Diablo 4 nightmare dungeons are perhaps the best Diablo 4 endgame activity and a place you’ll want to spend a lot of your time after beating the campaign. The good news is that Blizzard is about to make them even more efficient and fun, with some big changes coming ahead of the first proper season. In a Diablo 4 campfire chat, the team discusses how it’s planning to make your life in the RPG game much smoother very soon.
The pacing of nightmare dungeons was top of the list of community talking points during the campfire chat, where several leading members of the development team discussed their upcoming plans and a “chonky patch” in the works. While nightmare dungeons are already a great way to farm fast XP, get plenty of rare loot drops, and level your Diablo 4 paragon glyphs, they can be a little awkward to use due to travel time and inconsistency between the various dungeon types.
“Our goal is to have a lot of choice for players,” game director Joe Shely says, “both in terms of having lots of good choices for where you’re going to level, or acquire loot, and also in terms of your character having lots of choices.” General manager Rod Fergusson notes that while the expectation was for nightmare dungeons to be the go-to endgame farming spot, normal dungeons are proving a pretty valuable alternative. So big changes are on the way, and they’re very exciting for endgame blasters.
“Nightmare dungeons are explicitly set up to be highly replayable,” Shely explains, “so we want them to be a great place to farm – including if you want to farm them over and over. So what we’re going to do there is increase the amount of XP that you get from nightmare dungeons, and our goal with this is to make nightmare dungeons more efficient to do than side dungeons.”
There’s one other big problem with nightmare dungeons, however – simply getting to some of them across the Diablo 4 map can take quite a while. Joe acknowledges this: “You can’t just look at the XP you’re getting from the nightmare dungeon, because you have to spend some of the time traveling.” That makes it hard to justify even considering some of the more remote locations – but the team has good news there as well.
“The second thing we’re going to do here is we’re going to modify the way that sigils work so that they teleport you to nightmare dungeons,” Shely confirms. That’s a huge improvement and one that was immediately welcomed by a resounding chorus of celebratory ‘W’s in the live chat as it was said. You’ll now be able to just loop through nightmare dungeons without having to potter around, if you prefer.
So, to summarize, nightmare dungeons will now give you more rewards, and they’ll be way faster to farm with no travel time between them. As for when you can expect this change to occur, Shely says, “This is something that’s really important, so we’re working very hard on this right now to get it in before season one launches.” Obviously, a more complex system like teleporting requires a little more QA testing, but we should see it before Diablo 4 season 1 begins.
During the rest of the chat, the team also discusses pulling gems from your Diablo 4 inventory to help free up space, and a change to seasonal renown that will see your map progress and Diablo 4 Altars of Lilith stick around through resets. As a big fan of the game myself, the presentation was pretty much just what I wanted to see – considered changes in response to fan feedback that feel like they can benefit all players.
If you’re busy working on your best Diablo 4 builds, we’ve got all the important details to help you out. We’ve also rounded up everything on the Diablo 4 battle pass so you know what to expect and just what sort of rewards you can look forward to.