Blizzard wants Diablo 4's outrageous damage numbers to mean something again in Lord of Hatred, so it's letting you crank the difficulty up to near-impossible levels: 'It's going to be really f*cking hard'

The fun of a loot-based action RPG disappears when monsters pop in a single hit and the only thing that goes up are the damage numbers. Right now, you can upgrade your gear all you want in Diablo 4, but the majority of the game doesn't really require it.

This is a problem in a genre where incremental power gains are the carrot on the stick that keeps you chasing after more loot. I tend to quit playing every Diablo 4 season once I'm at the point where I'm only picking up items with slightly higher numbers. There's nothing to do with that kind of power but see how fast you can clear the new speedrun dungeon for a spot on the leaderboards.

Blizzard wants to fix this in the Lord of Hatred expansion when it launches next month, and it's doing so by borrowing an idea from Diablo 3. Currently, Diablo 4 has four torment difficulty tiers, each one raising the health and damage of every monster in the game and improving the loot they drop. In Lord of Hatred, that number is getting expanded to 12—news that was revealed by associate game director Zaven Haroutunian in a recent interview with YouTuber Wudijo and explained to PC Gamer in a separate interview with two designers in January.

Wudijo brought up the balance of power gained through a character's items versus their skill tree and how easy it is to get to the point where you're smacking monsters for billions of damage. Haroutunian said while "big numbers feel cool, they feel good for players to get," the game isn't actually asking you to have those big numbers.

"I think a lot of the 'it feels like it's too big' is when it encroaches on I'm just getting numbers higher and they're not actually meaningfully changing how I play or what I do, they're not unlocking the potential for me to do something that I otherwise wouldn't do," he explained. Dungeons like the Pit and the Tower scale way past the rest of the game so players can test their builds and compete on the leaderboards, he added.

Lord of Hatred's eight new torment tiers are an attempt at making everything else relevant as you grow stronger. "So all that power you're getting, you can go and be useful with it," he said.

Design director of systems Colin Finer told PC Gamer that the team sees these new torment tiers less as difficulty settings and more like steps to progress through the game.

"Philosophically where we want to go is difficulty is something you opt into risk/reward-wise, and that's where the meta progression steps in," he said. "You can think of torment as your floor—you're going to constantly increase that, and that's much more granular now in this 12 torment world, the jumps aren't quite as big."

It's normal in Diablo 3 to skip a few torment tiers as you hit power spikes in your progression, but game designer Aislyn Hall said the team wants Diablo 4's to have "a very clear progression through each of them as you're finding all these different additions to your build." The highest tier, however, is supposed to be aspirational and unnecessary for people to enjoy the game. "It's going to be really fucking hard," Hall said.

Haroutunian told Wudijo the increased loot drops from the higher torment tiers are part of the reason why Diablo 4 will get a loot filter when the expansion comes out. More items will pile up on the floor, but by that point you'll know exactly what you're looking for and can adjust the filter to only show whatever's worth picking up. And that might include weaker items you improve with the new Horadric Cube crafting system coming in the expansion.

If all of this works like Blizzard says it will, I shouldn't hit a wall as early as I currently do in Diablo 4. There will be a reason to keep rolling the dice for better gear, and I'll actually be able to feel the impact of those upgrades. I imagine there will still come a point where nothing in the game poses a threat to you—we're still talking about a Diablo game here—but I'd much rather have that happen weeks into a season rather than days.