In the meantime, Blizzard is hard at work on the 2.3 update for Diablo II: Resurrected, which should be available by the end of the month. An action/skill bar (which will make use of the entire function key range) has been added as one of the most significant new features, which will eliminate the need to constantly swap abilities when playing with both a keyboard and a mouse. The fact that the development team is taking player feedback into consideration is fantastic. This is one of the primary reasons I prefer to play with a controller (skills can be assigned to buttons), so it's great to see them doing so with cheap D2R items.
Diablo II: Resurrection players had immediate access to up to 12 buttons as soon as we added support for controllers for the game. Activating and using an ability is instantaneous when a player presses any of the face buttons or triggers that they have assigned to a specific ability. Additionally, in Diablo III, this method is employed, and it has since become the de facto standard for most controller interfaces in action role-playing games over the last several years.
As a result of the overwhelming amount of feedback we've received from the community, we've decided to include this feature for both keyboard and mouse play. The community has expressed a strong desire for this approach, and we are eager to meet that demand. We were initially hesitant to take this approach because we were concerned it would diverge too far from the original experience.
Active Skill Bindings is a new bar that players can use in place of the traditional skill bar, which is a welcome change. This will display an additional bar at the bottom of the screen, in addition to and beyond the standard Heads-Up Display. There are a total of 16 skills that can be assigned to that additional bar (although the tooltip indicates F1–F8). If the Quick Cast Skills feature is enabled, pressing these buttons will immediately activate the abilities, rather than simply remapping the right and left mouse buttons to the abilities as is the case currently.
With the addition of NVIDIA DLSS support, Diablo II: Resurrected will also receive a visual upgrade, which will no doubt improve performance for those who wish to play the game in 4K.
As a result, according to Blizzard, significant progress has been made in addressing server issues, with players now having to wait an average of less than 60 seconds to enter Sanctuary and be able to start playing the game
Aside from that, the team is working on creating a Public Test Realm (PTR) environment, similar to that of Diablo III, in order to thoroughly test upcoming updates
As for the future, we can expect to see more features that enhance the overall quality of life, as well as some game changers thrown in for good measure
