I’ve been playing Diablo IV since launch and have accumulated roughly 8,000 hours across 14 seasons, averaging around the same amount of playtime each season. This season alone, I have around 570 hours played and have pushed my Barbarian to Tower 146, currently around rank 41.
I’m saying this not because I expect playtime to guarantee a leaderboard position, but because after thousands of hours with the game, I think there is an important distinction Tower needs to make between progression through RNG and competition through skill.I really like the Tower and the fact that Diablo IV finally has a leaderboard where we can push our builds against other players. This is something many of us have wanted for a long time.
But after spending around 570 hours this season and pushing my Barbarian to Tower 146 and currently around rank 41, I think Transfigurations create a serious problem for Tower as a competitive leaderboard.
I understand that Blizzard has described Tower primarily as a way to test how far our builds can go rather than as a pure competitive mode. But once you add a public leaderboard, limited rounds, rank brackets, exclusive titles and a unique reward for rank #1, players are naturally going to compete.
And competition works best when players compete under reasonably comparable conditions.
RNG is not the same thing as skill.
RNG belongs in Diablo. Finding an incredible item is one of the reasons we play ARPGs. I don’t want Transfigurations removed from the game.
The problem is how much they can influence a competitive leaderboard.
In my case, after roughly 570 hours, despite specifically farming and looking for Physical Transfigurations, I have accumulated around 60%[x] Physical damage from Transfigurations.
I’ve inspected other Whirlwind Barbarians around the top of the leaderboard with roughly 100–160%[x] Physical from Transfigurations. One player we’ve compared has around 152%[x], despite having only around 617 hours played this season.
That’s roughly an 8% difference in playtime, but an enormous difference in one of the most important final damage multipliers.
And there is no gameplay decision I can make to obtain that missing Physical damage. I cannot position better to make it drop. I cannot manage my cooldowns better to make it drop. I cannot group monsters better to make it drop.
It simply has to drop.
That is the distinction between RNG and skill.
Skill in Tower is knowing how to build your character, grouping monsters efficiently, choosing the right packs, positioning correctly, managing cooldowns and defensive windows, maximizing damage uptime, avoiding deaths and executing the run efficiently.
Those are things the player controls and can improve.
Getting multiple perfect Physical Transfigurations — possibly together with additional useful Transfigurations such as CDR, attack speed or crowd control — is not something the player can improve through execution. Two equally skilled players can farm for hundreds of hours and finish the season with dramatically different character ceilings simply because one of them was luckier.
At very high Tower levels this becomes even more important. More damage can also indirectly provide more defense: if your Transfigurations already provide enough damage, you can sacrifice offensive affixes elsewhere for Maximum Resource, defensive options or other utility while still meeting the DPS requirement.
So RNG can affect both sides of the equation.
This doesn’t mean players at the top aren’t skilled.
Clearing extremely high Tower levels obviously requires good execution. A lucky character does not play itself.
But the leaderboard cannot tell us how much of the difference between two players came from execution and how much came from hundreds of hours of unequal RNG.
If two players compete in a race, skill should determine who uses the car better. RNG shouldn’t randomly give one driver a much more powerful engine.
My suggestion would be simple:
Disable Transfigurations inside Tower, or normalize their values for leaderboard runs.
They could remain exactly as they are everywhere else in Diablo IV. We would still have the excitement of finding crazy Transfiguration items and using them throughout the rest of the game.
But inside Tower, removing or normalizing this extreme layer of RNG would make the leaderboard much more representative of build knowledge, strategy and player execution.
This becomes especially important because Tower doesn’t just show a number. There are rank-based reward brackets — #1, #2–10, #11–100, #101–500, etc. — and exclusive titles. When #1 vs #2 or #10 vs #11 can mean a unique reward, I think the competitive environment should minimize factors that players fundamentally cannot control.
Diablo should have RNG. A competitive leaderboard should have skill.
Tower can have both, but right now I think Transfigurations give RNG too much influence over the second one.
I love the concept of Tower and I want to see it become better, not easier. Give us a more level playing field inside Tower and let us find out who can actually push their build the furthest.“I cannot position better to make it drop. I cannot manage my cooldowns better to make it drop. I cannot group monsters better to make it drop. It simply has to drop.”