difficulty and rift evolution

When it first came out, adventure mode didn’t just bring everything we have known in recent seasons. At first, the new cap for difficulty settings was the brand new torment difficulty setting, and it went as far as 6. The cap was then raised to 10 then 16, as we know it today. The season system was also brand new at the time, and was a fun way to start anew and challenge yourself again during a limited period of time, with some exclusive bonuses for each season.

Now we have come a long way with Diablo 3, and this the 25th and probably final season of the game. I hadn’t played in awhile and decided to give this season a good shot, maybe hoping to reach the highest greater rift (GR) which is 150.

definitely was favorite hub in the game. This little village besieged by zombie has such a great atmosphere.

That is when my friend stepped in. We had been playing together since the beginning of the season and he was even more hyped than me for this final season. After a few experiments, he went back to his favorite build ever: The wizard’s Firebird. It turned out to be very viable this season again, to the point where he managed to reach GR 150 and complete it. My poor barbarian couldn’t keep up anymore, and the best we achieved (or rather he achieved xD) while we were pushing as a duo was 147, and it was nothing short of a miracle, as my build definitely couldn’t handle something so high DPS wise.

That’s when I thought I simply couldn’t stop there! I knew my barbarian wouldn’t be able to do much better without a massive investment and I just didn’t feel like playing the Inna monk, so I decided to give the Firebird a shot myself. As expected, it took very little time to reach the level of power of my Frenzy barbarian (that’s how much difference in power there is from one build to another in this game), and I could focus on getting the best gear possible to make myself closer to reaching GR 150.

Finding that conduit pylon is always a “yes!” moment when you reach high GRs. It is by far your best ally to rack up kills no matter how powerful enemies are.

Once I became able to clear GR 146, it was obvious I wasn’t lacking that much in order to reach and complete the final rift. But I still needed that extra bit of power to propel myself a bit further. That is when I got lucky eventually got the (almost) perfect weapon, with all the good stats in ancient, and everything was almost maxed out. With that in hand, I “easily” managed to clear GR147 and my friend and I managed to clear a GR 150 as a duo (with the worst possible boss to boot xD). We were quite happy at the achievement especially since this season was our last shot at doing this. Now the only thing left was for me to clear my very own GR 150.

I had become powerful enough to kind of keep up with the rift timer, but no matter how many times I tried, I would just be missing about 1 minute, which quickly got frustrating. But my hope was that it would be possible to clear if I would just get a little push from a conduit pylon, which I had never seen in my 30 or so attempts.

But it eventually happened, with a double dose of luck, since the power pylon was also there! The boss that spawned was an easy one as well, the planets had aligned in my favor.

After so much time playing diablo it felt great to end on such a positive note. This screen felt like a certificate of some sort xD