...our first big content patch coming out in the next couple of months,

We’re planning to make several bug fixes to Call of the Ancients in patch 2.1 that should address some of the concerns we’ve seen players reporting with the skill. So, make sure you keep a hold of that Immortal Kings set!

• The Ancients should no longer sometimes stand idle when they have foes they could be clobbering instead.

• The Ancients should now use their secondary abilities as indicated on the tooltip.

Again, these bug fixes are currently expected to arrive with patch 2.1, but we don’t have an estimate to share for the date of that patch at this time. Thanks for all of the reports!

I did some digging and found out that these changes will update multiple pets, and not just Call of the Ancients. I’ll go over what those changes are, and what pets it should affect. I also want to emphasize that we don’t have an estimate to share for when we expect patch 2.1, but we’re definitely working on it and are looking to provide a PTR.

We’re making a number improvements to the AI of several pets:

We’re also fixing a number of issues that sometimes prevented some pets from attacking nearby enemies, or caused them to stand still and stop attacking their current target. Pets affected by these changes should include:

• Call of the Ancients
• Companion
• Fetish Army
• Gargantuan
• Mystic Ally
• Phalanx
• Zombie Dogs

Our future goals for the Monk in 2.1.0 focus improving core class attributes, class abilities, and addressing Legendaries that need improvement. You should all be able to see (and test out) these changes soon™ on the 2.1.0 PTR once its live. (Note: Initially, the PTR will not have all the changes we want to do for 2.1.0, but as the PTR progresses, more changes will be added. Also note that we do not have an ETA for the 2.1.0 PTR at this time.)

We also want to let you all know that we will be improving some of the underwhelming Set items. The following Sets will be receiving buffs or redesigns to their full-Set bonuses in 2.1.0 and will be retroactive, so keep those pieces:

• Firebird’s Finery
• Raiment of a Thousand Storms
• Monkey King’s Garb
• Thorns of the Invoker
• The Shadow’s Mantle

Well that's a really good question, isn't it, Wyatt? When you're making a game you come up with a lot of good ideas, and some ideas like Devil's Hand you say: it's awesome, it probably needs to bake a little bit longer. But one of them that we felt was really important, that we felt we really needed to take the proper time to develop it, was one of the features you guys have asked about a lot. You might have noticed that Wyatt and myself have done a lot of research for something called ladders. I'm very happy to say that as part of our first big content patch coming out in the next couple of months, we are going to be releasing Seasons, which will include a ladder-like aspect to them.

Well, we're still working on them, but the general gist is that you'll be able to level up a character, we will have specific ladders for seasons, and also some goodies that will drop along the way. There's more information of that to come, and we're not making an announcement of when, but for sure Seasons are coming to Reaper of Souls. Yeah, the secret is out.

Seasons are a shard of the existing game where everything is a fresh start. You start with a brand new character without access to any of the gold or items you collected with your primary account for the length of the season. We plan on creating brand new, powerful legendaries that only drop within in the season. After the season ends, all of your progress — your experience, your items, your gold, etc. — will be rolled into the main roster. The goal is the fresh-start feeling — so many changes and tweaks have happened since the launch of Diablo III — it is really energizing and fun to recreate that ‘first-moment-in-a-new-game’ feeling. We’ve also added leaderboards. Players can race on a variety of metrics to try to become the leader in their region or the top of their friends and clan lists. That friendly competition angle lends itself really well to Diablo games.

New end game challenges... Josh mentioned that the first content patch is going to have Seasons. I'm happy to announce that there is another major feature coming in the patch 2.1, which is going to be what we're internally calling Tiered Rifts. The idea behind that is an actual challenge scenario, where players do increasingly hard Rifts, to try and see who can get the farthest. The basic mechanics that we have working right now is: you go through the game in Adventure Mode, you do your Bounties, you do a Nephalem Rift. If you clear the Nephalem Rift, there's a chance to get what's called a Greater Rift Token. If you successfully clear the Greater Rift in a certain time limit, then you unlock a Greater Rift Key (Rank 2). If you clear that one, you get Rank 3, etc. Each one is harder than the previous one. Much like Seasons, we're looking at having a leaderboard as well, so you'll be able to compare your progress to the people on your Friends List, your Clan, and the whole region. You'll be able to see who got to the highest Tiered Rift, and what time were they able to obtain on that.

Second is Tiered Rifts. Tiered Rifts are variations on the Nephalem Rifts concept from Reaper of Souls. You have a timer to finish a Rift (kill enough monsters to draw out the boss and slay the boss) and the better you do, the more challenging the level that you get to tackle. For example, if you finished a Tiered Rift in just a few minutes, you’d get to jump ahead to a much harder rift. These will also have unique rewards, custom leaderboards, etc. Tiered Rifts are a new end game activity that offers both challenge and competition but are easy enough for everyone at max level (70) to try.

We don’t have any short term plans at the moment, but we all agree that the socketing game is not super deep and we’ve said so before. We are talking seriously about some legendary gem ideas that will offer new tactical options to players. Stay tuned as we do hope that this design gathers steam.