Greater Rift Mechanics

Introduction

Greater Rifts (also referred to as GR) play the biggest role in Diablo III's Endgame. In this post we are going to take a deep look into the mechanics behind it!

General

To open a Greater Rift you need a Greater Rift Keystone obtained in Nephalem Rifts. The higher the cleared Nephalem Rift is the higher the amount of average keys you will receive as reward. On Torment 16 you will receive 3 or 4 keys with equal probability. Cain's Destiny set can increase your average number of keys by 25%.

Click the Nephalem Obelisk next to Orek in town to open a GR & choose a Rift level. You will unlock the first tiers by completing Nephalem Rifts on certain difficulty levels.

On top of that and further along all the way to GR150 (which is the cap) you unlock new tiers by completing the Greater Rifts. To complete a Greater Rift you need to kill monsters until you reach 100% progression and then kill the Rift Guardian (also known as RG) within a 15 minute time window. The remaining time is displayed by a timer on the right side. Depending on how fast you complete the GR, you will unlock +1 (10:00-15 minutes completion time), +2 (5:00-9:59 minutes completion time) or +3 (0:00-4:59 minutes completion time) tiers.

Leaderboards
Every time you complete a Greater Rift in time you are also placed in the in game Leaderboards if you are within the top 1000 Players for each individual category. The categories on the Leaderboards are:

• Overall Solo for each of the 7 Classes.
  Since Season 23, each Class has 6 additional separate Leaderboards: one for each of the 5 Class Sets and 1 for No (6) Bonus Set (Usually Legacy of Nightmares and Legacy of Dreams builds).
• 2-Player
• 3-Player
• 4-Player

Once you kill the Rift Guardian of a Greater Rift in time all your transmogrification, gear, skills and passives will be snapshot onto the Leaderboards (if you'd hit the Top 1000). Everyone can view your clear on the Leaderboards and see your full setup except your follower. However this has not always been the case.

From the introduction of Greater Rifts into the game until Season 4, only the transmogrification of the players setup was shown and the actual build remained hidden. This was changed for the sake of more transparency, but also leads to some problems where a lot of people just copy paste whatever the Rank 1 player is using without understanding the mechanics behind the build or simply being unable to play it due to lack of Paragons. In the end this feature is useful to get a general idea of what builds the top clears used, especially for newer or returning players.

Rewards
Monsters killed in Greater Rifts don't drop any loot. All the Gold-generating effects (such as Boon of the Hoarder or Goldskin) are also disabled. Instead you get a massive amount of loot when you finish the rift by killing the Rift Guardian.

The Rift Guardian drops Gold, Gems, crafting materials and Blood Shards, the amount of which scales linearly with Greater Rift tier. It also drops up to 12 items of varying quality. The average quality of these items increases with the Greater Rift tier but somewhere around GR100 it becomes high enough that virtually every item dropped will be a Legendary or Set item. From that point on the item drops effectively stop scaling.

If you do not have all Legendary Gems collected, the Rift Guardian is guaranteed to drop one of the Gems you are missing. The first gem you get this way is always Bane of the Powerful. Legacy of Dreams has significantly higher drop chance compared to all other gems and is usually found soon after. Otherwise the order is completely random.

If you complete a Greater Rift in time, you can attempt to upgrade your Legendary Gems by talking to Urshi (who spawns next to a random player). You get 3 upgrade attempts baseline, one more if you don't die for the entire rift and another one if you pay Gold to empower the rift before entering it. You can spend these attempts on any gems that you have on your character or in your shared stash. The chance of successful upgrade depends on the Greater Rift tier and Gem's rank. Refer to the table for the exact chances on each level.

After you kill the Rift Guardian (and upgraded your Gems if you succeeded), you can talk to Orek in town to finish the quest. This closes the Greater Rift and grants you a large amount of Gold and Experience scaling exponentially with the Greater Rift tier.

New personal solo records will also unlock a new maximum Blood Shards cap the player can carry at a time. You start with a base cap of 500 and get an increase of +10 Blood Shards per cleared Greater Rift Level. That means if you manage to clear a GR100 solo you get a cap of:

500 Base + GR100 * 10 = 1,500 Blood Shards

In a fresh season or on a new account you will also get access to the best items in the game, the Primal Ancients, by clearing a GR70 Solo! Completing a GR75 Solo will also unlock Torment 16 difficulty in Public Games for your character. This is done to ensure that you are capable to clear certain content before being assigned to a public group of your power level.

Death Penalty
The penalty for death inside a Greater Rift is the additional time it takes to respawn: On the very first death you can respawn instantly without losing any time, but every death beyond that will increase your respawn timer by +5 seconds, up to a maximum of 30 seconds. The Greater Rift timer of 15 minutes will keep counting during your respawn time. There is however one counterplay to this mechanic, which consists to use the "Resurrect at Checkpoint" button to respawn instantly at the entrance of the Greater Rift floor you currently are.

The GR150 Cap
When introduced, the Greater Rift System was meant to be an infinite scaling system, which was actually the case for a long time as there was no way to reach the theoretical cap. However, the powercreep brought every patch eventually allowed players to reach and clear the highest possible Rifts with ease.

Nowadays, it became the rule rather than the exception that GR150 is cleared within the first few days of a fresh season and speed cleared within a few minutes in the final season push, hence the use of the term Time Attack.

Blizzard has stated that the Greater Rift Cap of 150 is here to stay as it is and rather focuses on adding new builds as well as improving existing ones to further add variety to Diablo III's endgame. Check out the full blogpost here.

Scaling

Greater Rifts get more and more difficult but also more and more rewarding the higher you go.
Each level you go up the multiplicative increase is:

Most of the time you will be playing Greater Rifts above level 70. There the scaling can be illustrated as follows:

• Monster Health doubles every 4.5 tiers
• Monster Damage doubles every 30 tiers
• Experience gain doubles every 14 tiers

Multiplayer Scaling
The monster life further increases by 100% for each Player beyond the first one who joined the Greater Rift when it was opened. The monster damage remains the same. As there are some amazing group synergies and combinations available as well as the Strength in Numbers buff the group benefits far outweigh the monster life gain. You can check the full Multiplayer scaling here.

History & Trials

Back when Greater Rifts got introduced you had to farm Bounties in order to open Torment Rifts with special Keys. Then you had to farm Torment Rifts in order to get Keystone of Trials from the Rift Guardian to access the Trial Realm.

The Trial Realm was a relatively small area where players had to clear waves of monsters in a certain time window. Depending on how high a wave of monster you or your party cleared in a given time you would be rewarded with a Greater Rift Keystone of the cleared difficulty level. A unique playstyle that was required to gain the highest keys resulted in an entire META revolving just around the Trial Realm.

This system was changed in 2015 with Season 4 to the system we know today as it was deemed players had to go through a lot of effort to actually play the real Diablo III endgame: Greater Rifts!

Map Layouts

There are a variety of different maps that randomly appear when a Greater Rift is opened. Generally Players are looking for open map layouts where it is easy to build up density of trash monsters while damaging Elites and dragging them along to finish them off. On top of that the top Rift layouts have plenty of Pylon spots for very flexible use. Here is a full list of all possible Maps and a short description of each map in the pool, sorted by their average performance. Maps that are part of the Orek's Dream selection are highlighted in Blue.

Greater Rift Map Pool

Patch 2.7.3 Update (Season 26)

• Sewers & Hidden Aqueducts have been removed from the GR map pool entirely.
• 3 new good maps were added: Fields of Misery, Briarthorn Cemetery & Desolate Sands.
• Good open maps chance has been adjusted to be more common.
• Greater Rifts can be closed without going back to menu by talking to Orek in town (single player only).
• Certain unrewarding and dangerous monster types have been buffed to give more progression (Fallen Shamans, Impalers, Succubus, Guardians).
• Orek's Dream has been introduced, a special rare Greater Rift that has overall high quality map layouts and monster types.

Learn more Pushing Tips in this video (80min)

Monster Sets

There are a variety of different monsters with different progressions that appear inside a Greater Rift. Here is an overview and ranking based on thousands of pushing attempts with dozens of different builds. Note that despite some monster sets ranking better than others, they can still turn out better or worse depending on their exact monster distribution, which is random. In some cases there are additional factors that make a difference such as species-specific damage bonuses (e.g. Pig Sticker), on-kill effects (e.g. Exploding Palm) or certain Seasonal Themes (like the killstreak effects from S19 and S21) which make small targets (such as small spiders) much more valuable.

For a closer look at specific very dangerous monster types and how to deal with them, check out our Hardcore Guide! For a detailed overview including progression, damage types, full monster list of each set & more, visit the Warpath Website (which is also where the monster set numbers from the table below originate). Monster sets that are part of the Orek's Dream selection are highlighted in Blue.

Monster Sets

Rift Guardians

The Rift Guardian spawns after 100% progression is reached and is the final boss of the Greater Rift. They all have the same amount of hit points, count as Elites and are different monster types. There are a total of 25 Rift Guardians each with different and unique mechanics.

To learn more, make sure to check out our Full Guide on Rift Guardian Mechanics by Chewingnom, including how to use their Force Teleport, optimize Bane of the Stricken stacking and outplay all of their abilities!

Pylon Mechanics

Rules & Management
Another important mechanic inside Greater Rifts are Pylons. Pylons are very important and can make the difference between an attempt and a clear in push. Here is all you need to know about Pylons:

• Each Pylon type can only spawn once within the same Greater Rift.
• It is only possible to spawn up to four Pylons per Greater Rift.
• After the Rift Guardian is spawned, Pylons cannot spawn anymore.
• Pylon spawn locations are always fixed in every layout. With enough practice, you can be able to tell where every Pylon location is just by looking at the layout!
• Pylon spawn chance is tied to how much progress you did. This chance is reset to ~1% after spawning a Pylon and scales linearly up to ~50% progress where your chance to find a Pylon on the next spot is 100%.
• As the base spawn chance is ~1%, you can get a Pylon at 0% progress, or get two Pylons in a row without doing any progress. That is however very unlikely.
• Due to the aforementioned rules, the optimal progression to actively look for a Pylon is between 20% and 33%. The sooner you find a Pylon, the sooner you can make progress towards spawning another!
• Pylon spawn locations are checked when you are 75 yards away from them, which is further than your screen edges (50 to 60 yards). Take care or you can miss a Pylon!
• Pylon spawn locations all have an independant chance to spawn a Pylon. Because you don't get a Pylon on a spot doesn't mean you can't get one on the next spot without doing any progress!
  This means you can check two Pylon spawn locations in a row if you have enough at disposition and you did a lot of progress. However, if you don't get any Pylon after checking two locations, you need to make some progress before checking another spot.
• You can check on purpose Pylon spawn locations to "block" them if your team does not want a Pylon on the floor you're fighting on. The same way, you can spawn Pylons on the next floor while your team is fighting on the previous floor.
• In group push, the Pylon management is generally the responsibility of Supports, especially the zBarb.
• Pylon effects are lost if you teleport out of the Greater Rift. This is especially useful for Shield Pylon as Supports generally want to be able to use their Bottomless Potion of Kulle-Aid to break walls. This can also be used to remove the Speed Pylon knockback effect while retaining the other benefits.
• The only item interacting with Pylons is The Flavor of Time, which doubles the Pylon effect duration for players wearing it. Followers can wear it for you in solo as it emanates.

Pylon Types

• Channeling Pylon
  • Effect: Reduces resource costs by 100% and all cooldowns by 75%.
  • Duration: 30 seconds
  • Best use: Offensive for high cooldown burst skills like the Necromancer's Land of the Dead and to skip maps quickly by spamming movement speed abilities.

• Conduit Pylon
  • Effect: Releases Lightning ticks from your character damaging monsters and scaling with the Greater Rift level. Deals reduced damage to Rift Guardians.
  • Duration: 30 seconds
  • Best use: At the end of open maps after dragging Elites close to it.

• Shield Pylon
  • Effect: Grants immunity to all incoming damage and Crowd Control effects.
  • Duration: 60 seconds
  • Best use: In huge prepared pulls or on the Rift Guardian.

• Speed Pylon
  • Effect: Increases Movement Speed by 100%, Attack Speed by 30% additive, grants the ability to move unhindered and to knock monsters up applying a Crowd Control effect onto them.
  • Duration: 60 seconds
  • Best use: This Pylon is skipped by some builds and often in group play because of the added Crowd Control effect, but it still can be used to skip floors fast or to help stacking Bane of the Stricken on the Rift Guardian. Leaving the Greater Rift for a moment only removes the knockback effect and let you keep the other benefits.

• Power Pylon
  • Effect: Grants you a 250% separate damage multiplier (x3.5).
  • Duration: 30 seconds
  • Best use: Usually in huge pulls with some Elites timed with Convention of Elements cycle or on the Rift Guardian after stacking Bane of the Stricken for some time.

Fishing

Getting a high rank on the Leaderboards usually requires a huge amount of GR fishing (i.e. resetting until you get a good run). The process of trying to achieve a new personal best or leaderboard rank is known as pushing (and we have a full guide on that, too!).

You are looking for a top tier map with a top tier mob type, usually a Conduit Pylon and a decent boss for your individual build. Sometimes you even rely on some more RNG factors like Seasonal Themes (S19, S21) or Elite Affixes like Missile Dampening. Here is a list of usual RNG factors that go into Greater Rift fishing and we can "build" our dream Greater Rift with roughly estimated chances:

1. You need a good Rift Tileset: Festering Woods is one of the best ones.
~ 10% chance

2. You need a good Tileset Layout: On Festering Woods, the best tilesets are 4 corner layouts.
~ 20% chance

3. You need a good Mobtype: Transformers or Lacuni Slashers for instance.
~30% chance

4. You need a good density of trash monsters or good amount of specific monsters (Unholy Thralls or Wretched Mothers for instance).
~ 33.3% chance

5. You need good Elite Affixes: Preferably no Wormwhole or Juggernaut Elites.
~ 20% chance

6. You need good Elite Types: You want to have mostly melee Elites (these usually stay inside the pull and follow very easily) or Summoners, Mothers, Vile Hives, Maggots to spawn additional progress and/or Area Damage.
~ 15% chance

7. You want to finish the Rift in 1 to 3 Pulls ideally to lose not too much time moving and building a new pull.
~ Covered in 1. 2. 3. & 4.

8. You need good Pylons: Ideally Conduit Pylon for the Rift, Power Pylon and/or Speed Pylon for the Rift Guardian. In solo, Shield Pylon is great during the Rift for most builds.
~ 25% chance

9. You want to get 100% Progression on one map to not lose times with loading screens, travel times and grouping up monsters. Getting ~80% Progression in one map and finish with a Conduit Pylon on the second map is more likely to happen and great as well.
~ Covered in 1. 2. 3. & 4.

10. You need a good Rift Guardian depending on your build, completely stationary single target or melee with minions for Oculus Rings for instance.
~ 24% chance

That leaves us with a rough estimation about the chance to get a dream Rift scenario:

0.1 * 0.2 * 0.3 * 0.333 * 0.2 * 0.15 * 0.25 * 0.24 = 0.00143856%

Or 1 in around 69k for the absolute perfect Rift. Of course you don't need a perfect Rift by any means to get a top rank, it is rather just a theoretical best case scenario. You can expect a very good Rift that covers most of these RNG factors roughly every 50-100 keys.

Summary

Greater Rifts are very RNG heavy and are a huge part of the game. Getting a high Leaderboard rank requires a lot of fishing and determination from the player. The system around the Greater Rift cap and the randomness factor could be greatly improved, but it has already come a long way since its launch and has been improved tremendously. Overall Greater Rifts are a great endgame tool and are fun to play solo as well as in groups with your friends.
May RNGsus be with you!

Credits

Written by Rob.
Contributions by Chewingnom.
Updates by wudijo.