've added the Underground Passage to Dark Wood,  The Hole to Black Marsh, Barracks to the Jail, and more areas can now be terrorized, all these are very good changes.

ACT 1

• Blood Moor and Den of Evil

• Cold Plains and The Cave

• Burial Grounds, The Crypt, and the Mausoleum

• Stony Field

• Dark Wood/Underground Passage

• Black Marsh/The Hole

• The Forgotten Tower

• Jail/Barracks

• Cathedral and Catacombs

• The Pit

• Tristram

• Moo Moo Farm

ACT 2

• Sewers

• Rocky Waste and Stony Tomb

• Dry Hills and Halls of the Dead

• Far Oasis

• Lost City, Valley of Snakes, and Claw Viper Temple

• Ancient Tunnels

• Arcane Sanctuary

• Tal Rasha's Tombs

ACT 3

• Spider Forest and Spider Cavern

• Great Marsh

• Flayer Jungle and Flayer Dungeon

• Kurast Bazaar, Ruined Temple, and Disused Fane

• Kurast Sewers

• Travincal

• Durance of Hate

ACT 4

• Outer Steppes and Plains of Despair

• River of Flame/City of the Damned

• Chaos Sanctuary

ACT 5

• Bloody Foothills/Frigid Highlands/Abbadon

• Glacial Trail/Drifter Cavern

• Crystalline Passage and Frozen River

• Arreat Plateau/Pit of Acheron

• Nihlathak's Temple, Halls of Anguish, Halls of Pain, and Halls of Vaught

• Ancient's Way and Icy Cellar

• Worldstone Keep, Throne of Destruction, and Worldstone Chamber

Also, there are more bug fixes to Terror Zones:

• Fixed Terrorized treasure classes for certain super-unique monsters and bosses.

• Fixed an issue where an act boss's quest treasure class would sometimes be used instead of the terrorized treasure class.

• Fixed an issue where the current terrorized zone was not properly marked in the Waypoint menu while using Legacy Graphics.

• Fixed an issue with translations that appear when The Pit is the current terrorized zone.

D2R Class Skill Changes

Assassin

• The Assassin's trap skills now benefit from -% to Enemy Resistance.

• Fixed an issue where missiles created from Martial Arts charge up skills would not gain the benefit of +% To Elemental Skill Damage modifiers.

The Assassin's trap skills now benefits from -% to enemy resistance, finally Griffin's eye we actually have a use on the Assassin besides just the 25 faster cast for dual claw synths. They buffed the Amazon here too and we actually think some things are flying under the radar with this they fixed an issue where strafe was not applying bonus attack rating to attacks, fixed an issue where strafe was still doing 75 weapon damage after a previous balance change, this is to say that they updated this in a previous patch but the damage was not actually being reflected. 

Amazon

• Fixed an issue where Strafe was not applying bonus Attack Rating to attacks.

• Fixed an issue where Strafe was still doing 75% weapon damage after a previous balance change.

• Fixed issue where the +% Attack Rating on Power Strike was not being applied.

• Fixed the tooltip for Multi Shot to reflect the synergy bonus.

To Amazons, they did put something here fix the tooltip for multi-shot to reflect the Synergy bonus, so it's possible that worked the other way around as well. 

Sorceress

• Cold Mastery is now applied at 1/5 effectiveness after an immunity is broken.

• Fixed an issue where Fire Mastery's bonus to fire skill damage didn't apply to the additional fire damage granted by Enchant on ranged weapons.

• Updated the tooltip for Enchant to better reflect the skill's effects.

Cold Mastery is now applied at one-fifth Effectiveness after immunity is broken, the developers say we wanted to bring cold Mastery in line with all other skill-based Elemental resistance-reducing effects for increased consistency. Truthfully we think they just need to make Cold Mastery work like all the other masteries instead of making yet another exception here to the Cold Mastery skill, this is something that even PVP players are screaming for while people weren't necessarily screaming for it in PVM after the introduction of sunder charms. We think if you're going to make a change like this to nerf it any way you should probably just go in the correct direction with it.

Druid

• Fixed an underlying issue that caused the Druid's Shockwave skill to do an unintended amount of damage.

To Druid, they fixed the Shockwave Druid, they say we wanted to implement targeted changes and Buffs for the Druid instead of having a particular Druid build be strong because of a bug, that's a very interesting thing to say from the new Devs. We'd be surprised if there wasn't a lot of Kickback about this here because the Shockwave Druid still wasn't really the the top version of a druid, in fact a bit of history in previous LOD patches the hammerdin - it wasn't supposed to have Hammer damage amplified by the concentration Aura but it was so cool when it happened and players absolutely loved the build and there was so much Kickback when they fixed that, that they ended up reverting the changes so that the hammerdin is what it is today.

More Gemaplay Updates and Bug Fixes

Dupe Method Nerfed

They might have fixed the Dupe method with this one - if they fixed an issue where the shared stash could exceed the memory limit which caused items in the player's inventory or stash to be deleted. Alternatively if you removed items from a seasonal shared stash, it would actually work in the opposite and sometimes, the memory would be overloaded so much that it would actually forget server side that you took that item out of the ladder shared stash that was how the dupe method worked.

Modding

• Moved the "% Damage Synergy" field for Multiple Shot (srvdofunc 8) from calc4 to calc5.

• New columns have been added. Developers of existing offline single-player mods can remake their changes with the new data, or they can add the new columns manually before merging.

If you go down to the modding section all the way at the bottom, you can see some of the changes that they've made that they've sort of thrown in this section. They moved the percent damage Synergy field for multi-shot from calc 4 to calc 5, basically the difference between some of these levels is that it applies the damage on the character screen but not in actual application. So the fact that they're doing this for modding down here on multi-shot tells us  that we might have actually inherently got some sort of update to multi-shot that wasn't talked about either, it's possible that multi-shot damage was not being applied properly and only being displayed on the character screen. 

Controller

• Fixed an issue where skills granted by charges on a character’s alternate slot weapon would have their bound hotkeys unusable when loading into a game.

• Fixed an issue where the Loot to Cube skill would not function if bound to the shared interaction button.

General

• Fixed an issue where pressing the hotkey to open the inventory while loading into the game could cause the inventory UI to appear empty.

• Fixed an issue where the Shared Stash could exceed the memory limit, which caused items in the player's inventory or Stash to be deleted.

• Fixed an issue where the tooltip on the Lobby's season dropdown would show an inaccurate date.

• Fixed an issue where new entries on the leaderboard could display as Unknown.

• Fixed an issue where applying changes to controls would automatically close the settings menu.

• Fixed an issue where changes to controls would not be immediately applied.

• Fixed an issue where swapping between keyboard and mouse input and controller input would reset the difficulty filter in the PC Lobby game list.

• Added an appropriate error message when trying to create an online character with a name that is already taken on the player's online character list.

• The Ladder flag in character creation will now be disabled when there is no active Ladder Season.

• Fixed an issue with a voice over line from Tyrael in Chinese.

• Fixed an issue with the Chinese version of Deckard Cain's Stay a while and listen voice over dialogue.