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For most ARPGs with a history measured in years, it's not uncommon for certain mechanics to appear, be removed, and then return. Even if a mechanic has shortcomings, it can continue to be beneficial after improvements.

For Diablo 4, the most representative of these mechanics, and perhaps the one that's recently received the most attention, is probably the leaderboard. It's a competitive ladder system designed to incentivize competition among players.

This feature first appeared in Diablo 4 Season 3, but was later removed due to poor performance caused by cheating and other issues. However, it recently returned in 2.5.0 PTR, along with new The Tower dungeon.

How effective is this return? Will the leaderboards be better than before, ensuring their inclusion in Season 11 and beyond? We'll evaluate and predict their performance on 2.5.0 PTR.

The Tower In Season 11

It's important to understand that the current leaderboards are integrated with The Tower and only reflect your performance within that dungeon, not your overall Diablo 4 progress or other events.

The Tower is essentially a multi-stage, timed dungeon, with 10 minutes to complete each round. It operates similarly to The Pit, but accessing The Tower requires you to first unlock The Pit, which is then activated through Obelisk in Cerrigar.

As you progress deeper, you unlock more floors within the tower - like climbing a building - each with a randomized tile set and monster family. To advance, you must kill these enemies while collecting orbs and XP.

When you destroy a tower on your current floor, Pylons appear. Four Pylons appear during the game. The first three appear in a random order, while the fourth is a random repeat of a previous temple. Pylons provide short-term buffs.

When you reach sufficient progress in a dungeon round, a random boss will spawn. Defeating this boss before the end of the round completes the game, and your ranking will be determined based on your performance.

Leaderboard Overview

Season 11 leaderboards are categorized by your class and party size when you complete The Tower, and include both hardcore and normal levels. The leaderboard displays the following real-time information:

• Character rank
• Character name
• Tower Tier completed
• Time taken to complete a round
• Date you listed on the leaderboard

How Is The Tower Performing On 2.5.0 PTR?

Overall, while the new content is noteworthy, once you understand the mechanics, you'll notice that The Tower still follows the traditional Diablo 4 dungeon formula: fight monsters, level up, then fight higher-level monsters, with the requisite rewards and buffs.

This isn't to say that The Tower isn't worth experiencing, but rather that it doesn't seem to offer enough new content to truly engage you, leaving it feeling like "old wine in new bottles."

The few novel experiences it offers are, on the one hand, the enemy types, which at least mean you can earn richer rewards for defeating them. On the other hand, they're reflected in the leaderboards.

Compared to the limited comparisons you had with friends while exploring The Pit, the return of the leaderboard system at least encourages competitive players to play The Tower more actively, generating a surge of community engagement in the short term.

So, if I were to rate The Tower based on its performance on 2.5.0 PTR, it's only passable. It doesn't have any fatal flaws, but it does lack the allure to keep you playing, unless you enjoy demonstrating your skills through leaderboards.

If the leaderboards don't suffer from the same issues that led to their removal, they might attract a wave of veteran Diablo 4 players who were interested in them. Ultimately, however, everyone will realize that the leaderboards could have been placed directly within The Pit.

The fact that The Tower's similarities mean it can not offer novelty and has the potential to make gameplay systems become redundant. While you can earn Diablo 4 gold by playing, the rewards can also be distributed through The Pit or other events.

How Can The Tower Be improved?

While 2.5.0 PTR hasn't yet revealed the rewards for achieving high rankings on the leaderboards, and you can currently only complete 20 floors at most, if The Tower is indeed implemented in Season 11, these rewards should be interesting enough.

In addition, it would be ideal to update the leaderboards not only with the change of seasons, but also regularly throughout the course of a single season, allowing more players to prove their prowess by earning rewards like special titles.

Tips For Completing The Tower

While The Tower isn't a particularly innovative Season 11 mechanic at this point, it is certainly a way to earn seasonal rewards, so it's still necessary to understand the relevant tips for participating.

To do this, you need to understand how it works, earn sufficient resources early in the season, and craft a build suitable for completing this endgame event. This way, you can quickly complete a dungeon run, earning rewards, and achieving a good leaderboard ranking.

In the end, while the new content is certainly exciting, The Tower lacks any truly outstanding innovations beyond the leaderboard system.

However, the development team also stated that they will continue to update the mechanism in the future. Let us look forward to it getting better!

Typically, the transition between seasons is the busiest time for Diablo 4 players, as you need to simultaneously experience the next season's PTR and wrap up the current one.

Thankfully, the two aren't mutually exclusive. The results of your efforts in the current season can be validated or carried forward in PTR or the new season, especially some new builds.

With this in mind, this time we'll introduce Lunging Strike Barbarian Build for Diablo 4 Season 10. Its strength lies in its simple control and powerful enough to decimate enemies and delve into dungeons in the endgame.

Assuming Barbarian isn't nerfed, this build is expected to remain available in 2.5.0 PTR and even Season 11. The difference lies in Chaos Perks being replaced by better new season mechanics.

Key Skills

As the name suggests, Lunging Strike is the core skill addition for this build. It generates Fury in addition to dealing physical damage, and attacks by dashing forward and attacking.

Later, you'll need to upgrade this skill to Combat Lunging Strike. This way, if you land a critical hit while using a skill, you'll enter a Berserking state, increasing your speed and damage output in combat.

All of these form the foundation for this build to work. Next, you'll need to unlock other skills with the primary goal of increasing damage reduction, distributing skill points evenly.

• Warpath: After gaining Overpowering effect, your damage output increases by 4% for 4 seconds.
• Endless Fury: All basic skills generate an additional 12% Fury, ensuring you always have enough Fury to consume.
• Imposing Presence: Grants you 5% additional maximum health.
• Martial Vigor: Increases damage reduction by 6% when encountering elite enemies.
• Belligerence: Attacking enemies with basic skills for 4 seconds deals additional damage.
• Outburst: Gain thorns and a maximum health increase. Tough as Nails: Increases the damage you deal to enemies with thorns and bleeding.

As you progress, you'll need to continually unlock more skills for this build, but your primary focus should be on increasing Fury generation or boosting damage and health.

It's worth noting that some gear, such as Shard of Verathiel or Hooves of the Mountain God, requires Fury consumption to achieve better combat effectiveness.

Hooves of the Mountain God, a Barbarian-exclusive piece of gear, not only generates additional Fury per second but also consumes Fury to deal with additional damage with basic skills.

While Masterworking in Season 10 didn't receive the same positive changes as in 2.5.0 PTR, it's still important to earn Diablo 4 gold and other materials to enhance gear through these mechanics to improve the overall effectiveness of your build.

How To Plan Your Paragon Board?

Paragon Board is the best way to continue improving your character after max level, so careful board planning can help you refine your build and further improve your overall combat effectiveness.

For Lunging Strike Barbarian Build, unlocking Paragon nodes remains crucial, focusing on consistently generating and utilizing Fury and managing it while Berserking for as long as possible to deal extra damage and maximize damage reduction.

• Wrath: Ensures you generate additional Fury when you land critical hits, and gains a critical hit damage bonus.
• Warbringer: For every 75 Fury you consume, you gain a 15% increase in maximum health.
• Blood Rage: Upon killing an enemy with bleeding damage, you have a 10% chance to enter Berserking for 5 seconds, increasing your damage by 45%.
• Challenger: Grants a 20% bonus to normal nodes within its radius.
• Carnage: If you land a critical hit while Berserking, your attack speed increases for 6 seconds.

You need to utilize all available Paragon Points to earn them. Just like unlocking skills, you should continue to develop your Paragon Board according to the core objectives we've outlined until you've used up all your points.

How To Choose Gear?

We actually recommended two suitable pieces of gear when we introduced skill builds. The advantage of Season 10 is that with the addition of Chaos Armor, you have more freedom when choosing your gear, without having to worry too much about slot placement.

So, while Ramaladni's Magnum Opus is a unique sword, you can obtain its Chaos Armor version and place it in any slot you want. This gear's primary purpose is to deal bonus damage by consuming Fury - a perfect fit for the crafting core of your build.

Other gear worth adding is Fists of Fate, which grants a chance to apply random crowd control effects and bonus damage, making enemies vulnerable and easier to eliminate.

It's important to note that Hooves of the Mountain God deals bonus damage by repeatedly casting basic skills until Fury is depleted, which then causes basic skills to deal with additional damage through slashing.

So, as you continue to add gear, you'll want to avoid weapons that prioritize consuming your Fury over Hooves of the Mountain God, otherwise they won't function properly and you'll waste a slot.

Season-Specific Chaos Perks

Every Season 10 build should include Chaos Perks. These seasonal mechanics are one of the easiest and most effective ways to gain additional boosts to your build, though there are limits on the number and types of perks you can carry.

For Lunging Strike Barbarian build, if you're too lazy to change your perks before each fight, we recommend prioritizing the following:

• A Beast Cornered: Increases your damage output by losing life.
• Raging Chaos: When you're at low health, you enter a Berserking state, and your core skills deal fire damage.
• Dual Threat: Casting a basic skill simultaneously grants you another basic skill on the target, dealing 50-80% more damage.
• Brown Over Brains: If you feel your character is too fragile and unsuitable for A Beast Cornered, you can opt for this perk instead.

You'll find that while the process of unlocking skills or Paragon nodes is lengthy, crafting and using the entire Lunging Strike Barbarian Build always maintains a clear core and purpose, preventing unnecessary frustration during gameplay.

We hope this introduction will enhance your Season 10 experience, and we wish you all the best in 2.5.0 PTR - which already started on October 21st!

On October 16th, Diablo 4 held its Sanctuary Sitdown preview for Season 11 and the associated 2.5.0 PTR, providing a preview of a host of new content and changes expected in the new season and PTR.

While Sanctuary Sitdown didn't include any further details about the second DLC and the 2026 plans as previously predicted, it's clear that Season 11 will feature significantly more changes than previous seasons.

Based on Sanctuary Sitdown and other official information, we'll provide a preview of 2.5.0 PTR content.

When Is 2.5.0 PTR Expected To Launch?

While the release date for Season 11 remains to be determined, we can confirm that 2.5.0 PTR will be available to all PC Battle.net users on October 21st. As is customary with Diablo 4, PTR typically lasts about a week, so it'll likely end around October 28th or 29th.

You can actually infer a possible release date for Season 11 from this, but honestly, that's not the main point right now. Understanding the content in 2.5.0 PTR will help you get started with the new season.

In general, 2.5.0 PTR consists of three main components: a major overhaul of existing core mechanics, the return of previously removed features, and new dungeons and bosses.

Interestingly, most of this content wasn't announced on 2025 content roadmap. Clearly, Diablo 4 intends to utilize Season 11, the season connecting 2025 and 2026, to deliver a surprise at the end of the year.

What Changes Will Be Included?

The changes primarily focus on item upgrades, Renown system, and reworks or optimizations to how potions work. We'll cover each of these.

Tempering And Masterworking

Once you've acquired your ideal gear in Diablo 4, as your abilities increase, you can enhance it to match your character's strength through the specialized systems. These systems are primarily Tempering and Masterworking.

Tempering allows you to add one affix to your gear, but each Tempering session can yield three possible affixes. Unlucky enough to randomly receive a poor affix can actually lower the value of your gear.

Similarly, the results of Masterworking are also tied to luck. This system requires you to consume Diablo 4 gold and other necessary materials to upgrade your gear's existing affixes, but if the desired effect isn't achieved, you need to reset.

This can easily lead to wasting time, effort, game materials, and gold on enhancing your gear, especially with Masterworking, as resetting only returns a small portion of the materials.

Also Read: Why Is Druid The Strongest Class In Diablo 4 Season 10?: A Comparison Of Spiritborn, Sorceress, And Druid Performance

However, in 2.5.0 PTR, both systems are undergoing changes, arguably with the sole purpose of improving your experience.

First, Tempering recipes allow you to directly select the specific affix you want, eliminating the need for randomized modifiers and allowing you to change them at will. However, to balance this change, gear can only receive one Tempering affix in total.

Masterworking, on the other hand, will now improve the overall quality of gear, up to level 20. After that, you can continue to roll for a Capstone bonus, upgrading a random non-premium affix to a premium affix.

Building on this, 2.5.0 PTR will also introduce Sanctification, allowing you to select another random buff for gear after completing Tempering and Masterworking. However, after Sanctification, the gear cannot be modified.

Changes To Healing And Defense Mechanics

The changes in defense mechanics are truly revolutionary. By making armor and resistances a rating system, Diablo 4's defensive potions are rendered useless.

In 2.5.0 PTR, equipped armor will reduce damage taken from all types, and the armor and resistance penalties associated with Torment difficulty will be removed. All your defensive attributes will be represented by the new Toughness metric.

Regarding healing, potions will now instantly restore 35% of your total health. This translates to a reduction in the amount of base potions you can carry, but they will recharge faster. Additionally, the stats of all health-boosting affixes will be increased.

Renown System Rework

In most previous Diablo seasons, you earned Renown points by progressing through the season, which in turn led to rewards for progressing through Renown system.

Starting with Season 11, while you will still be able to progress through Renown system in Eternal Realm, it will be merged with Season Journey into a new system, Season Rank, on seasonal servers.

In fact, the changes are minimal functionally, because you'll still need to complete various objectives to earn seasonal rewards, but the merger will clearly streamline these seasonal systems.

What's New Content?

New content expected to be exclusively part of Season 11 will primarily focus on the multi-level dungeon, The Tower, and the new world boss, Azmodan.

The Tower requires you to kill enough enemies within 10 minutes to summon a random boss. Defeating the boss ends the dungeon and stops the timer.

Notably, the leaderboard feature, previously removed from Diablo 4, returns with the release of The Tower. All your Tower dungeon battles will be ranked by class and number of players.

The development team stated that The Tower in Season 11 is more of a pilot, and they will continue to refine and expand the dungeon content based on actual player feedback.

Return Of Capstone Dungeons

In addition to the leaderboard system, Capstone dungeons will also return to Diablo 4 in 2.5.0 PTR. There are five returning dungeons, each with a different recommended challenge level and difficulty, allowing you to choose one based on your ability.

Above is a preview of 2.5.0 PTR highlights. Use this information to prepare for PTR over the next four days!

While efficiency has been improved, Masterworking gear still requires the consumption of specific materials. To reduce farming time and focus on PTR itself, it's best to get safe and cheap Diablo 4 items trading at D4GOLD!

If you've been playing Diablo 4 since at least the beginning of this year, you're probably aware that starting with Season 8, the game's most dangerous endgame bosses (also known as ladder bosses) have been fully upgraded to lair bosses.

This change isn't just in name; more importantly, the mechanics shift from gathering materials to summoning a boss to starting the fight, to allowing you to directly fight them, but you must first collect lair keys to unlock the boss's corresponding hoard upon victory.

To ensure you're getting the right lair keys, lair bosses are now divided into three different tiers: initiate, greater, and exalted. Higher-tier lair keys may require killing lower-tier lair bosses, while others can be obtained by completing regular Diablo 4 events.

The reason you should continue farming lair bosses in Season 10 is that they drop Unique or Mythic Uniques. While some may not be as powerful as Chaos Armor, the overall value is still worth the effort.

So how should you farm lair bosses in Season 10, and what tips should you keep in mind? We'll explain below.

Lair Bosses And Related Keys

There are nine lair bosses in Season 10, each with its own lair key and loot pool. While you can theoretically farm a specific set of lair bosses, you'll need to complete other gameplay or boss battles to obtain the keys needed to unlock their hoards.

One thing worth noting and encouraging is that after defeating an initiate lair boss, in addition to the higher-level lair keys, Stygian Stones will also drop. This item can be converted 1:1 into any desired greater lair key.

All lair bosses and the lair keys/Stygian Stone drops they can provide are as follows:

• Varshan (initiate): Required 12x Malignant Heart, drops Shard of Agony or Stygian Stone
• Grigoire (initiate): Required 12x Living Steel, drops Shard of Agony or Stygian Stone
• Beast in the Ice (initiate): Required 12x Distilled Fear, drops Pincushioned Doll or Stygian Stone
• Lord Zir (initiate): Required 12x Exquisite Blood, drops Pincushioned Doll or Stygian Stone
• Urivar (initiate): Required 12x Judicator's Mask, drops Abhorrent Heart or Stygian Stone
• Duriel (greater): Required 3x Shard of Agony
• Andariel (greater): Required 3x Pincushioned Doll
• Harbinger of Hatred (greater): Requires 3x Abhorrent Heart
• Belial (exalted): Requires 2x Betrayer's Husk

In addition to defeating low-level bosses, you can also earn specific lair keys by completing the following Diablo 4 events or gameplay:

• Malignant Heart: Whispers or Helltides
• Living Steel: Helltides Chests
• Distilled Fear: Nightmare Dungeons
• Exquisite Blood: Legion Events, Helltides, and World Bosses
• Judicator's Mask: Helltides, Whispers, and World Bosses
• Betrayer's Husk: Belial's Ambush

What Is Belial's Ambush?

Belial's Ambush is essentially an ambush that randomly triggers after defeating any initiate or greater boss, ensuring you have a chance to unlock Belial's hoard.

While this small Belial isn't as dangerous as a full-fledged boss, you must remain vigilant during the fight. During battle, it will attack you with a combination of blood and poison magic, requiring you to dodge quickly and carry gear with appropriate resistance.

How To Find Lair Bosses?

While you no longer need to collect summoning materials in advance, it's recommended to wait until your character level is high enough to handle endgame content before finding and challenging a Lair Boss.

You can find the corresponding lair boss on the map by its unique icon. Right-clicking it will teleport you to the boss and begin the fight. However, before doing so, you'll need to understand the boss's lair keys and drop information and find reliable allies.

Lair Boss Loot Patterns

First, all lair bosses have the potential to drop either Uniques or Mythic Uniques. These drops are categorized as general available to all classes, and gear specific to each class.

When you defeat a boss and receive your first Unique drop, it will be a class-exclusive item. If you obtain other Unique loot or defeat the boss later, your chances of receiving general or exclusive loot are equal.

In addition, it's recommended to complete the lair boss fight in a group, not only because it's more efficient, but also because each additional team member increases the boss's chance of dropping additional Unique loot by 33%.

Alternatively, you can increase the boss's loot drop rate by increasing the difficulty. Typically, at Torment 3 difficulty, the current lair boss will drop one additional Unique loot. At Torment 4 difficulty and with enough players, the boss may even drop seven.

Best Season 10 Lair Keys Farming Strategy

In addition to lair keys, you'll also need to complete other tasks to earn gold and other crafting materials. Therefore, it's not recommended to directly challenge initiate boss after entering the endgame. Instead, first obtain Undercity Tributes through Helltides.

To do this, you must first own Vessel of Hatred DLC, which qualifies you for entering and farming Kurast Undercity. You can then earn more Undercity Tributes by repeatedly defeating Blood Maidens in Helltides.

The more Tributes you use before entering Kurast Undercity, the greater the rewards you'll ultimately receive, significantly increasing your chances of obtaining lair keys by completing Kurast Undercity.

That's all you need to know before farming Diablo 4 lair bosses in Season 10. While you're doing the quests, don't forget to challenge the new boss Bartuc in Infernal Hordes to obtain Chaos Armor!

If defeating lair bosses to obtain Unique or Mythic Uniques on your own is too tedious or difficult, you can also trade safe Diablo 4 items at D4GOLD! Simply enter the name of the Unique item you want to instantly retrieve and buy it!