One of the major announcements in today’s Season 8 PTR Campfire Chat was that Blizzard are changing how summoning materials work for endgame bosses! Let’s take a look at the new system.
Summoning Materials as Lair Keys
First off, you can now freely summon all endgame bosses. When defeated, they will drop a much smaller amount of loot and a locked chest with the majority of the rewards inside. To open that chest you’ll need a key, and that key is one of the current summoning materials. So, you fight Grigoire, he drops a Hoard chest similar to the Helltide ones, and you need Living Steel to open it.
Another big difference is that each player in the party will need to pay to open their chest individually. So everyone has to use their own keys every run to get loot. However, there is a larger chance at an extra Unique the more players are in a party.
Those are the basics, and here is the full info:
Lair Boss Rework
- Bosses formerly known as Endgame or Ladder Bosses have been broken out into 3 tiers: Initiate, Greater, and Exalted Lair Bosses to convey their varying difficulty and rewards.
- Initiate Lair Bosses: Beast in the Ice, Grigoire, Lord Zir, Varshan, and Urivar (available for Vessel of Hatred owners only).
- Greater Lair Bosses: Andariel, Duriel, and Harbringer of Hatred (available for Vessel of Hatred owners only).
- Exalted Lair Bosses: Belial, Lord of Lies.
- You must be on Torment Difficulty I or higher to fight any Lair Boss.
- Lair Boss Loot
- Lair Bosses no longer require boss materials to summon and provide a vastly reduced reward upon death. Instead, when a Lair boss dies, a chest called a Hoard will spawn containing its loot. Each player must individually spend boss materials to open their Hoard.
- The first Unique item dropped by a Lair Boss will be from their unique pool. Further Unique Items will have a 50% chance to be from the general Unique pool.
- When playing in a party, Lair Bosses have a 33% chance per additional party member to drop an extra Unique Item from their unique pool.
- Lair Bosses now drop 5 Unique Items in Torment IV, instead of 6.
- Lair Boss Keys
- Each boss requires a Lair Boss Key to unlock their Hoard. This is one specific item for each boss, such as: Malignant Heart (Varshan), Living Steel (Grigorie), Distilled Fear (Beast in the Ice), Exquisite Blood (Lord Zir), Judicator’s Mask (Urivar), Shard of Agony (Duriel), Pin-Cushioned Doll (Andariel), Hatred Hearts (Harbringer of Hatred, Betrayer’s Husk (Belial, Lord of Lies).
- All Initiate Lair Bosses have the chance to drop a Stygian Stone, which can be converted into any Greater Lair Boss Key of your choice.
- Lair Boss Keys can stack up to 99.
- Locating Boss Lairs–the home of Lair Bosses.
- Boss Lairs have a unique map icon to help distinguish them.
- Once discovered, you can now teleport directly to a Boss Lair.
- Each Boss Lair description on the map lists the required Hoard Key and if you currently own a sufficient amount.
Developer’s Note: We’ve received feedback that players would jump into a party, have a member of their party pay the material cost to summon a boss, kill the boss to earn the rewards, then leave the party. This behavior felt unfair to players who were paying the material cost to summon the boss, so now each player must pay the material cost to reap a boss’ rewards from their Hoard. Additionally, we received feedback that it felt unfair to pay the material cost to summon a boss to test your build against, only to die and not receive any rewards. Now, you can fight any Lair Boss on Torment Difficulty I and higher to determine if you have what it takes to best the boss before sinking materials into them.