Diablo 2 Terror Zones explained

So for the 2.5 patch PTR, this is kind of the idea of what’s going to be coming for the second season of Diablo 2 resurrected. You might have heard of these things called “Diablo 2 terror zones”. Today I’m going to try to give you a quick explanation for what this really means for your playthrough, for your end game leveling and your farming of runes and gear.

 

How the Diablo 2 terror zones work

When you’re playing online and you look in the chat menu, it’s going to tell you what area is currently being terrorized. So the monsters in these zones will be at least two levels higher than your current level or their original level, up to a maximum that is per difficulty. So what that essentially means, if you’re level seven and you’re somehow doing baal runs, those monsters are not going to be level nine, they will be their normal level. Because if you’re level seven, the monsters generally would be two levels higher than you are.

That’s not how it works. If the level has an incredibly high monster level and you’re incredibly low, they will still have their normal average monster level. So this does work for every difficulty, but it’s just ever so slightly different.

Normal

The base monsters, the white monsters, in other words, are two levels higher than you, but only up to level 45. That way you can’t get way too much experience in places like normal. The champions are four levels higher than you. The uniques are five level higher than you, up to a maximum there of 48 for the uniques.

 

Nightmare

Now, on Nightmare, it’s exactly the same. The base monsters are two levels higher than you, up to a maximum of level 71. The champions are four levels up to level 73. The uniques five levels higher than you, up to maximum of 74.

 

Hell

And when we move into Hell, it’s once again very similar. Two levels higher than you, up to level 96. The champions are four levels higher than you, up to level 98. The uniques, once again five, up to a maximum of level 99.

 

How are these Diablo 2 terror zones chosen?

They actually cycle through once every hour which zone it is changes, you can exit, come into another game and that same exact zone for that particular blocked out hour will be terrorized.

In Terrorized zones some monsters are going to be usually higher level because they’re going to be higher than you. Not necessarily based upon what the area level is. So in general, you should be getting much better experience from these particular zones when you’re killing monsters. This is going to change the way that you level late game quite a bit. If you are super high level like level 95, the monsters are going to be two levels higher than you. So that would be 97. The base monsters can’t be 97. The max will be 96, but you’re going to be getting a ton more experience from that.

 

Leveling with Diablo 2 terror zones

Generally, the way of leveling would be chaos runs and baal runs. But from these terrorized zones, you’re actually going to get way more experience than you would from doing Chaos and Baal runs. Because they’re higher level, you’d think that these areas would be a lot more difficult. That’s the kind of the reward for getting the more experience.

In our experience playing in these different terror zones, we did not notice the monsters being any more difficult. If you were just fighting the monsters in this area at any other time the difficulty was the same. We just went ahead and used the regular PTR characters that they gave you in order to test it out. There really was absolutely no issue. These characters weren’t perfectly min/maxed, they didn’t have all the perfect gear. However, they were built in whatever gear they had and went out there and did not have a struggle or a problem at all.

 

Drop way better items

On top of that, it’s very important to mention when you’re doing this end game leveling, because the monsters are having such a higher monster level, they actually have an opportunity to drop way better and more items and by more items. I don’t mean they literally drop a larger quantity, but there’s a larger base of items that they can be selected from, similar to how in level 85 areas, you can drop every single item in the game. If you’re a higher level character, the monsters will be higher level. So theoretically, if you’re 95 or 96, if you’re in Tal Rasha’s Tombs in act one or anything like that, you have the opportunity to drop every single unique item in the entire game. Mang songs Lesson, Griffons eye diadem, Deaths web unearthed wand, Tyraels might sacred armor, you name it, you can get it.

And the main reason why you could find way more of these super rare uniques is because in normal 85 areas, the champions will be a few levels higher than the regular White Monsters. So in an 85 area, those champions will be 87. So you can drop the TC 87 uniques. But in these new terror zones, the monster levels is going to be based upon what your character level is, who made the game.

 

Example

So if you are up in the higher 90s, you’re going to get that maximum level of 96 for the monster level, for the terror zones. That means every single monster including the white Monsters in the game, will be high enough monster level to have a high enough treasure class in order to drop every single item in the entire game. So no longer is it farming the pits and just taking out just the champion, because he’s the only one that has a chance of dropping you that Griffin’s eye.

This is super exciting, the late endgame, finding items, leveling up to 99, etc. Just imagine you’re like in act three, and all of a sudden on ladder reset, Tal Rasha’s Tomb gets terrorized. I’ll be honest, you might stop right there and hop back even though you might be high enough level already.