Diablo 4's upcoming Lord of Hatred expansion will address the long-running issue of overpowered builds from a new angle. Instead of countering those builds with nerfs, which everyone hates, Blizzard is adding a whopping eight new Torment, or difficulty tiers, in an attempt to give players a better excuse for their stupidly overpowered characters.
The news was quietly revealed in a recent interview with YouTuber Wudijo, in which associate game director Zaven Haroutunian explains the reasoning for adding so many new Torment tiers beyond the current four. "Big numbers feel cool, they feel good for players to get. Just, you know, 'oh I got an upgrade, it's a very clear step up in my power progression' ... is the game actually asking you to have numbers that need to be that high to begin with?"
The problem comes down to, in Haroutunian's words, when players feel like they're just "getting numbers higher" without "actually meaningfully changing" how they play the game. Basically, bringing the Torment tier up to 12 is Blizzard's answer to the Diablo 4 player asking these questions: "'What do I do with these numbers, what do I do with the power I get?'"
Haroutunian did clarify that that the difficulty level in the highest Torment tier still won't be higher than the most challenging level of The Pit of the Artificers, so this is more about letting maxed-out endgame players feel some sort of challenge outside of the Pit.
"So we're not actually inflating the numbers past the current ceiling, what we're actually doing is saying, 'hey, all these activities, all of this content, can be competitive so you're not just stuck in this one place at the very end of the game," he says, adding that the top-level Torment tier "goes right up to the edge" of the toughest Pit difficulty.
Talking to PC Gamer, director of systems Colin Finer and game designer Aislyn Hall lay out Blizzard's thinking on progressing through these new Torment tiers.
"Philosophically where we want to go is difficulty is something you opt into risk/reward-wise, and that's where the meta progression steps in," Finer says. "You can think of torment as your floor—you're going to constantly increase that, and that's much more granular now in this 12 torment world, the jumps aren't quite as big."
Meanwhile, Hall says Blizzard wants players to have "a very clear progression through each of them as you're finding all these different additions to your build," warning that the final tier is not for the faint of heart. "It's going to be really fucking hard," says Hall.
I'm more of a Diablo 2 guy these days, but when I do play Diablo 4 it's to wind down at the end of a long day when clicking demons to death sounds more relaxing than pottering around Animal Crossing. That's to say, I am not the target demographic for these updates, but I've also been covering the Diablo beat for long enough to know there are plenty of people who get their kicks by creating utterly broken builds.
For those players, I hope you have a little more to chew on with Lord of Hatred, but something tells me you'll quickly find a way to take the torment out of even the highest Torment tier.
Lord of Hatred, Diablo 4's second expansion, is out April 28.
