Season 26 Release Date
Season 26 “Echoing Nightmare” will begin on April 15h at 5PM (PDT/CEST/KST) shortly after the next Diablo 3 update. This update is expected to be released on April 12th. Season 26 introduces the Echoing Nightmare, the first Seasonal Theme that introduces a brand-new activity to the game!
In the Echoing Nightmare, players will experience an intense, densely packed, increasingly challenging event that stretches their ability to stay in the fight as long as possible. We found inspiration in Orek's warning, "Many nephalem have stood where you are now, but few succeeded in overcoming the trials." The Echoing Nightmare explores what happened to those Nephalem who did not succeed.
Read more on the official news post here.
Echoing Nightmare General Overview
Echoing Nightmares are a new rewarding endgame activity set within the memories of fallen Nephalem. You must first acquire a Petrified Scream from a Greater Rift Guardian, and then cube it to enter. Once inside you'll be challenged with an endless wave of enemies until you are either overwhelmed or killed!
Here are the key points about this game system:
- An endless wave of monsters is spawning once the Echoing Nightmare has started. There is a sort of progress bar on your UI that fills depending on how many monsters there are in the area. If the bar is filled, you are considered overwhelmed and the encounter ends.
- Each Echoing Nightmare has a randomly chosen monster type. Hence some monster types might favor the player more depending on the aggressiveness of some monster types or how many ranged monsters they have.
- The difficulty scales similarly to Greater Rift Levels as players progress throughout the encounter.
- Players can progress faster by defeating monsters quickly. It is possible to jump up to 12 Levels in one go if you defeat all the monsters spawned.
- 4 Pylons are located in the area, one in each corner: Conduit Pylon, Power Pylon, Channeling Pylon and Speed Pylon. Using them strategically for the final waves can be the key to lead you to the victory!
- Monsters cannot be affected by any kind of Hard Crowd Control. This means pulling abilities are useless and it also heavily nerfs builds relying on Hard CC to deal damage (Necromancers with Krysbin's Sentence for instance). However the monsters can still be slowed.
- Rewards and monsters' HP and damage stop scaling after Wave 150 even if the Echoing Nightmare goes on until you are overwhelmed or die. Unfortunately there is no leaderboard so there is pretty much no incentive to try to reach the highest wave.
- Players receive the following rewards upon completing an Echoing Nightmare: Experience, Legendary Items, Blood Shards, Gems and a new Legendary Gem, Whisper of Atonement.
In order to spice up Echoing Nightmares, there are special enemies as well as some random events that can occur:
- Rare Monsters can spawn but not Champion Packs.
- Hellish Machinations appear and spawn streams of Exploding Lunatics, which run towards the player to explode and proc a Molten Explosion afterwards.
- A Fallen Nephalem can spawn randomly. Killing him triggers an AoE that one shots every monster within ~25 yards when it detonates after a few seconds.
- A random Rift Guardian spawns every 30 Waves.
- A Bandit Shrine can randomly spawn anywhere in the area as you progress.
- Green Meteors fall from the sky after Wave 100.
We will have a dedicated Echoing Nightmare Guide soon for the full details on how each of them works, a brand new Echoing Nightmare Build Tier List and our META post for the best strategies!
Maxroll Updates
Our team is working hard to update Maxroll and all our content (Guides, Tier Lists, META) for Season 26 during the course of the next days! We expected to be finish the update process by Sunday, April 10th right when Season 25 ends. D3Planner will be updated completely once Patch 2.7.3 hits the live servers a few days later. The PTR version is already available here. Meanwhile, we wish you the best of luck in the final days of Season 25. Stay tuned :)
The Maxroll D3 Team
