Diablo 4 Gauntlets finally bring Leaderboards to the game

Leaderboards are coming to Diablo 4 in a system called the Gauntlet, a timed dungeon challenge that will launch with Season 3 in January. D4’s leaderboards are similar in intent but different in execution than either the Diablo 3 Rift-based leaderboards  or the Diablo 2 ladder system… however, the system has definitely taken a lot of inspiration from D3’s weekly Challenge Rifts. We already knew leaderboards were in the works, but thanks to BlizzCon 2023 we now know that it’s coming pretty soon: Season 2 will end and Season 3 will begin on January 23, bringing Gauntlets with it.

Every week there will be a new Gauntlet with a fixed map. Everyone will have the same Gauntlet to run, but dungeon is non-linear, so you’ll be able to choose your own path to find the best way to the end. Getting through the dungeon with the best time, with the best score, will get you a spot on the Leaderboard for the week. Particularly good scores may get you a spot in The Hall of the Ancients, memorializing your performance beyond the weekly Gauntlet Leaderboard.

Here’s what we know about Gauntlets and Leaderboards in Diablo 4 so far.

Details on Gauntlets in Diablo 4

Doing well in the weekly Gauntlet dungeon will get you a spot on Diablo 4’s new Leaderboards. Here are the details we learned in the Campfire Chat at BlizzCon:

• The top 1000 Gauntlet players make the Leaderboard. The very top players in each Ladder will get a spot on the Leaderboard for the week. There are a lot of different Leaderboards and ways to filter them — solo Leaderboards for each class, party Leaderboards for groups of various sizes, Hardcore and non-Hardcore players, and even Leaderboards by location.
• Gauntlets are on a timer. The faster you go the better your score.
• Monster drops will give you better score. Monsters and chests drop Proofs of Might, an item that will “maximize your score” according to Joe Shely. That suggests you may want to seek out specific monsters as you go rather than necessarily going down the shortest path.
• The Gauntlet and Leaderboards reset weekly. Every week we’ll get a new Gauntlet to run and the Leaderboards reset. You’ll have to make the climb to the top every week.
• The Hall of the Ancients lists the very best players. While the Leaderboards reset every week, the top players on the weekly Leaderboards will have their names preserved in the Hall of Ancients. It’s essentially a non-weekly Leaderboard, and will offer you a chance to earn seals that you can display on your character profile as well as recording your weekly progress.
• Gauntlets are available in World Tier 4. You don’t need to be level 100 to run Gauntlets, but you need to be playing at WT4.

This is still in development, so these details may change before Season 3 goes live, but what we have so far is a different — but not wholly unfamiliar — way to handle Leaderboards in a Diablo game. I do find the Hall of Ancients to be a little “We heard you like Leaderboards so here’s a Leaderboard of your weekly Leaderboards so you can rank on the board while you rank on the board” but it’s not necessarily a bad idea to give players long-term goals as well as weekly goals. I’m curious to see how the Gauntlet works in terms of designing your own approach to clearing them.

Beyond Gauntlets, we don’t know very much about Season 3, which the developers jokingly referred to as “the Season of Orange Text.” They’re not ready to tell us the name yet, but they did drop some images that seem to feature Egyptian motifs. For now, we can only guess wait for the next big announcement.

Gauntlets will be available when Diablo 4 Season 3 launches on January 23, 2024.