Blizzard has released Infernal Shrines on the Americas Server, but has taken Haunted Mines, Garden of Terror and Blackheart's Bay out of rotation. These maps will return to Quick Match and Hero League in a week, and will remain available in Custom matches.
After some delay, Blizzard has now released the hotfix to the Americas servers which will enable the newest map, Infernal Shrines. The other regions, Europe and Asia, will follow suit soon. Infernal Shrines is the second map of the Eternal Conflict and features lore of the Diablo universe. In the map, teams will fight skeletons to win the control of Punishers. These Punishers have different abilities, based on the shrine which they are summoned from. Different from other summoned objectives like the Immortal or the Bone Golem is the fact that these Punishers will sometimes actively pursue the other team's heroes. This dynamic really changes the feel of this map.
In this same hotfix, Blizzard has also temporarily removed three maps from the Quick Match and Hero League map rotation. Blackheart's Bay, Garden of Terror and Haunted Mines will only be available in Custom Games this week, but will return to the other modes after this week ends. The decision to temporarily decrease the map pool is aimed to give players more experience with the new map, since it will be selected as the map more often.
Blizzard has also mentioned several times before that they are focusing a lot of attention on the amount of maps which are playable at any time. Blizzard has said they dont want players to feel overwhelmed with the amount of different maps, and are thus experimenting with ways to reduce this sense of overwhelment.
The new map will probably not be used in European or American tournaments for a while, since the scene has been following a one-week delay rule. But the Asian scene has been known to not wait that long, so we will be on the lookout for the first competitive matches on Infernal Shrines.
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