Diablo 4 Season 8 Lair Bosses Reworked: Your Opponents Have Undergone A Big Change!
Posted: Apr 28, 2025 Views: 34
Good news! In order to give players a more fresh exploration experience, the developers have added a lot of new mechanics in Diablo 4 Season 8 Belial’s Return, and made major changes to some of the original game content.
The most worth mentioning is the most important challenge for players: Boss encounters. At this stage, Endgame Bosses and Ladder Bosses you have challenged before are classified as Lair Bosses, and you can only start challenging them after entering Torment I.
In order to allow you to quickly get started with your encounters with them after entering the new season and successfully take all the loot, this guide will introduce you to the new Lair Boss system and some combat techniques you can use in it.
Tiers
Now, the bosses you can challenge in D4 are divided into 3 tiers: Initiate, Greater, and Exalted. Their challenge difficulty is gradually increasing, but the rewards they provide to you are also gradually increasing. The following is a list of bosses based on the tiers descriptions provided by the developer.
Initiate Lair Bosses
- Grigoire
- Beast in The Ice
- Varshan
- Lord Zir
- Urivar In Vessel of Hatred DLC
Greater Lair Bosses
- Duriel
- Andariel
- Harbinger of Hatred In Vessel of Hatred DLC
Exalted Lair Bosses: Only Belial
Finding Lair Bosses
Each Lair Boss in Diablo 4 now has its own icon on the map, which you can right-click to teleport to. When you hover over the icon, you will see the name of the boss, the loot list, and the type and number of keys required to unlock the loot.
Encounter Mechanics
The actual content of your encounters with these Lair Bosses hasn’t changed much, except for some minor changes to their damage moves or elemental resistances due to some Legendary Aspects and Uniques added in Diablo 4 Season 8.
The real changes come in the mechanics of how this encounter is initiated and how the loot is obtained. Now, you don’t need to fight them or summon materials to start the encounter. As long as you enter the arena in the dungeon containing the encounter, the encounter will start immediately.
This change in mechanics will make it easier to enter these difficult challenges, making them accessible to all players who meet the level of requirements. But I have to tell you in advance that the biggest impact of this change is that the rewards after the bosses die are greatly reduced.
Not only that, the loot after the bosses die is no longer scattered all over your screen waiting for you to pick it up, but it is placed in a safe called Hoard, which requires Lair Boss Keys to open it and claim all the loot.
Please note that when you are exploring in a group, only when each player has the corresponding type and number of Lair Boss Keys can the Hoard be opened and all rewards claimed. Once everyone has finished picking up, the altar that spawned the bosses will be usable again because the cooldown has been skipped.
These Lair Boss Keys are actually some of the materials used to summon bosses in the first few seasons of Diablo 4, such as Malignant Heart, Living Steel, and Distilled Fear, and so on. But they are now only used to open Hoard.
Stygian Stone, which was very important in the summoning process before, has become an item dropped by these bosses, and they can also be exchanged 1:1 for any loot chest provided by opening Greater Lair Bosses. Here are the number and type of Lair Boss Keys required for each boss.
Varshan
- Required: 12 Malignant Heart
- Drops: Shard of Agony/Stygian Stone
Grigoire
- Required: 12 Living Steel
- Drops: Shard of Agony/Stygian Stone
Beast in the Ice
- Required: 12 Distilled Fear
- Drops: Pincushioned Doll/Stygian Stone
Lord Zir
- Required: 12 Exquisite Blood
- Drops: Pincushioned Doll/Stygian Stone
Urivar (Vessel of Hatred DLC)
- Required: 12 Judicator’s Mask
- Drops: Abhorrent Heart/Stygian Stone
Duriel
- Required: 3 Shard of Agony
Andariel
- Required: 3 Pincushioned Doll
Harbinger of Hatred (Vessel of Hatred DLC)
- Required: 3 Abhorrent Heart
Belial
- Required: 2 Betrayer’s Husk
Also, after you successfully defeat a Lair Boss, there’s a chance you’ll be ambushed by Belial: it uses a mix of blood and poison attacks to deal with extreme damage to you. So spend a lot of Diablo 4 Gold to increase your build’s resistance to these two elements before dealing with bosses, just in case.
And after you defeat Belial that ambushed you, you’ll get a second round of loot from the same boss you just killed, as well as a Betrayer’s Husk that summons Belial’s Exalted form. Since this fight is unpredictable, it’s best to bring extra potions to restore health and mana.
Lair Boss Loot
As you can see from the above list, only Initiate Lair Bosses will drop some keys that can be used to unlock higher tier Lair Bosses Hoards. In addition, the Unique given to you when you first defeat a Lair Boss comes from its unique item pool, and Uniques obtained after completing subsequent challenges have a 50% chance of coming from the universal unique item pool.
If you challenge these bosses in Torment Difficulty 3, you will drop an additional unique item from the regular item pool. And for each additional team member in your team, there is a 33% chance of dropping an additional unique item from its unique item pool. In Torment 4, Lair Boss will provide you with 7 Uniques, one more than in previous seasons.
The above is the description of the changes to bosses in Diablo 4 Season 8 Belial’s Return and the strategies that can be used. I hope that through this guide, you can have a clearer understanding of the changes made by the current developers to these powerful opponents, and successfully defeat them thoroughly through your own efforts to obtain more useful loot. I wish you a happy game!
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