After years of not having a true endgame progression system in Diablo 4 – Lord of Hatred released War Plans, that proved to be one of the most popular features of the DLC. Just like with any brand new addition however, it is far from being completely polished, and there is still a lot of room for improvement.
One of the major drawbacks of War Plans has been a slow accumulation of activity XP gain. Leveling War Plans to max level is a slow process that isn’t helped with some activities taking a lot longer than others.
Playing War Plans in a party is another challenge for Diablo 4’s endgame approach. As it stands now, playing them with other people is often a clunky experience. New proposed changes for Season 14 aim to fix these shortcomings, but leave an elephant in the room unaddressed.
Increased Activity Experience
Players will be glad to find that all War Plan activities will now grant a lot more experience than before. But we know what activity is the real problem here – Infernal Hordes consume more time than anything else. While Nightmare Dungeons and Helltides can be completed in a couple of minutes, Infernal Hordes are a 10 minute affair every single time. Horde experience therefore is outright doubled in Season 14, to compensate.
War Plans In a Party
Currently, if another player shares the same activity on their War Plan, we get a small reward cache and 80% of the activity exp. This results in a sub-par experience, where we depend on random luck that other players will have their activities in sync with ours.
As a result, developers are rolling out a much-requested feature: Party War Plans. Come season 14, all party members will be able to sync their War Plan together – tackling the same objectives and getting equal rewards along the way.
How it works: the entire party needs to be in Temis. A new option called New Plan for Party will be available. Once selected, it will initiate a party-wide reroll of the War Plan. Then, a party vote is initiated and, once accepted, a party-wide War Plan is created for every member of your party.
The cost of rerolling a Party War Plan is two marks of El’druin, taken from the initiating player. In a four-person party, this ensures at least four Party War Plan runs. This system will no doubt keep improving as players offer their feedback once Season 14 goes live.
New Activities
We’re also getting two new War Plan activities. Sort of. The first one is Greater Helltide Harvest, which is the same as ordinary Helltide activity – but rewards players for collecting a much greater amount of Cinders. This will allow players to spend more time in Helltides, while still getting rewarded for it.
Second activity ties in Escalating Nightmares into the War Plan. These are completed by finishing all three dungeons and slaying Astaroth at the end. Escalating Nightmare Dungeons proved very lucrative in Season 13, so this change will further incentivize players to run them, while progressing their War Plan at the same time.
Both of these activities grant a large amount of activity experience to Helltides and Nightmare Dungeons respectively.
Still No Account-Wide War Plans
These are much needed updates to War Plans, but by far the most requested War Plan feature has been to make them account-wide, as opposed to having every character start from scratch. These are the news that we were hoping to see in the developer stream, but so far this change will not happen.
During the Q/A portion of the stream, Art Peshkov – the lead systems designer – said: „We hear you on the feedback for per-character War Plans. We are investigating making this be per-partition, which is how Paragon works when you start the season. We’ll have more to discuss later“
The patch goes live on June 30th, 2026.
