D2R 2.6 Patch Notes & Ladder Season 3 Guide: Release Date, Runewords, Sunders, Terror Zones & Changes

The final Diablo 2 Resurrected 2.6 patch notes have come out, and the new Ladder season is on the way. What can you expect from the D2R 2.6 Ladder 3 reset? In this D2R 2.6 and Ladder 3 reset guide, we talk about the release date and changes for runewords, sunder charms, and terror zones.

D2R Patch 2.6 Updates & Changes - Diablo 2 Resurrected 2.6 PTR, Ladder 3 Start & Reset

On February 16, Patch 2.6 for Diablo 2 Resurrected will go live, giving players more chances to quickly level up and accumulate potent D2R items. There are going to be new rune words for this Ladder season 3. They did in fact confirm that all of the Ladder from last season would be available for the non-Ladder players. They did confirm that offline characters will have access to Terror Zones and Sunder Charms now which is coming in 2.6. If you want to know about the final D2R 2.6 patch notes, keep reading.

D2R Ladder Season 3 Release Date

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

D2R 2.6 & Ladder 3 Runewords

Cure

First off, they added a cleansing aura to the Cure helmet which is pretty powerful and has a lot of interesting repercussions. We're going to see a lot of people using that helmet now.

Hearth

They did not touch Ground but they did add cannot be frozen to the Hearth helmet.

Hustle

They did not touch the Temper helmets, they did some sweeping changes to the Hustle rune word, both in its armor form and in its weapon form. The armored form had 65% run walk, 40% increased attack speed and all resistance is 10 added to it as well as a plus 6 evade o skill, which if you're not aware is the Amazon skill that allows you to dodge not only melee and ranged attacks but also spells while moving. 

This allows you to get a pretty decent level of evade up to about 50% evasion with relative ease, which has put the Hustle armor in a very interesting position as far as melee and range characters. Because it offers some just pretty sexy options there in terms of survivability. The evasion o skill also is probably going to have some pretty wide-sweeping effects on the PVP Community.

The D2R weapon has been changed pretty dramatically to change it from a buff stick into something that you would actually want to put on a character. What they've done is reduce the level of a burst of speed on striking because they did not like that people were only going to use it as a buff stick and they added in level one fanaticism aura as well. So that now it has fanaticism and level one burst of speed on striking, together, which is a very interesting way to change the weapon. 

This changes it into a weapon that we will probably see a lot on mercenaries as well as players for the free fanaticism Aura. As of right now, there are only two ways to get your hands on fanaticism aura which is the Faith bow or the Beast ax, and neither of which is particularly cheap. But this one coming in at a Ko rune offers literally fanaticism aura for the dirt cheap price of a Ko rune. They also upped the enhanced damage from 150% to 200%, so to make it a little bit more of an interesting choice as far as a weapon goes.

Mosaic

The Mosaic rune word has seen some pretty sweeping D2R Patch 2.6 PTR changes as well. Most notable is the change from a 25% chance for finishing moves not to consume charges of 250 which means that we can now reach 100% with the two. Also, they've added in, when a finisher is executed in this way, it now refreshes the expiration timer of the stack of combo charges, which means that the combo charges will no longer expire. On top of this, they also added in some other juicy tidbits like life steal, cold skill, lightning skill, and fire skill damage from 8 to 15%.

Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis werewolf helmet didn't really get very many changes. They did increase the attack rating on the mark of the wolf from 20 to 30%. They also separated the crushing blow out so that it's no longer attached to the mark of the bear apparently it's just flat on the helmet.

D2R Patch 2.6 Sunder Charms

Sundering Charms in Diablo 2 Ladder 3 can now drop from fallen foes in all non-classic game modes.

D2R 2.6 & Ladder 3 Terror Zones

D2R 2.6 Patch made changes to Terror Zones. Terror Zones are now available in offline games. Offline Terror Zones will operate on a different schedule from their online counterpart but function the same otherwise. You can now receive sundering charms as a drop in offline Terror Zone games too. They took away Kurast Sewers since everybody hated them. Now, we are going to look at some new Diablo 2 Resurrected Terror Zones 2.6 have added in season 3

1. The Underground Passage (Act 1)

2. Black Marsh (Act 1)

3. The Hole (Act 1)

4. Barracks (Act 1)

5. Ancient Tunnels (Act 2)

6. Great Marsh (Act 3)

7. Frigid Highlands (Act 5)

8. Abaddon (Act 5)

9. Drifter Cavern (Act 5)

10. Pit of Acheron (Act 3)

D2R 2.6 & Ladder 3 Changes

1. The Flickering Flames' resist fire aura no longer overwrites the paladins-based resistance. They also fixed the Paladin's blessed aim aura from overwriting the Amazon penetrate skill, so big the buff there to the Amazons.

2. The Assassins got a huge buff in the form of the trap skills and will now benefit from negative enemy lightning resistance or fire resistance depending on which trap you're using. Fixed an issue where missiles created from martial arts charge-up skills would not be gaining the benefit of the plus to Elemental skill damage modifiers, that's a big one for the Mosaic rune word.

3. The Amazon saw probably the most sweeping changes after the D26 Patch 2.6 PTR which is strafe was finally fixed, so the attack rating works with it. The strafe weapon damage was finally fixed so it actually does its correct damage output. The attack rating on power strike was fixed and also multi-shot now has an updated tooltip.

4. Sorceress has got a pretty big buff and a pretty big nerf at the same time. Cold Mastery is now applied at one-fifth effectiveness after immunity is broken. This means that even if you have something like 240% cold mastery versus a monster that was immune despite them being broken, it will now only deal out 20% of its total effectiveness. If you had 240% cold mastery, it would be something like 48 negatives to the monster, which is still a pretty impressive amount of negative resistance and could help you kill the target. But it's not going to be as crazily overpowered as it was before, which is where you had a cold sorceress running around breaking everything down to negative 100%. Looks like the cold sorceress’ day in the sun is over.

Another thing that is a buff was they fixed an issue where fire mastery's bonus to the fire skill damage didn't apply to the additional fire damage granted by Enchant on ranged weapons. So there is a specific build for the Sorceress known as the Enchant Bow Scorc. What you would do is enchant yourself and spread this fire damage through the exploding arrow skill to do massive amounts of AOE damage. The problem with this is that, apparently, fire Mastery was never applying its bonus to the fire damage that was being added by enchant to the bow. This means that those Enchant Bow Scorc are now basically getting a huge buff. Now that fire mastery is actually going to be applied to those effects, that means that the Enchant Bow Sorc may actually be overpowered at this point.

5. Another big change is the Druid. The Druid Shockwave skill was in fact a bug and they fixed it in the D2R 2.6.