Diablo 4 Lord of Hatred player finds "theoretically infinite" treasure goblin hack to spawn so much loot that the game can't keep up
Over 2,400 treasure goblins in a single dungeon proved to be too many
Diablo 4's new Lord of Hatred expansion has effectively revitalized the ARPG's endgame and loot, but with any update that fundamentally shakes up core systems to such a degree, there are bound to be some unintended interactions, and one of those appears to allow for thousands of treasure goblins in a single dungeon and so much loot the game can't keep up.
Diablo content creator FP recently released a video demonstrating a trick hiding in the Lord of Hatred DLC's new War Plans feature, which lets you pick and pull from your favorite endgame activities and pair them with special nodes to customize loot and enemy spawns. The Gauntlet node, which traps the "souls" of enemies you slay in a Nightmare dungeon's shrine buff window and then respawns them when it expires, is key to this particular exploit, but there's also a lot of luck and waiting involved to get FP's setup all lined up.
As explained by fellow Diablo creator Rob2628, first you'll need to find a dungeon with shrines, and then you'll need to reset that dungeon until you find the highly sought after blue treasure goblins, called Gelatinous Syruses in the game, and then you're good to go with Gauntlet ticked on. With this setup enabled, the blue goblins you kill will separate into smaller spawns as they usually do, but these smol goblins will be stored and respawn as full goblins alongside their parents when the shrine buff ends, apparently because the spawns and parents share the same name. And if you manage to time your run perfectly so that the first shrine's buff ends just before you activate the next one and kill your newly respawned goblins, you'll create a "theoretically infinite" chain, as Rob2628 puts it, of replicating and respawning treasure goblins and loot.
FP was able to reach a total of 2,400 treasure goblins in a single Nightmare dungeon, which is a spectacle every Diablo 4 player needs to witness, but it's actually not an ideal number for loot efficiency. As demonstrated in the above video, that amount of loot spawning all at once seems to overload the system, and large swaths of it will disappear as the engine struggles to keep up. It does appear that lower-tiered loot is deleted first, which is handy, but FP still says they lost "all the loot except for 400 charms," which were "salvaged for 10k dust." Next time, FP says, they'll work on finding a formula that spawns a much more manageable 399 goblins, which they theorize will maximize loot without risking the sort of catastrophic loss of loot they experienced in this last run.
If this really catches on like some previous Diablo 4 exploits have, I'll be curious to see how Blizzard tackles it. It's clearly an exploit, as evidenced by FP's predicament, but Blizzard has taken a varied approach to nerfing similarly overpowered loopholes like this in the past. Regardless, this setup makes War Plans the most lucrative endgame activity in Diablo 4 by quite a large moment for now, even if it takes a good amount of patience to pull off.
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After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.
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