Diablo 4 player discovers you spend more time exploring than fighting in Nightmare Dungeons

Diablo 4
(Image credit: Blizzard)

A Diablo 4 veteran has run some math on Nightmare Dungeons, and come up with some intriguing results.

The post below outlines the experiment the player undertook for Season 1 of Diablo 4. They ran 10 Nightmare Dungeons on tiers between 5 and 10, and then analyzed the time spent fighting and simply running around, and revealed that the majority of time spent in the endgame dungeons was running around instead of fighting. 

I collected data on what percent of time in nightmare dungeons was spent actually fighting from r/diablo4

The ten runs through the Nightmare Dungeons saw 43% of the total time spent in combat, ploughing through bosses and mobs alike. The majority of the time however, the remaining 57%, was spent purely running around the Nightmare Dungeons, in search of the next objective or next foe to fight.

"The worst run had 21% combat time -- I had to double back twice after missing turns for objectives," further reads the post, admitting a little bit of error on their part. "Highest was ~65%, had pretty 'good' objectives (kill all enemies + slay the pile of eyeballs). I only had a few dungeons with a boss at the end, but they were consistently quite a bit less than 10% of the total dungeon time, usually around 5%."

It's worth noting the Nightmare Dungeons were run with a Rogue character, which feels like one of the speedier classes in Diablo 4. One of the top-rated Reddit comments posits that Necromancers feel like "slugs," so it'd be pretty interesting to see if the combat to running ratio gets worse with the undead class.

There's a lot of bemoaning the Nightmare Dungeons' objectives in the responses on Reddit. "There is nothing fun about missing some prisoner you have to untie and having to run back through 10 rooms you already cleared, if that’s the end game then there is no point in me playing," reads one reply. Perhaps players would be happier with Nightmare Dungeons with less time between enemies.

There's a new Diablo 4 money bug on the scene, and it makes a money-saving activity actually cost you money instead.

Hirun Cryer

Hirun Cryer is a freelance reporter and writer with Gamesradar+ based out of U.K. After earning a degree in American History specializing in journalism, cinema, literature, and history, he stepped into the games writing world, with a focus on shooters, indie games, and RPGs, and has since been the recipient of the MCV 30 Under 30 award for 2021. In his spare time he freelances with other outlets around the industry, practices Japanese, and enjoys contemporary manga and anime.

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