Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred's new hardest difficulty tier has been conquered in just 17 hours by a sleepless sorceress
One of the major changes in Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred is the ability to scale the difficulty way higher than you could before. Most players are gradually climbing the torment tiers as they gear their characters up, but some players are speedrunning to the top just to see how fast they can do it.
For Diablo 4 streamer Mekuna, the ascent from a level 1 sorceress to a level 70 sorceress capable of holding her own in the hardest difficulty took around 17 hours of non-stop grinding. And because Blizzard intentionally kept a lot of late-game details secret, he also had to quickly come up with a build that could take him there.
That build ended up being centered around a new variant of the Blizzard skill. Instead of dropping hail onto enemies, Mekuna spams the lightning variant of it to fry packs of enemies in seconds. Watching all the bright circles stack up in his final dungeon run is like opening a website in light mode at night—you almost have to squint to see what's going on.
He reached torment 12 on hour 20 of his Twitch stream, making him probably one of the first to get that far in so little time and on so little sleep. He kicked off the expansion playing the new warlock class through the campaign and eventually ditched it for the class that has taken him to the top of Diablo 4's unofficial competitive leaderboards before. By the looks of it, he still had quite a lot of upgrades to obtain when he achieved it. I didn't catch any infinite damage bugs going on, but it's possible the build is a little stronger than Blizzard intended.
A lot is possible when you have that much uninterrupted time to play, but Mekuna's achievement confirms that Diablo 4's new torment tiers aren't impossible to survive—at least with characters as strong as his. Blizzard told PC Gamer earlier this year that torment 12 would be "really fucking hard," and while I still believe that, it's clear there will be outliers as there always are with Diablo 4. That said, it's nice to see that it isn't some bizarre bug-exploiting build that made it that far.
There is one small caveat here that's worth mentioning though: Mekuna may have finished torment 12, but there are other ways of increasing the difficulty on top of that through the new activity skill trees. Some of the upgrades in there can boost monsters up a few levels even higher than the torment tier would normally allow. I'd be curious if he can survive those too.
Lord of Hatred's new skill trees, item crafting system, and reworked difficulty tiers mean all previous ways to measure a character's power are useless, so I'm excited to see how all the other classes fare, especially paladins and warlocks. Soon the game's leaderboards will go live and we'll be able to see what absurdly powerful builds players have come up with.
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