The Diablo games have odd ideas about difficulty. If you played Diablo 3 on normal you probably didn’t have to drink a single health potion until the end of act one. Cranking things up was the way to go, and plenty of people think the same is true of Diablo 4. Hard is the new normal—especially since, as well as offering slightly more of a challenge, it also rewards players with 75% more experience from monster kills and 75% more gold.
It’s still not the difficulty you go to if you really want to feel the pain, since there’s expert, penitent, and multiple levels of torment above that. In fact, players starting a brand new character to try out each new season expect to have a smooth introduction even on hard—which is why Diablo 4’s seventh season, the Season of Witchcraft, is a bit of a shock.
The story in Season 7 has it that the dangling magical heads on the Tree of Whispers have started to go missing, and we’ve been recruited by a witch named Gelena to track them down in return for cool witch powers, like the ability to summon exploding frogs. In the first dungeon Gelena leads you to are a bunch of zombies called the Headrotten, a tanky new enemy who take a bit more effort than usual to put down. And then you meet their boss, the Enraged Headless Husk.
This glowy jerk hits like a truck full of axes, and like the other Headrotten he has a barrier you have to chip away at before you even get to his hit points. Fighting your way over to him will earn you a couple of levels, but you’ll still be wielding basic gear, and will struggle to knock away that annoying sky-blue barrier before you even get to his health bar inside it.
On the Diablo 4 subreddit, players are sharing their surprise at this difficulty spike. “I have 2000 hrs in D4 and my Barb can’t kill him on Hard”, says HiFiMAN3878. “Glad it’s not just me”, commiserates how_sweet_it_is. “That barrier man. Playing on Hard and had to leave to do random events to gear up”, before clarifying “I enjoy the challenge and it’s nice to actually have to think and prepare for fights.”
Most players aren’t upset by this unusually early gear check. “I enjoyed it. Made me go out to get a few level and gears, got him at lvl 15. Happy it’s not just brainless kill everything at low level and there’s some challenges”, says Kaythar.
I had my arse handed to me by the Enraged Headless Husk as well, so now I’m off to do some looting elsewhere for a bit. Or I could pay someone else to do it for me, since that’s apparently a normal thing nobody needs to apologize for.