The recent Diablo Immortal Shadow War, offer sizable bonuses as performance rewards.
At the end of each Cycle of Strife, players are awarded a Deeds of Valor badge based on their performance in that cycle. The rewards for these vary depending upon whether you are a standard adventurer, part of the Diablo Immortal Immortals faction. At their lowest, a badge can provide a player with a 2% buff to their health and damage, but the top level badge for the highest-performing Immortals awards 20% additional health and damage.
Badges last for a limited period of time – usually for around a month – and you can equip up to three of them at once to apply their bonuses to your character. They're also notable because, unlike other stat bonuses such as resonance, they can't simply be increased by spending money to get your hands on additional Diablo Immortal legendary gems. They also factor in more than simply how strong you are, with your activities and participation level taken into when determining your badge for a given cycle.
Deeds of Valor badges aren't currently mentioned in the patch notes about server transfers. The rules do note that a character will be disbanded from their clan and their faction set to Adventurer, with leaderboard rankings removed, but there's no note on badges and it does state that "progress in achievements and Battleground rating will be retained." As such, one player by the name of JasonPH5 was surprised to find that their badges had gone after the transfer, leaving them down 25,000 HP by their count.
Players note that there is some logic to this given that they haven't achieved anything in their new server's Cycle of Strife, but say that "Blizzard absolutely should have given a heads up on this if it's not a bug." One comment speculates that Blizzard must have forgotten about the mechanic altogether, with some others noting that several bugs have been present since launch causing players to not get their badges correctly.
There has already been much talk about the Deeds of Valor – while players generally seem to appreciate that there's a sizable stat bonus that can be earned simply by playing and grinding rather than spending real money, it has often been held up as one reason Diablo Immortal players feel like they can't take a break from the game. The time-limited nature of the badges means that if they expire while you're away for a few weeks, you'll have to slowly grind them back over the course of several more (without having active ones to help you).
Our free PC game worrying how long they might be waiting for a max-rank gem.