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Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred Will Expand Torment from 4 Tiers to 12 and Sync with The Pit's Full Ladder

Category: Diablo 4 Posted: Apr 03, 2026 Views: 54

Less than a month remains until the launch of Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred. Since this update is essentially version 2.0 of the game, nearly everything is changing: every build you've ever used will see major adjustments, and many new builds will emerge.

But while a lot of attention will go to the new items, the significant overhaul of the difficulty system might be overlooked by many players. And the experiments the developers ran with endgame difficulty in Season 12 suggest this could have a massive impact on how we experience the game.

Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred Will Expand Torment from 4 Tiers to 12 and Sync with The Pit's Full Ladder

Torment Tiers

First, the biggest change: Torment Tiers. Many players probably haven't heard about this yet, because it has only been confirmed in a single interview. One of the lead developers of Diablo 4 revealed that after the expansion launches, we will have 12 Torment Tiers.

Some players might not like this news, as it brings back memories of the excessive difficulty levels in Diablo III - most of which felt pointless, just raw number stacking. But in Diablo IV, this system is designed to be far more reasonable.

Currently, Diablo 4 has four Torment Tiers. These are directly tied to the difficulty of The Pit and The Tower, because they share the same scaling mechanics. Clearing a certain level of The Pit unlocks the corresponding Torment Tier.

Lord of Hatred simply extends this logic upward to Torment 12, aligning it perfectly with the highest levels of The Pit and The Tower. Right now, the four Torment Tiers correspond to roughly Pit level 55, while the 12 Torment Tiers will scale all the way to the maximum level of The Pit and The Tower.

The developers are just taking the existing difficulty system and expanding it across the entire game world, letting you play all content at those higher difficulty levels. Since The Pit and The Tower were never designed for players to reach their top levels, almost no one will actually get to Torment 12.

Choosing Difficulty in the Open World

In Season 12, once you reached Torment 4 with a strong build, most of the game became trivial. Then you'd step into The Pit, and after reaching your limit, nearly every enemy could one-shot you while you barely scratched them.

Unless you have a bugged build or something far beyond expectations, you won't clear the highest difficulty. But below that, you can make all content as challenging as you want - and with greater challenge come better rewards: more experience, more gold, and higher quality Diablo 4 items dropped by bosses and monsters.

If you have a top-tier endgame build and want to farm Helltide, you could now choose to do so at Torment 8. That way, content that used to be a mindless steamroll becomes difficult and engaging again. Many top builds barely feel different above Torment 4 - the difference only shows in The Pit and The Tower. Having more difficulty tiers gives you a much clearer sense of your build's strength.

You can think of this as the foundation layer of the difficulty system. Once you reach the endgame, the new War Plans system will add a host of extra mechanics that further deepen the endgame difficulty.

War Plans

War Plans Playlists

War Plans system consists of two core parts. The first part is War Plan itself. You choose from several different plans. After selecting a War Plan and its associated playlist, you'll see an interface where you pick five activities in sequence. Each activity has different options and comes with a randomized bonus reward.

For example, suppose you pick Helltide as one of the five activities in your War Plan playlist. After completing that Helltide, you'll get an extra reward - randomly generated when you selected the activity. And of course, this bonus is added on top of all the usual drops from Helltide.

As you complete more War Plan playlists, you'll accumulate more loot. The developers haven't said whether this will also increase the overall difficulty, but most likely the difficulty does not stack.

Activity Experience

Each time you finish an activity in the playlist, you earn activity experience for that specific endgame activity. Every endgame activity currently in the game will have its own meta-progression skill tree. That means a total of seven different skill trees, with possibly more to come.

Every time you engage with and complete something through War Plans system, you gain experience for that activity, allowing you to invest points into its skill tree. This can completely change how that activity plays and what rewards it offers.

 developers have given some examples, and some of these changes will significantly affect the actual difficulty of the activity - not in terms of numeric scaling, but through changes to mechanics and gameplay.

Other Factors Affecting Difficulty

Beyond the pure difficulty changes, the expansion's balance adjustments will also completely transform the experience. We already know that all passive skills from the skill tree will be removed. Many multiplicative damage bonuses will be moved to other systems. This should allow the development team to balance the game more precisely and reduce stat inflation overall.

At the same time, Horadric Cube and Talisman System will be added to further boost character power. You will have countless ways to craft different builds, which might push every current build 5 to 10 levels higher in The Pit.

After the expansion launches, Diablo IV will feel like a completely different game. How will these difficulty changes affect the experience? Will they accelerate the endgame journey? What will be the best difficulty level for players to choose? All of that remains to be seen.

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