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Diablo 4 Season 9 PTR Escalating Nightmare Dungeons: How Does This New Feature Work?

Posted: Jun 03, 2025 Views: 75

Recently, everyone’s attention must have been focused on the upcoming Diablo 4 Season 9. Since players have been complaining about the boring endgame content, the developers have been working hard to bring more interesting challenge modes to players to win back lost players.

And an important new feature launched in the latest Season 9 PTR may break the current bad situation of the endgame and bring new possibilities for Diablo 4 to regain its vitality. This is Escalating Nightmare Dungeons.

Escalating Nightmare is an endgame activity that connects three Nightmare Dungeons with random attributes to increase the difficulty and obtain more generous rewards. In the end, players will start the final boss battle with Astaroth. In a new endgame battle full of challenging mechanisms, you will face Mephisto’s Acolyte and Amalgam. This battle will be a great test of your character build and strategy, but the rewards are definitely worth your struggle!

Diablo 4 Season 9 PTR Escalating Nightmare Dungeons: How Does This New Feature Work?

How To Enter Escalating Nightmare?

So how do you enter these Escalating Nightmare Dungeons? Let’s take a look!

To start these dungeons, you need to prepare some Escalation Sigil. These Sigils can be dropped from Horadric Strongrooms.

Sigil functions similarly to Infernal Hordes Compass, and it will automatically open the first Nightmare Dungeon in the series. After completing this dungeon, a portal will be generated that will teleport the player to the second dungeon. When we complete the last dungeon, players will be able to open a new boss battle through the portal.

Horadric Strongrooms are another new feature added in Season 9 PTR, which is a kind of micro-dungeons in Nightmares and Escalating Dungeons.

They offer limited-time challenges with powerful enemies and obstacles, and finally a boss battle. But taking the time to complete Strongroom is definitely worth it, because not only will you get a Horadric Cache and Horadric Attunement, but you will also have the chance to get a powerful Elixir. Even if you don’t need Elixir right now, it can still earn you a ton of Diablo 4 Gold, as these consumables are in high demand on the market.

Diablo 4 Season 9 Horadric Strongrooms

How To Run Escalating Dungeon?

To get back to the point, you can get these Escalation Sigils from Horadric Strongrooms. Once you find Sigil, you can right-click on it like any other Nightmare Dungeon Sigil, and that will open Escalating Dungeon.

However, unlike Nightmare Dungeon, Escalating Dungeon does not end after you defeat the first boss of the first dungeon.

When you complete the first dungeon, you’ll get loot like in a normal Nightmare Dungeon. However, you’ll be teleported to the next dungeon via a pillar, and there are three dungeons in total, with an Astaroth boss fight at the end.

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Dungeon Affixes

Also, it’s worth noting that the affixes in Escalating Dungeon are randomized each time, meaning that when you start a new dungeon, there will be new affixes.

The number of both positive and negative affixes increases as you run the dungeon, and they stack as you progress, meaning that the first dungeon will have one negative and one positive affix, and by the third dungeon you’ll have three of each. I guess that’s where the name Escalating comes from.

However, the difficulty doesn’t really change between dungeons, because if you have a good enough character to farm Torment 4 difficulty, you shouldn’t have any trouble killing monsters even in the third dungeon.

Once you complete a dungeon, you’ll get similar loot to a normal Nightmare Dungeon. But at the end of the dungeon, there will be a pillar that you can click on to reach the second floor or the second dungeon of Escalating Nightmare. Also, this pillar will tell you the random affixes you’ll see in the next dungeon.

Astaroth Boss Fight

Once you complete the third dungeon, the pillars will reappear, but this time you’ll be taken to Astaroth’s Lair, where the final battle will take place.

And, as we mentioned before, you can find Horadric Strongrooms in these Escalating Dungeons, just like in regular Nightmare Dungeons, and you can always tell which affixes will affect your current dungeon by looking at the map.

In my experience, Astaroth boss drops a lot of loot, including a lot of crafting materials, such as Obducite. Additionally, there will be special affixes that affect Astaroth loot drops, however, these are random and you can’t change them as needed. Whether this will bring new fun to your dungeon runs or put us in a new cycle of endless farming is still unknown.

But if you want to get an advantage in your dungeon runs, it is absolutely necessary to get some high-level gear and resources, and here are some iggm coupon codes that may help you!

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Final Thoughts

That’s it, that’s all we know about Escalating Nightmare Dungeons in Season 9 so far.

To be honest, running multiple Nightmare Dungeons in a row like this and having a special battle at the end is indeed an update that the community has been calling for a long time. 

However, some people may worry that running multiple Nightmare Dungeons in a row will become awkward and boring, but some people think that Escalating Nightmare system should bring a breath of fresh air when running dungeons and greatly simplify the entire process. In any case, let us look forward to what this new season update will bring!

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