Diablo 4 Nightmare Dungeons Guide: How To Unlock, Monsters, Rewards, Sigils & Glyphs Farming

You've got your hell tides, world bosses, and world events but nightmare dungeons are probably the most significant when Diablo 4 launches. Today, we want to talk about Diablo 4 Nightmare Dungeons, the primary game activity that they're going to use to farm experience in the late game and also level up your glyphs.

Diablo 4 Nightmare Dungeons Guide: How To Unlock, Monsters, Rewards, Sigils & Glyphs Farming

Nightmare Dungeons are essentially beefed-up versions of normal dungeons. You might have played this in the beta already, so this is just a regular dungeon but now it is amplified with those nightmares and affixes. Nightmare sigils, which may be crafted by the occultist, when triggered, transform some dungeons into more challenging versions of themselves. As you go through the tiers, the difficulty increases. There are a few mechanics that play here that are important to understand to be effective with how you can progress and how you can beat those Diablo 4 Nightmare Dungeons effectively.

How To Unlock Diablo 4 Nightmare Dungeons

Start off a nightmare dungeon, you're going to need to use a nightmare sigil these can be found in the consumables tab of your character's inventory screen after you visited the Tree of Whispers and obtained your first one. When you use a nightmare sigil, check the map you'll see a different icon for the specific dungeon that that nightmare sigil has affected. Additionally, when your character arrives at a nightmare dungeon entrance, you're going to see runes or sigils that are sort of animating or falling on the entrance letting you know that that's the nightmare version of that dungeon the monster's difficulty scales as the higher value of the Nightmare dungeon rises. You're only allowed a specific amount of deaths before you fail the challenge of completing any nightmare dungeon. However, resurrecting a fallen teammate is a pretty solid loophole to get around that mechanic as it doesn't penalize you when you resurrect the teammate for dying. It doesn't count toward the total deaths on the run because you saved them.

Diablo 4 Nightmare Dungeons Monsters

The monsters do scale up with both damage and health the higher tiers you go and they also scale up in levels. The monster's level is always exactly 54 levels higher than the tier of the dungeon that you're running. So that means that the highest monster level in the game is 154 and the tier 1 nightmare version will have level 55 monsters. It doesn't have the minimum because it starts in Nightmare difficulty with tier 1 sigils, so you can only access them in the end game after the campaign and then goes all the way to tier 100.

Diablo 4 Nightmare Dungeons Loots

At the end of each nightmare dungeon, you will get rare items, legendaries, XP and Gold. Also at the end of nightmare dungeons, you're going to see an invulnerability bubble that surrounds this object that you engage with, so that you can spend time looking at the glyphs that you have and spending experience points that you get rewarded for completing nightmare dungeons.

Diablo 4 Nightmare Sigils

There are two different types of sigils in Diablo IV Nightmare Dungeons, there’s ancestral one and the sacred one. This is tied to the world tier, the ancestral one is only World tier 3, and then others are only world tier 4. This corresponds to sacred items that you can find and accessible items these are just the higher tier items that drop in the higher difficulties. You can actually access sacred sigils when in terminal difficulty or you cannot access ancestors' sigils when in nightmare difficulty. Between those two steps, the sigils also become more intense. Sacred sigils in Nightmare difficulty have up to 12 free revives allowed but on the ancestors, sigils it's only 4 revives. This means that the most important consideration is that when you're trying to beat  Nightmare Dungeon pushing sort of saying for example when they make leaderboards down the line, we will be to actually stay alive. For now, this is the only thing that you have to worry about it's just not dying.

The affixes themselves become more intense. Every single sigil always has one positive affix and then there are also additional modifiers. They are environmental modifiers. So there are up to four negative affixes and one positive one every single time on the ancestral ones. On the second one, it's a lot easier because there are only two of them. The thing is that generally sacred dungeons are not really worth doing. The reason is that as you go to higher tiers you get significantly more XP to level up your glyphs, in fact, it scales linearly, and it has a base value of 2xp. On top of that, you generally want to try to finish your renowned grind very early so when you have your first character and you reach the end game then renown is your main objective. If you want to get those skill points, you want to get those paragon points on the renowned system so you just progress past those nightmare sigils at least on the sacred tier quite easily.

How To Farm Paragon Levels In Diablo 4?

Another thing to consider here is your character's XP. When you defeat those monsters, you're going to get XP and the optimal difficulty to XP ratio is being behind the monsters by exactly three in levels. If you are three levels behind monsters, you get up to a 25% bonus XP which is the cap of bonus XP when you're under level, so you cannot find non-level 100 monsters and suddenly get five times the XP. If you can still go higher tiers effortlessly, then sure. But generally, you want to be exactly three behind so it's like the optimal ratio. You want to run a Nightmare Dungeon sigil that is around 50 to 53 levels below your character's level.

In terms of leveling up efficiently, this is definitely the way to go so that you have a fast clear speed while also getting optimal XP per hour. What it also means is that when you are at level 100 or approach level 100, you actually want to run Nightmare Dungeons of roughly tier 50 or so. Because 100 minus 50 is tier 50 or even higher. If you feel comfortable going higher tiers, you do get slightly more XP after that as well. Because the monsters scale up in levels but it's not really such a big bonus compared to the first three levels being on the level of the monsters. It also means that especially towards the end of the progression, you can really start boosting those glyphs that you use in your paragon boards.

How To Craft Sigil In Diablo 4?

In the official crafting interface, you can actually just go there and craft any sigil you want. There's actually a roadblock or progression you have to achieve to actually unlock this. You just have to do one Nightmare Dungeon, then crafting and salvaging sigils unlocks and you can use sigil powder that you get either just from the runs directly. For example, we can do side events in the dungeons, they can drop a bit of sigil powder or just salvage sigil. Then you can use that to craft sigils. When it comes to actually running those Nightmare Dungeons, you have to actually go there and use those sigils. You don't really want to waste your time traveling around. Later on, when you're steamrolling through the dungeons, you probably want to try to stack up the same sigils multiple times so they can chain them back to back. 

There is this dungeon reset timer when you finish a dungeon, you have to wait a certain amount of time before it resets. But if sigil is actually not the case. You can always just activate a new sigil and go right into the next run. In fact, you can actually abuse this on Hardcore as well to instantly teleport out of a Dungeon. Because when you activate a new sigil, it will deactivate your currently active Nightmare Dungeon and you just get kicked out. When you run those dungeons, you definitely want to pay attention to especially those environmental effects. Because all these environmental effects can be outplayed and thus are very powerful so you want to make sure that you avoid them.

How To Push High Tier In Diablo 4?

It doesn't matter too much on the lower tiers where stuff is still relatively easy, but you can definitely notice that the difficulty does scale up. You will not able to even finish this dungeon when the monsters were around 30 or 40 levels above you. So it does get pretty difficult pretty fast and reaching tier 100 is not something that anyone should expect really at the very least that even fully decked-out characters at the 100. Min-max will have a lot of trouble fighting level 154 monsters. Being unannulled by 50 levels is a lot, you take significantly more damage. We don't know the percentage scaling yet but it's going to be pretty rough that's for sure. 

Things that were previously quite insignificant actually can become a real problem when you're fighting higher-tier monsters. Because suddenly the fights are longer, suddenly stuff that you ignored starts hurting you really hard. So it actually changes the way you're playing this type of nonsense depending on which tier you're running. On a real Nightmare Dungeon push, we have to play very slowly and carefully. This can be uh you know like 50 minutes plus or it can be very slow and steady progression basically through a really difficult dungeon.

How To Upgrade Glyph In Diablo 4?

One other tip we can give you is that at the end of the dungeon, you have your glyph inventory where you can choose which one to the lab and can see how much XP you have, how much you gain, what the upgrade does exactly, and all that and you also have your gear entire inventory of glyphs that you can see there. We recommend that you level up all of your glyphs to level two at least those that you want to use because they are actually listed here by their rank. The higher-level glyphs are always here on the top left. Instead of trying to click and search through those glyphs because they all account for the same. We would recommend you just when you start out with Nightmare Dungeons for the first time, take your list of 5, 6, 7 glyphs or whatever you're going to have in your build at the end game and just level them all up once and then just continue to rank them up in the order of priority from there, so they don't have to search them in this inventory.