Join game.
Teleport through Worldstone Keep.
Clear the Throne of Destruction.
Survive five waves.
Kill Baal.
Leave.
Repeat until level 99, insanity or both.
But Diablo II: Resurrected is no longer quite the same game. Terror Zones, new endgame systems and years of accumulated farming knowledge have given players far more efficient ways to spend their time.
And that has created an awkward problem.
Baal is still the final boss of Diablo II.
He just does not always feel like one of its best farming targets.
Baal Runs Ask Quite a Lot
A fresh community discussion has revived an old complaint: the journey to Baal can demand considerably more effort than the eventual reward seems to justify.
Worldstone Keep is hardly a relaxing stroll.
Depending on the roll, players can encounter Burning Souls, dolls, vipers and other creatures specifically designed to remind Hardcore characters that life is temporary.
Then comes the Throne of Destruction.
Baal summons five separate monster waves, many with substantial resistances and enough health to slow weaker builds considerably.
Only after clearing all five do you finally get to fight Baal himself — a boss with a large health pool, mana-draining attacks, teleportation and an irritating habit of producing a duplicate when everyone would really prefer he simply stood still and accepted his fate.
That was fine when Baal represented one of the premier routes for experience and loot.
The question is whether it still makes sense today.
Terror Zones Changed the Equation
The funny part is that Blizzard deliberately created Terror Zones to solve the opposite problem.
When the system was originally introduced, Blizzard said it wanted to provide an alternative to repeatedly farming Baal, Diablo or Nihlathak on the road to level 99.
Mission accomplished.
Perhaps a little too thoroughly.
Terror Zones allow high-level monsters, valuable loot and strong experience gains to appear throughout Sanctuary. At very high character levels, they have become particularly important because ordinary monsters suffer increasingly brutal experience penalties while appropriately scaled Terror Zone monsters remain useful.
Players can therefore chase experience and items without committing themselves to the same lengthy Baal sequence every game.
Meanwhile, other classic bosses retain obvious niches.
Andariel and Mephisto remain attractive magic-find targets because they can be reached and killed quickly.
Diablo sits at the end of a Chaos Sanctuary run packed with valuable monsters.
Baal asks you to cross Worldstone Keep, clear his throne room, fight five scheduled waves and then kill him.
He should probably have something impressive waiting in his pockets.
The Waves May Be the Real Problem
One suggestion from the community discussion is particularly interesting: improve the loot from Baal's five waves rather than simply turning Baal himself into a loot piñata.
That would make the entire encounter matter.
Right now, the waves can feel like admission paperwork before the actual boss fight. They take time, they contain dangerous enemies, but players rarely enter a Baal run because they are excited about what wave three might drop.
Giving the wave bosses more meaningful drop potential could turn the Throne of Destruction back into an actual farming destination.
Not merely a waiting room with skeletons.
Baal Should Not Necessarily Be the Best Farm
There is an important distinction here.
Diablo II does not need to return to twenty years of endless Baal-run supremacy.
Terror Zones were a good addition precisely because they broke that monotony, and newer content such as the Colossal Ancients gives Diablo II's endgame more places to go than the same throne room forever.
Variety is healthy.
The final boss does not need to become the mathematically optimal thing to kill every minute of every day.
But there is a large distance between “not mandatory” and “why am I bothering?”
The Lord of Destruction Deserves Better Pockets
Baal is one of Diablo II's great encounters.
The journey through Worldstone Keep feels dangerous. The throne waves create anticipation. The final chamber still has an appropriately miserable atmosphere more than two decades later.
It would be a shame if the optimal response to all of that became:
“Nice. Is Tal Rasha's Tomb terrorized yet?”
Diablo II: Resurrected has successfully expanded beyond the era when the endgame meant repeating Baal until your eyes stopped focusing.
That is progress.
Now perhaps it is time to make killing the Lord of Destruction feel rewarding again.
He is the final boss, after all.
Surely he can afford better loot.
Sources
Blizzard Entertainment – Diablo II: Resurrected Patch 2.5 Terror Zones
r/Diablo_2_Resurrected – Community discussion on Baal and wave rewards, August 7, 2026
