Every Diablo IV Season Ranked

Diablo IV is on its thirteenth season, Season of Reckoning, which started at the end of April and runs to the end of June. That’s enough history to see the shape of the thing, and the shape is this: one season rebuilt the game, a handful built on it well, and the rest have been content refreshes wearing different mechanics.

Ranking them by how much they mattered rather than by theme.

The one that changed everything

Season 4: Loot Reborn

May 2024, and still the dividing line. Before it, Diablo IV had an itemisation problem so severe that the loot itself was the complaint: hundreds of items with marginal affix differences, most of which went straight to the vendor. Loot Reborn tore out the affix system, cut item complexity, introduced tempering and masterworking, and made drops feel like they were worth reading.

Nothing since has come close to that scale of change, and everything since has been built on the foundation it laid. If you dropped the game before Season 4 and haven’t been back, this is the update that makes it worth reconsidering.

Genuinely good

Season 2: Blood

The first season to feel confident. Vampiric powers gave build variety that the first season didn’t, and the accompanying patch fixed movement speed, resistances and the endgame boss ladder. This is where the game stopped feeling like it was apologising.

Season 5: Infernal Hordes

Added the first genuinely good endgame activity. A wave-based, risk-and-reward mode with meaningful decisions between rounds, and it has stayed in the game as permanent content, which is the highest compliment available for a seasonal mechanic.

Season 7: Witchcraft

The strongest seasonal power system so far. Witch powers were flexible enough to reshape existing builds rather than replacing them, which is the difference between a mechanic you use and one you tolerate. The Headhunt zones gave it a clear activity loop.

Solid but unremarkable

Season 6: Hatred Rising

Carried by the Vessel of Hatred expansion launching alongside it rather than by its own content. The Spiritborn class, the new region and the level squish were the story. As a season in isolation, thin, and it ran long at over a hundred days to accommodate the expansion.

Season 9: Sins of the Horadrim

Competent, well structured, and difficult to remember much about a year later. That isn’t a criticism exactly. Most seasons in a game like this should be competent and forgettable.

Season 11: Divine Intervention

A long season, running December through to March, with a decent power fantasy and enough quality of life work underneath to justify the length.

Season 13: Reckoning

The current one, and it’s still early to judge properly. What is clear is that it’s doing more with the endgame progression than the last few, and it arrived after an unusually short predecessor.

The weak ones

Season 8: Belial’s Return

Boss ladder restructuring that mostly rearranged existing content, with a seasonal mechanic that failed to justify itself. The boss fight at the centre of it was good. The route to it wasn’t.

Season 10: Infernal Chaos

Leaned on modifiers and difficulty stacking rather than new systems. Fine if you were already deep in the endgame, and offered very little reason for a lapsed player to return.

Season 12: Slaughter

Notable mainly for being short. At 48 days it was roughly half the normal length, functioning as a bridge to a larger update rather than a season in its own right, and it felt exactly like that.

Season 3: The Construct

The low point. A companion pet you managed rather than played with, a dungeon type that was widely disliked, and a seasonal mechanic that added maintenance rather than power. Blizzard’s own retrospectives have been fairly candid about it.

Season 1: The Malignant

Ranked last for context rather than content. It followed a launch patch that nerfed almost everything, arrived with a mechanic that required constant inventory management, and set expectations for seasonal content that took a year to recover from.

What has not changed

The seasonal structure itself. Every three months, a new character, a new mechanic, a battle pass, and the same campaign skip. That loop works for people who enjoy rebuilding a character from scratch and does nothing for people who want their existing one to matter.

The endgame still resolves into running the same handful of activities at increasing difficulty tiers. Seasons have added variety to that rotation without changing its nature, and thirteen seasons in, that looks like a design choice rather than a work in progress.