Diablo 4 team moves the Season 7 end date to April 29 — but why?

Spring is usually a season for new things — flowers blooming, trees waking up from winter — but a new season end delay was not on the Diablo 4 bingo card. And yet, General Manager Rod Fergusson posted on X (formerly Twitter) at the end of February confirming that Season 8 would “take a couple of weeks longer to bake.” Let’s talk about what’s going on with Season 8 and why that delay means Season 7 now ends April 29.

Like its predecessors, the patch for Season 8 brings the seasonal story and associated power systems as well as changes to the underlying title. But patch 2.2.0 has the dev team backpedaling a bit on a recent Vessel of Hatred change — they’re making the game harder. Yes, really.

During the PTR campfire chat, they shared that players had achieved Torment 4 at pretty wild rates — both faster than anticipated and a higher percentage achieving the peak difficulty in that faster time! That is changing in Season 8. Their target is roughly 10% of the player population should hit Torment 4. Again — yes, really.

Their changes sounded relatively straightforward — torment tiers are still tied to the associated Pit levels, but Torment 1 will unlock at Pit 10, and the subsequent tiers will have a higher experienced difficulty, with Torment 4 the equivalent of Season 7’s Pit 76. This is tuning a fundamentally different difficulty system than the game launched with — one fairly recently implemented, at that. But this also has to be a pretty recent decision, as it’s driven by player data from the current season (which started January 21).

So the current season will end later, likely because we’re changing the endgame difficulty tiers in addition to balance updates, new loot, and the season theme. We’ll see patch 2.2.0 and Season 8 in Sanctuary on April 29, friends. Let us know what you think of the longer timeline in the comments!