Diablo 4 Carry Run

Good news! In order to give players a more fresh exploration experience, the developers have added a lot of new mechanics in Diablo 4 Season 8 Belial’s Return, and made major changes to some of the original game content.

The most worth mentioning is the most important challenge for players: Boss encounters. At this stage, Endgame Bosses and Ladder Bosses you have challenged before are classified as Lair Bosses, and you can only start challenging them after entering Torment I.

In order to allow you to quickly get started with your encounters with them after entering the new season and successfully take all the loot, this guide will introduce you to the new Lair Boss system and some combat techniques you can use in it.

Tiers

Now, the bosses you can challenge in D4 are divided into 3 tiers: Initiate, Greater, and Exalted. Their challenge difficulty is gradually increasing, but the rewards they provide to you are also gradually increasing. The following is a list of bosses based on the tiers descriptions provided by the developer.

Initiate Lair Bosses

• Grigoire
• Beast in The Ice
• Varshan
• Lord Zir
• Urivar In Vessel of Hatred DLC

Greater Lair Bosses

• Duriel
• Andariel
• Harbinger of Hatred In Vessel of Hatred DLC

Exalted Lair Bosses: Only Belial

Finding Lair Bosses

Each Lair Boss in Diablo 4 now has its own icon on the map, which you can right-click to teleport to. When you hover over the icon, you will see the name of the boss, the loot list, and the type and number of keys required to unlock the loot.

Encounter Mechanics

The actual content of your encounters with these Lair Bosses hasn’t changed much, except for some minor changes to their damage moves or elemental resistances due to some Legendary Aspects and Uniques added in Diablo 4 Season 8.

The real changes come in the mechanics of how this encounter is initiated and how the loot is obtained. Now, you don’t need to fight them or summon materials to start the encounter. As long as you enter the arena in the dungeon containing the encounter, the encounter will start immediately.

This change in mechanics will make it easier to enter these difficult challenges, making them accessible to all players who meet the level of requirements. But I have to tell you in advance that the biggest impact of this change is that the rewards after the bosses die are greatly reduced.

Not only that, the loot after the bosses die is no longer scattered all over your screen waiting for you to pick it up, but it is placed in a safe called Hoard, which requires Lair Boss Keys to open it and claim all the loot.

Please note that when you are exploring in a group, only when each player has the corresponding type and number of Lair Boss Keys can the Hoard be opened and all rewards claimed. Once everyone has finished picking up, the altar that spawned the bosses will be usable again because the cooldown has been skipped.

These Lair Boss Keys are actually some of the materials used to summon bosses in the first few seasons of Diablo 4, such as Malignant Heart, Living Steel, and Distilled Fear, and so on. But they are now only used to open Hoard.

Stygian Stone, which was very important in the summoning process before, has become an item dropped by these bosses, and they can also be exchanged 1:1 for any loot chest provided by opening Greater Lair Bosses. Here are the number and type of Lair Boss Keys required for each boss.

Varshan

• Required: 12 Malignant Heart
• Drops: Shard of Agony/Stygian Stone

Grigoire

• Required: 12 Living Steel
• Drops: Shard of Agony/Stygian Stone

Beast in the Ice

• Required: 12 Distilled Fear
• Drops: Pincushioned Doll/Stygian Stone

Lord Zir

• Required: 12 Exquisite Blood
• Drops: Pincushioned Doll/Stygian Stone

Urivar (Vessel of Hatred DLC)

• Required: 12 Judicator’s Mask
• Drops: Abhorrent Heart/Stygian Stone

Duriel

• Required: 3 Shard of Agony

Andariel

• Required: 3 Pincushioned Doll

Harbinger of Hatred (Vessel of Hatred DLC)

• Required: 3 Abhorrent Heart

Belial

• Required: 2 Betrayer’s Husk

Also, after you successfully defeat a Lair Boss, there’s a chance you’ll be ambushed by Belial: it uses a mix of blood and poison attacks to deal with extreme damage to you. So spend a lot of Diablo 4 Gold to increase your build’s resistance to these two elements before dealing with bosses, just in case.

And after you defeat Belial that ambushed you, you’ll get a second round of loot from the same boss you just killed, as well as a Betrayer’s Husk that summons Belial’s Exalted form. Since this fight is unpredictable, it’s best to bring extra potions to restore health and mana.

Lair Boss Loot

As you can see from the above list, only Initiate Lair Bosses will drop some keys that can be used to unlock higher tier Lair Bosses Hoards. In addition, the Unique given to you when you first defeat a Lair Boss comes from its unique item pool, and Uniques obtained after completing subsequent challenges have a 50% chance of coming from the universal unique item pool.

If you challenge these bosses in Torment Difficulty 3, you will drop an additional unique item from the regular item pool. And for each additional team member in your team, there is a 33% chance of dropping an additional unique item from its unique item pool. In Torment 4, Lair Boss will provide you with 7 Uniques, one more than in previous seasons.

The above is the description of the changes to bosses in Diablo 4 Season 8 Belial’s Return and the strategies that can be used. I hope that through this guide, you can have a clearer understanding of the changes made by the current developers to these powerful opponents, and successfully defeat them thoroughly through your own efforts to obtain more useful loot. I wish you a happy game!

As the enlightenment of many players to action role-playing games, Diablo 4 has been going further and further on the road of constantly bringing new game content to players, and it will celebrate its second anniversary this fall. At present, D4 Season 8, which will be released on April 29, may give players a very big surprise first.

The theme of this new season is Belial’s Return. As the name suggests, you will face off against Belial, Lord of Lies, a powerful opponent introduced from Diablo 3, and you can find very valuable items from the loot it drops, such as the many Legendary Aspects and Unique Items added in this new season.

Although the developers have already released many announcements about this new season, and there have been multiple leaks on many player communities and social platforms, in this guide, we will give you a comprehensive overview of all the new game content that Diablo 4 Season 8: Belial’s Return will bring, and predict how they will change your exploration.

New Season Story

As with all previous season updates, players will experience an entirely new seasonal story in Diablo 4 Season 8. You must join forces with the two main characters (Seyeena, a retired Vizjerei sorcerer, and Jarius, a self-styled knight of the Cathedral of Light) to unravel the mysteries of the Sanctuary and hunt down Belial.

Although each new season of Diablo 4 will launch a new game story, the story in this season is directly related to your main quest in the entire game, because in the official trailer Belial mentioned the information that Mephisto awakened in human form in Sanctuary, which gives players the opportunity to appreciate the evolution of the story while waiting for the next expansion of Diablo 4.

In fact, this high correlation between the season plot and the main plot makes most players more willing to accept the long gap between expansions, and they are looking forward to the developers linking some of the side stories in the season plot with the expansion or the next season, which will make players feel that each part is weaving a bigger puzzle for the main plot, thereby deepening their interest in exploring it.

Reintroduction And Rework Of Boss

As just introduced, in this new season you will have a final confrontation with the reintroduced Belial, Lord of Lies, a monster with armored claws, three horns, and yellow eyes that glow like lamps. In the console version of Diablo 3, the player’s battle with Belial underwent some major changes in the third stage: the camera angle changed from above to directly in front of the boss.

Although there is no guarantee whether this change will happen in the encounter between this monster and the player in this Diablo 4, I think this battlefield scene without an isometric perspective may scare all players and allow players to immerse themselves in this ultimate showdown.

Note that to start this battle you will need to speak to Stranger next to Waypoint in Kyovashad’s city center to receive a quest log that includes this battle. In addition, you need to have completed all the main campaigns in the game and have a new character in Seasonal Realm.

The most important thing to remember is that you need to spend as much Diablo 4 Gold as possible before taking on Belial so that you have a nearly perfect endgame build that will give you a better chance of winning and fewer deaths in this final encounter.

In addition to the reintroduction of Belial, the developers have also made some improvements to some existing bosses in the game, for example, boss classifications will change from the previous Endgame and Ladder bosses to Initiate, Greater, and Exalted Lair bosses, which will increase in difficulty and rewards.

In addition, the boss summoning materials that have been continued for several seasons will also begin to end. In this season, Lair Boss no longer requires materials such as Duriel Materials or Andariel Materials to summon, making its challenge much easier, but the amount of loot you get, such as D4 Gold after its death will also be reduced accordingly.

Not only that, the loot it offers you will appear in the form of a Hoard, which you need to use the corresponding number of Lair Boss keys to unlock and claim - 12 for Initiate, 3 for Greater, and only 2 for Exalted. And now the locations of these Lair Bosses will also have unique map icons on the mini-map, and you can use the teleport function to directly reach the designated dungeon.

New Mechanic: Boss Powers & Apparition Incursion Event

Of course, Diablo 4’s changes to bosses go far beyond this: now you can gain powers from World, Event, and Lair Bosses after defeating them, including a primary skill that Boss previously used on you and a modifiable modifier.

As far as we know, you can use up to four Boss Powers at once - one primary and three modifiers, all of which enhance your character’s abilities and improve your gameplay experience. While some well-informed action RPG fans will find these mechanics very familiar, it’s still quite shocking when the developers actually show players this mechanic in a cinematic trailer.

In addition, the newly added Apparition Incursion Event, a periodic event, will bring some Apparition monsters with Belial mark into Sanctuary. You need to clear them all, no matter what difficulty level you are at. After you have cleared all the enemies and the progress bar at the bottom of the screen is full, one of 10 Apparition Bosses will appear and challenge you.

New Battle Pass System: Reliquary

After many players complained, the developers finally made a comprehensive change to the battle pass system in Diablo 4. Currently, you can choose the order and type of rewards you want to receive. For example, if you need weapons more, you can unlock Weapons Reliquary first, and then receive your season rewards in order.

In addition, in the subsequent game process, Reliquary may also be associated with IP cooperation and some milestone events to launch some event Reliquary. They may exist for a short time, but their significance is extraordinary.

Since Diablo 4 has made so many changes in Season 8, many players are looking forward to the impact of these changes, including many loyal fans of other similar players. In fact, I really hope that the developers will continue to maintain the frequency of such major updates so that players will gradually become more interested in its next expansion. I wish you a happy game!