Diablo 4 Season 8's difficulty rebalance is self-defeating as a testing ground

Modified Mar 30, 2025 08:59 IST

There’s been so much said about Diablo 4 Season 8’s upcoming difficulty rebalance. The developers, and even some of the playerbase, have said the game is too easy. It’s too simple to get to Torment 4, and defeat the hardest content the game has to offer. The solution was, with that in mind, to ramp up the difficulty and slow down the leveling process, as it pertains to the Torment difficulties. There are some positives in this, too.

Players will have to spend more time with their builds, learning why they actually work if they’re copying someone else’s build. Maybe those powerful new Uniques will drop as the leveling and growing process takes a bit more time. However, we need to talk about these changes, and what could stop useful information from getting to the developers: boss powers.

Diablo 4 Season 8’s difficulty rebalance is going to be ruined by boss powers

I’m not against the difficulty rebalance in Diablo 4 Season 8, I want to be perfectly clear about that. I do want it to use data that makes sense, though. Was I able to clear some content in Torment 4 without boss powers, and a mediocre build? I absolutely did, though it took some pretty hard work. I really had to know what I was doing with my buttons, and my skeleton army.

It's possible to start dropping Billions of damage, even post difficulty rework (Image via Blizzard Entertainment/@Rob2628)

I think the real problem though, are these incredible new boss powers. I love them, don’t get me wrong — but I think they’re going to skew the data for how the new difficulty rebalance is going to work out for players across the game. I’ve seen players do billions and trillions of damage without too much effort on the PTR, for example.

Sure, these are players that play Diablo 4 for a living, and thus, have a great deal of information that the casual, regular player does not. These players also have the hours required to grind out everything they need to make the most ridiculous builds that will still trivialize everything.

Perhaps, due to seasonal power bloat, the developers are going to have a hard time figuring out where to put the needle, when it comes to difficulty rebalancing. What if, instead of meaningful difficulty rebalance in Season 9, we just get weaker powers? Now the game is harder, and our seasonal gimmicks are miserable. It’s just going to feel like Season 3 all over again.

Boss powers add so much to a character in Diablo 4 Season 8 right now. It’s not uncommon to hear that the build actually doesn’t matter anymore — all that matters is having the right boss powers put together, and you can shred absolutely anything in the game. However, we’ll still have to see how it all shakes out on the live servers, but I do worry the information they receive won’t be the information they should be receiving going forward.

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Edited by Abu Amjad Khan