Diablo 3 Season 36 is now live, as the Lords of Hell take over again (again)

Diablo 3 Season 35 kicked off pure pandemonium on June 6, with the Season of Eternal Conflict’s array of killstreak rewards designed to rain treasure, smite your enemies, and more. But every good season comes to an end, and even though the game’s 2025 season schedule has been rocky, we now have confirmation when Season 36 will kick off. Diablo 3 Season 35 ended Sunday, September 7, and Season 36: The Lords of Hell is now live as of Friday, September 12, 2025.

Season 36 is the first to re-recycle a theme — we last saw the Lords of Hell in Season 30, and it first debuted in Season 25. The fact that we’re already hitting a repeat does beg the question — are we going to see the same cycle of five themes moving forward with all future seasons? We don’t know yet.

How did we get there? Well, when Diablo 3 entered maintenance mode, Ghostcrawler promised me a pony the Diablo 3 team stated that the subsequent seasons would follow a standard quarterly schedule, with each season accompanied by a randomly-selected returning theme. And they started out strong — Seasons 30 and 31 both ran for 12 weeks and 2 days, and Season 32 extended a bit, adding two weeks to the runtime to account for both a PTR period and the launch of Diablo 4’s first expansion, Vessel of Hatred.

But 2025 has been a year of scheduling hiccups. First, Season 33 accidentally ended two weeks early. Then they shifted the original start date of Season 34 back a week, announcing the change a mere two days before it should hav elaunched. Admittedly, it was an excellent shift, as the original date hit the same week as Diablo 4’s new season and it provided some additional cleanup time for lingering account issues after the early stop. But then Season 34 ran for four months, to some pretty hefty community confusion. Luckily, Season 35 seems to have gotten us back on schedule, so dive into Season 36, which is now live. See you in Sanctuary!

Originally published June 9, 2025, updated September 14, 2025