Rhykker Interviews Game Director Zaven Haroutunian - Lord of Hatred's Endgame Vision
Content creator Rhykker sat down with Zaven Haroutunian, Game Director on Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred, for a wide-ranging conversation about the expansion's endgame philosophy, the Pit overhaul, Torment tier design, aspirational content, and what lessons from the last three years shaped this expansion. There's a lot of design philosophy in here alongside some new concrete details.
Note: Quotes have been lightly cleaned up for readability.
War Plans - Zaven's Favorite Feature
When asked to pick his favorite new feature, Zaven didn't hesitate: War Plans, hands down. He described the activity tree system as "kind of mind blowing," saying that even after months of internal play, he was still having realizations about interactions as recently as three weeks before the interview.
The design philosophy behind War Plans was summed up by an early internal motto: "many paths, many summits". The idea is that from wherever you are in the game, you can see multiple pinnacle goals ahead of you, and there are multiple ways to reach each one.
The Pit - Rebuilt from Scratch
One of the biggest reveals: the Pit has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. Zaven was emphatic about this - no piece of old data exists. It's been built from scratch.
What this means in practice:
- Every environment and every monster in the game can now show up in the Pit, going all the way back to base game content
- There are layouts that don't appear anywhere else in the game - including massive, wide-open cave variants where you can't even see the walls (a "jackpot moment" compared to the narrow caves players dislike)
- Goblins are back in the Pit
- There are custom crafting materials found inside the Pit that you use in future Pit runs
- There's a secret in the Pit that Zaven openly encouraged players to find
Pit Activity Tree Nodes
The Pit's War Plans activity tree has some particularly wild options:
Heart of Stone: If you're good at not taking damage, monsters drop more progress orbs so you progress faster. At the end, you can deposit the object for a bonus glyph upgrade. This is a direct reward for skillful play.
Mastery Objective: The Pit gains a timed mastery challenge: +1 glyph upgrade for every five minutes left on the timer.
Butcher Node: Add The Butcher to your Pit run. Kill him and the run just ends - you win regardless of progress. But if he kills you, you lose. If he spawns on the first floor, you could theoretically have a 30-second Pit run.
+1 Glyph Upgrade Node: Simply grants an additional glyph upgrade per run.
XP Conversion: If you're done with glyph upgrades, you can convert them to an XP source instead.
Glyph upgrades are still exclusive to the Pit for now, though Zaven said "maybe down the line" they could expand elsewhere. The philosophy was to keep it as a unique attribute of the Pit and then build multiple nodes around manipulating it.
Monster Power - A Hidden Difficulty Layer
War Plans includes a system called Monster Power that sits on top of Torment tiers. It can target entire activities or even individual monsters within an activity. You can say "this monster in Helltide has +1 Monster Power" and layer on your own challenge with corresponding rewards.
Torment Tiers - Not Torment Bloat
Zaven directly addressed the D3 Torment bloat concern, acknowledging he was there for it back in the day. His argument for why D4 won't repeat it:
The D3 problem stemmed from two things being infinite: Paragon and Greater Rifts. Once you surpassed a Torment tier's difficulty, everything at that level became irrelevant. Blizzard had to keep escalating just to preserve value, creating "Greater Rift jail."
In D4, Paragon is not infinite and the Pit is not infinite. There's already an upper bound. The Torment expansion to 12 is about filling in the gaps, not raising the ceiling. The goal is making sure all activities can scale high enough to remain relevant in the endgame, not just the Pit.
Some concrete numbers:
- Torment 8 in Lord of Hatred is roughly equivalent to current Torment 4
- Torment 12 corresponds to roughly Pit 100
- Activities can now scale to about Pit 100 equivalent, up from roughly Pit 50 before
- No plans to add Torment 13+ - but they'll listen if players ask for it
Power Level Changes
Zaven explained the order of operations on power: passives were removed first, then monster health and the rest of the game were retuned to accommodate the new reality. The Talisman adds power on top, but because it doesn't compete directly with your gear slots, it doesn't need to cause its own inflation problem.
The result: Pit 100 should be easier to reach for more builds than it is on live today. The funnel of viable builds narrows as difficulty increases, so keeping Pit 100 as the clear target and ensuring many builds can reach it was a deliberate design goal.
Pinnacle Content and Mephisto
Zaven confirmed Mephisto as the new pinnacle fight, but was clear he's not a farm boss. He's "bigger than a boss" and not something you'll run 100 times a day. His endgame version includes a whole new phase not seen in the campaign.
Echoing Hatred and the pinnacle fight exist outside the War Plans system - they're separate activities, not part of the formal activity rotation.
There are also undisclosed challenges that Zaven wants players to discover on their own.
Aspirational Content Philosophy
This section of the interview went deep into design philosophy. Zaven's core position: the game needs aspirational content, but that content shouldn't present itself as the sole or true completion point.
He used Uber Lilith as a cautionary tale. She ended up "torn between two identities" - she wasn't meaningful enough for blasters looking for rewarding loop content, and she was too hard for players looking for a finality moment. She served neither audience well, and the team learned from that.
The solution in Lord of Hatred is creating enough summits that not everything has to be for everyone. Fishing completionists, Echoing Hatred pushers, War Plans customizers, Tower competitors, and Pit blasters can all have their own goals. That breadth is what makes aspirational content healthy - instead of one gate that frustrates everyone who can't pass it.
On the topic of community pressure to make things easier, Zaven's position was nuanced: if players can't reach something because the team didn't give them enough tools, that should be fixed. If tuning was wrong, fix it. But making one audience happy by annoying another doesn't make the game better.
Diablo 4's Identity - Three Years of Learning
When asked what lessons from the last three years most shaped Lord of Hatred, Zaven got reflective. At launch, the game was caught between two identities - "is this more like D2 or more like D3?" He said the team inadvertently convinced both camps that the game was made for the other side.
The biggest lesson: Diablo 4 just needs to be Diablo 4. It can freely draw from D1, D2, D3, other ARPGs, and even genres outside of ARPGs. Inspiration drawn broadly breeds innovation. The team has found confidence in saying "this is just D4, it is what it is."
Zaven's description of D4's identity at its core: it starts as a really good action game with a rich dark fantasy narrative, but it reveals immense systems depth as you progress. The key rule: every ounce of complexity needs to produce tenfold output in depth, or it's just a tangled mess.
For Returning Players
Zaven's message to players who haven't touched D4 since Season 1 or 2: treat it like a new game. He said he's heard people say these changes don't feel like an expansion - they feel like a new entry. Every class is completely different. Items are different. Crafting is different. The activity count has more than doubled since launch.
His closing advice: savor the campaign. Don't rush to blast. There'll be plenty of time for that. The team put enormous effort into the conclusion of the Age of Hatred arc, and the audio design and music in Skovos deserve a moment of attention before the min-maxing kicks in.
Quick Hits
- War Plans: Zaven's favorite feature, calls it "transformative"
- Pit: Rebuilt from scratch, every environment and monster in the game can appear
- Pit secret: Something hidden in the Pit for players to discover
- Monster Power: New War Plans difficulty layer on top of Torment tiers
- Torment 8 ≈ current Torment 4 in difficulty
- Torment 12 ≈ Pit 100 - no plans for Torment 13+
- Mephisto: New pinnacle fight with a campaign-exclusive phase, not a farm boss
- Echoing Hatred: Outside War Plans, separate activity
- Glyph upgrades: Still Pit-only, but many new nodes to earn more per run
- Pit 100: Should be reachable by more builds than on current live
- Aspirational content: Team committed to keeping it, but with "many summits" rather than one gate
This interview was conducted by Rhykker with Zaven Haroutunian, Game Director on Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred.
Original interview here