Diablo 4 is redesigning the boss ladder for Season 8, and it’s good news for every player

Diablo 4 patch 2.2.0 will be launching with Season 8 on April 29, but we’ve already seen the game’s next update on the PTR and the biggest feature that stood out to me was the boss ladder rework. Characters who make it to Diablo 4’s endgame will find themselves farming killing ladder bosses, hunting for specific gear and uniques to make your build. But right now the boss ladder isn’t very intuitive: before you can summon any bosses, you’ve got to farm up 12-24 shiny trinkets of various sorts to summon the boss, which means even more busywork before you do what you want to do. And even when you do collect the needed summoning materials, you might summon the boss only to find that it’s too difficult for you to kill, but the materials are gone and you’re back to farming more gear (and more summoning materials) to try again.

Season 8 will change that, and for the better. In patch 2.2.0, the ladder bosses have been split into difficulty tiers to make it easier to tell their how hard they are, the materials needed are being streamlined, and you won’t need materials to summon the boss, only to open their Hoard — a chest of loot — after they die. There are also two new bosses joining the rotation: Urivar from Vessel of Hatred and Belial, who is joining the game in Season 8.

These are the new difficulty tiers for these bosses:

• Initiate Lair: Beast in the Ice, Grigoire, Lord Zir, Varshan, and Urivar.
• Greater Lair: Andariel, Duriel, and Harbringer of Hatred.
• Exalted Lair: Belial, Lord of Lies.

You’ll need to be on Torment 1 or higher to summon any of these bosses, but once you get there, there’s less risk to trying to kill them even if you aren’t sure your character is powerful enough, since summoning them doesn’t cost materials anymore. Of course the downside of this change is that you will still need those materials to unlock the Hoard they leave behind. Another downside is that these bosses will drop less loot than they do right now.

But while you’re getting less loot, you may be getting better loot: the first unique dropped by each of these bosses will come directly from their unique pool to help you target farm the gear you want, so no more getting 17 Doombringers when you’re trying to farm Azurewrath. After your first unique, each additional unique drop has a 50% chance to come from the combined pool. Each person in your party adds a 33% additional chance at a second unique drop (from the boss’s pool), so grouping is encouraged. However, all members in a group will need a key to open the Hoard for loot.

You will still need materials to create keys to open these Hordes, but the system has been streamlined. You still need a specific type of item per boss: Malignant Heart (Varshan), Living Steel (Grigorie), Distilled Fear (Beast in the Ice), Exquisite Blood (Lord Zir), Judicator’s Mask (Urivar), Shard of Agony (Duriel), Pin-Cushioned Doll (Andariel), Abhorrent Hearts (Harbringer of Hatred, Betrayer’s Husk (Belial, Lord of Lies). However, killing these bosses can give you a Stygian Stone, which you can convert into a key to unlock any Greater Lair boss. These keys stack to 99, which may help save space in your inventory from the large collection of summoning materials we’re used to hauling around.

And one big change that will make farming these bosses easier: each lair boss will be marked on the map with a unique icon, including their name and what’s required to summon them, so they’re easy to find. Best of all, you can teleport directly to them from the map. No more searching for boss locations or trekking across the map to get to them.

Overall, I’m absolutely excited to see these changes go live. The developer’s notes in the patch notes say these changes were spurred on by community comments, so the team is listening to our feedback and making changes based on it. These changes will go live with Season 8, starting later this month.