Patch 2.3: Torment Difficulty Undocumented Buffs

Blizzard has updated their game guide with some of the general game changes in Patch 2.3, including the increased rewards and perils you’ll find on the new, higher levels of Torment. We wrote an article about this back at the start of the PTR, trying to figure if Torment 10 was worth it, and included the interesting figures *not* listed on Blizzard’s page.

Here’s the official Blue values for how all difficulty levels in the game scale up, in terms of exp, gold find, monster damage, and monster hit points.

Big damn jumps there, but remember that T7-T10 increase more per than T1-T6. T1 = GR10, T2 = GR13, T3 = GR16, T4 = GR19, T5 = GR22, and T6 = GR25, but above that things go up by 5s, so T7 = GR30, T8 = GR35, T9 = GR40, and T10 = GR45. And the game grows harder more than it does more rewarding, which is why comparing T10 vs. T6 = 25x higher monster hit points and 4x higher monster damage, but only double the gold find and triple the exp.

Torment Difficulty Undocumented Buffs

Those are the obvious changes though; the stuff you can see just hovering on the difficulty levels in the game creation screen. Our focus in that article from July was trying to figure out the undocumented stuff that you can only see by play testing. What does T7-T10 do to your chances of getting a Death Breath (or 2) to drop, to the number of Horadric Cache materials per bag, to the odds of a Rift Guardian dropping a Greater Rift Key, and to your chances of getting an Infernal Machine and/or Demonic Organ?

The following are estimated figures from PTR testing and some live Patch 2.3 testing. These figures don’t seem to have changed much since the start of the PTR, but please hit the comments with corrections or agreements, so we can try to arrive at an overall community consensus. All % chances are estimates due to non-infinite testing time.

Torment 6: 75% chance of 1 Deaths Breath per elite*, 90% chance of 1 Rift Key per Guardian, 3 Horadric Cache materials per bag, 50% chance of 1 Machine per KW, 100% chance of 1 Organ per Uber.

Torment 7: 90% of 1 DB per Elite*, 100% for 1 Rift Key per Guardian, 4 Horadric Cache materials per bag, 70% chance of 1 machine per KWs, 50% chance of 2 Organs per Uber.

Torment 8: 100% 1 DB and 10% for 2 DBs per Elite*, 100% for 1 Rift Key and 15% chance of 2 Rift Keys per Guardian, 4 Horadric Cache materials per bag, 80% chance of 1 machine from KWs, 90% chance of 2 organs per Uber, 25% chance of 3 organs.

Torment 9: 20% chance of 2 DBs per Elite*, 25% chance of 2 Rift Keys per Guardian, 4 Horadric Cache materials per bag, 20% chance of a 2nd cache legendary, 90% chance of 1 machine from KWs and 30% chance of 2 machines from KWs, 50% chance of 3 organs per Uber.

Torment 10: 33% chance of 2 DBs per Elite, 50% chance of 2 Rift Keys per Guardian, 4 Horadric Cache materials, 50% chance of a 2nd cache legendary, 99% for 1 machine from KWs and 33% chance of 2 machines from KWs, 75% chance of 3 organs per Uber.

* Deaths Breath drop odds seem to be the same from Goblins and Golden chests as from Elites.

Basically, as you go up from T7 and higher, you increase your drop odds for everything, and above T8 you start getting double and triple drops for lots of things you’ll never see more than 1 of on T6.

The early sweet spot seems to be T7, since you almost always get 1 DB per elite, usually get a Machine from each KW, and always get the maximum (4) stacks of cache materials. T7 is the setting to speed farm bounties.

Moving up higher than T7, especially going up to T10, pays off most obviously on the Infernal Machine event, since you get more machines per KW and more Organs per Uber. Don’t sleep on the chance for double Death Breaths on T8+, either. You’ve probably got thousands of them now, pre-season, but you can never have too many. DBs were everyone’s crafting/cubing bottleneck on the PTR during Season 4 testing, (much more so than Forgotten Souls) and that economic state will surely return when S4 goes live this weekend.