There's a particular frustration that defines modern Diablo 4 for dedicated players: you spend months grinding endgame dungeons, assembling a god-tier character with absurd damage numbers, and then realise there's nothing left to actually use it on. The endgame content that matters scales up to a certain point and then stops. Everything else feels trivial.
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. For many players, that's where the seasonal grind ends.
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. The solution is dramatic: Blizzard has confirmed that Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred is set to expand the Torment levels from four to 12.
More tiers, more reasons to keep playing
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. The jump between each tier is substantial. That steep climb is part of the problem: players gear up, push to Torment 4, and then the only challenging content left is The Pit, a specific dungeon that scales far beyond everything else.
The new twelve-tier system breaks that cliff into smaller steps. 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."
The real point seems to be giving more activities room to scale into late game instead of leaving players stuck with only a few efficient options. The extra Torment tiers are meant to bring more of the game closer to Pit-level progression, including content like Helltides and Infernal Hordes, with rewards scaling up as well.
Community divide on the approach
The response hasn't been uniformly positive. Many fans were left extremely unhappy. Some compared it unfavorably to Diablo 3, which features 16 levels of Torment, and has long been criticized for how it reduces the feeling that difficulty actually matters.
There's also a practical concern: Users can only play with others on the same Torment level, so the player base previously present between Torment 1-4 will now be split between Torment 1-12. Spreading the community thinner across more difficulty tiers could create ghost towns in the lower levels, isolating newer or casually-geared players.
That said, some players like the idea because the current jumps between Torment levels can feel rough, and more tiers could help that. A progression path that gives your character something meaningful to do at every power level, rather than a few narrow options, does address a real design problem.
A bigger overhaul ahead
The difficulty expansion is part of a larger reshaping of Diablo 4's systems. Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred is set to release on April 28, 2026, adding the new Warlock class to the game among other features. The expansion also brings two new classes, the Paladin and the Warlock, alongside skill tree reworks and a reintroduced Horadric Cube.
Whether the twelve-tier system succeeds depends on whether it feels like natural progression or artificial padding. Blizzard's track record with difficulty scaling is mixed: Diablo 3's sixteen Torment tiers eventually became a stat-scaling exercise rather than meaningful challenge. The real test will come in April when players actually try to farm through twelve layers of escalating difficulty. If the jumps stay forgiving and the rewards scale fairly, it could finally make those god-tier weapons feel earned. If it's just more numbers, the community's scepticism will be justified.