Diablo IV’s endgame looks expansive (and a bit confusing)

Diablo IV’s dungeons are gonna be a nightmare after players complete the campaign. The developers just released a new video outlining the game’s endgame progression, and it’s filled with all sorts of somewhat bewildering things like paragon systems, world tiers, nightmare dungeons, and more.

Players will level up their characters via a bog standard skill tree. The video shows that, once players have hit max level, completed the campaign, and completed the capstone dungeon at the end of the game, they’ll get access to an expanded skill board that reminds me a bit of Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid. So even though your character is at the highest level achievable, there will still be a system in place to make them more powerful. The board is rotatable, with different orientations geared toward specific skills and stats. From the video, it looks very… large and intimidating to a newbie like me, so hopefully it’s not as complicated as it appears.

Nightmare dungeons are returning to the Diablo endgame allowing players to upgrade one of the dungeons they may have completed before into a harder, nastier version filled with buffed-up enemies and, of course, higher qualities of loot. Nightmare dungeons are able to be even further modified by affixes just like the ones found in the Mythic+ dungeons in World of Warcraft. They grant special — and sometimes outright cruel — properties to bosses and regular mobs, like having them explode when they die.

Diablo IV’s endgame didn’t forget about the PvP sickos, either. In the Fields of Hatred (which, coincidentally, is also the name of my forthcoming farming co-op), players will collect shards from bosses that they will then need to purify in order to buy special cosmetic rewards. But attempting to purify shards seems like it’ll alert other players who may want to gank you for your shards.

Diablo IV’s endgame looks pretty sick in that there seems to be so much stuff that I don’t yet understand that it makes me dizzy. I’m looking forward to figuring out what it all means when Diablo IV launches on June 6th.