Diablo 3 Season 17 now live, giving players a three-month long buff

Diablo 3's Season 17 went live on Friday, adding three new Torment difficulty levels to the game and giving every player the powerful Legacy of Nightmares buff, which encourages you to build around your ancient items.

The buff, usually granted for wearing two specific rings, increases your attack power by a huge 750% for every ancient item equipped and reduces incoming damage by 4%. The catch is that you cannot have any other item set bonus active. The idea, therefore, is that "every Ancient Legendary you find is that much more valuable", Blizzard said in the patch notes.

If you're using an existing Legacy of Nightmare build, you now have free ring slots, which allows you to experiment with new combinations. "Meanwhile, classes traditionally dependent on a heavy amount of survivability from their ring slots have more freedom to experiment with build-changing Legendaries that don’t rely on a Class Set," the developer said.

You'll be able to try out your new builds in three new Torment levels—14, 15 and 16. Blizzard has bumped up the drop rates for rewards in these Torment levels since the PTR version went out, so you can expect more juicy loot in this full version.

The patch also adds some quality of life changes such as a search bar for your stash, which is handy. You can read the full list of changes, including bug fixes and balancing changes, in the patch notes.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.