Diablo 4 Is Completely Changing How It Handles Difficulty, Taking A Page From Diablo 3

Diablo 4 will receive some huge changes alongside its Vessel of Hatred expansion, changes that include a complete restructuring of the game’s difficulty system and its endgame.

As revealed during a recent (very lengthy) livestream, Blizzard has announced World Tiers, Diablo 4’s current difficulty system, will be removed. In their place will be a system that is much more similar to Diablo 3. Players will journey through Normal, Hard, Expert, and Penitent difficulty before reaching the start of the endgame at Torment 1 difficulty. Each difficulty will see players earn additional XP and gold.

Unlocking the new Torment difficulties will be tied directly to progressing through the Pit endgame activity introduced in the game’s Loot Reborn update earlier this year. There will be four Torment difficulties in total, with each difficulty representing a significant increase in challenge. Players will only be able to unlock Torment 1 after conquering Pit Tier 20, after which subsequent difficulties will be unlocked every 15 Pit Tiers. The highest level of the Pit will be Tier 100, but each tier will be more challenging than in the current version of the game.

Torment difficulty will be where players start to find the best items. Sacred items will be removed entirely, while Ancestral items are being reworked to only drop at Torment difficulties and to be more rare. However, they will also be much more powerful, as they will have a guaranteed Greater Affix stat and feature more potent Legendary powers. Higher Torment tiers will reward more Ancestral items, rewarding players who push the game’s highest difficulties.

Blizzard said the game’s difficulty changes are to make Diablo 4 feel more consistent across its various content, instead of the difficulty varying wildly in the current version of the game depending on what endgame activity you are pursuing.

The difficulty changes will go hand-in-hand with upcoming changes to leveling and the Paragon system in Diablo 4. The level cap come Update 2.0 will be reduced to 60 (down from 100), while Paragon points unlocked through leveling will be shared across all characters on a realm i.e., the Eternal, Hardcore, and Seasonal realms. As players predicted, this will coincide with a numbers value squish for damage and health, making the game more readable instead of bosses having trillions of health and players dealing billions of damage.

Players will actually be able to earn more Paragon points come the update, but there will be a five Paragon board limit. Blizzard said this change is to encourage players to fill out each board more, instead of simply rushing to each Glyph node. Each class will receive a new board, and each existing board will be rebalanced accordingly.

With the release of Vessel of Hatred, Paragon Glyphs will be upgraded by doing the Pit instead of Nightmare dungeons (which will instead reward Masterwork materials). Instead of an XP system used to level up Glyphs, it will instead be a chance or fail system, where players will have a guaranteed chance to upgrade their Glyph if completing a Pit tier 10 levels or more higher than the Glyph’s current level and a less than 100% chance when completing lower level Pit tiers. Glyphs will have a new max rank of 100, and will see a radius increase at rank 15 and 46. Rank 46 will also upgrade the Glyph to a Legendary Glyph, after which it will gain a powerful, multiplicative stat bonus.

All of those changes will be in addition to Vessel of Hatred’s new class, the Spiritborn, new skills for each class, the return of Mercenaries, the addition of runewords from Diablo 2, and a new group-based endgame dungeon, the Dark Citadel. Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred releases October 8.