Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred's hardest difficulty cleared in 17 hours by one determined sorceress
Streamer Mekuna hit torment 12 in just 17 hours with a lightning-spear sorceress build, likely making him one of the first players to reach Diablo 4's new difficulty cap.
Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred lets you push difficulty way higher than before. Most players are grinding through the torment tiers at a reasonable pace, but some are speedrunning straight to the top.
Diablo 4 streamer Mekuna climbed from level 1 sorceress to a torment 12-clearing level 70 sorceress in around 17 hours of non-stop grinding. Since Blizzard kept most late-game details under wraps, he had to figure out a working build on the fly.
That build centers on a new variant of the Blizzard skill. Instead of dropping hail, Mekuna spams the lightning variant to fry enemy packs in seconds. His final dungeon run looks like opening a website in light mode at night—you have to squint to see what's happening.
He hit torment 12 at hour 20 of his Twitch stream, likely making him one of the first to get there in so little time and on so little sleep. He started the expansion with the new warlock class, then switched to the sorceress—the class that has taken him to the top of Diablo 4's unofficial competitive leaderboards before. He still had plenty of upgrades left to grab when he cleared it. No infinite damage bugs that I could see, but the build might be stronger than Blizzard intended.
Mekuna's run confirms that Diablo 4's new torment tiers are survivable—at least with characters as strong as his. Blizzard told PC Gamer earlier this year that torment 12 would be "really fucking hard." That's still true, but there will always be outliers in Diablo 4. At least it wasn't some bizarre bug-exploiting build that got him there.
One caveat: Mekuna finished torment 12, but you can push difficulty even higher through the new activity skill trees. Some upgrades in there boost monsters a few levels beyond what the torment tier normally allows. Can he survive those too?
Lord of Hatred's new skill trees, item crafting system, and reworked difficulty tiers mean all previous ways to measure character power are useless. I'm curious to see how the other classes stack up, especially paladins and warlocks. Once the game's leaderboards go live, we'll see what absurdly powerful builds players have cooked up.