The player says the priority quest remains stuck on “Bring the Trace of Echoes to a Seer”, except the objective is greyed out and marked complete. They cannot interact with the Seer, the nearby pedestal remains unchanged and obtaining more Traces through Kurast Undercity has not moved the quest forward. The result is not merely an untidy quest journal. The player says they remain unable to complete the associated seasonal objectives because Echoing Hatred itself never properly unlocks. This would be irritating enough as a fresh Season 14 bug. Unfortunately, players have been describing variations of precisely the same Resounding Scream soft-lock since the beginning of May.
The Trace Dropped. The Quest Updated. Then Diablo 4 Stopped Listening
Blizzard's intended sequence is straightforward by Diablo standards, which admittedly means there are fewer than nine currencies involved. Echoing Hatred is one of Lord of Hatred's major endgame activities. Blizzard describes it as a hyper-rare escalating survival challenge where players battle increasingly difficult waves of Mephisto's forces until the build, player or keyboard finally admits defeat. Access begins when an incredibly rare Trace of Echoes drops. The player takes that Trace to the Sightless Eye in Temis, offers it and gains access to Echoing Hatred.
We have already covered the first half of that problem extensively. In July, players reported going more than 90 hours without seeing a Trace of Echoes, and earlier this week we revisited the wider question of whether Diablo IV's activity keys are becoming rarer than the loot they unlock. The September 9 player has successfully cleared that hurdle three times. The problem is that the front door still refuses to open.
According to the new report, The Resounding Scream displays the Trace delivery objective as completed, yet the quest cannot progress. There is no useful interaction with the Seer and no change at the pedestal. The player has collected three Traces from Undercity runs without changing that state. It is difficult to blame bad RNG when the inventory contains multiple copies of the object RNG was supposed to provide.
Players Were Reporting the Same Checkmark in May
The oldest large bug reports date back to the first days of May. On May 1, one player said a Trace of Echoes triggered The Resounding Scream correctly, but arriving at the Seer produced no useful interaction. Other players immediately began reporting the same state: “Bring the Trace of Echoes to the Seer” showed a check mark, but nothing followed it. Restarting Diablo IV, changing difficulty, changing zones, tracking and untracking the quest and returning later did not consistently solve the problem.
A separate May 11 thread documents an even stranger failure. The player successfully handed in the Trace, watched the Seer perform the ritual and saw the Sightless Eye appear. The Eye was not interactable. After restarting the game, even that visual clue disappeared. The quest remained in the Journal but its Objective section became completely blank, the Seer could no longer be used and tracking the quest produced no destination. Other players confirmed the exact same progression state through May and June.
At that point The Resounding Scream stops behaving like a quest and begins behaving like an old Windows shortcut whose original file was deleted three months ago. The icon is still there. Clicking it merely reminds you that something used to happen.
Some Players Have Been Locked Out of the Activity Entirely
The consequences are more substantial than losing one quest reward. The Resounding Scream is the introduction to Echoing Hatred. If the Sightless Eye never becomes usable, the affected character can remain locked out of one of Lord of Hatred's headline endgame systems. Echoing Hatred was advertised alongside War Plans as a major expansion feature, and our original breakdown of Blizzard's new endgame systems focused on precisely why the mode sounded interesting: endless scaling waves, randomized enemy combinations and better rewards the longer the build survives.
For affected players, none of that matters very much. They can read about Echoing Hatred. They can find the extraordinarily rare entry item. They can even find several of them. They simply cannot complete the introduction that makes the system usable. One May player described being excluded from Echoing Hatred for weeks while continuing to find additional Traces. Another reached June with the same quest still stuck. The problem then crossed into Season 14: on July 3, a Solo Self-Found player reported that the Eye appeared during the ritual but became non-interactable, then disappeared after a restart while the blank quest remained in the Journal. A second player confirmed the same problem a week later and specifically noted that it prevented seasonal reward progression.
There Is a Player-Discovered Workaround — but It Involves Starting Another Character
The closest thing to a consistent workaround appeared in June, and it is not exactly elegant. One affected player created another character that had not yet attempted The Resounding Scream, obtained a Trace of Echoes on that character and completed the unlock successfully. Another player then tried the same approach: they created a new character, had it power-levelled to 70, transferred their equipment over, farmed until another Trace dropped and completed the quest there. Afterward, their original bugged character reportedly showed the Sightless Eye correctly and the quest appeared completed.
That is encouraging if your definition of “fix” includes create another hero and redo a meaningful chunk of progression. The player said the process cost them glyph progression and War Plan progress on the replacement character, so this is less a workaround and more a small relocation programme.
One player suspected changing difficulty after receiving the Trace may have contributed to their original bug, while others mentioned entering Temis or Echoing Hatred-related areas through somebody else's party before completing their own unlock. Those theories remain unconfirmed. The important point is that multiple affected players have experienced the bug while playing solo as well, so party interaction clearly cannot explain every case.
Blizzard Has Already Fixed a Different Sightless Eye Interaction Bug
There is one especially curious detail buried in Blizzard's June 30 Patch 3.1.0 notes. Blizzard fixed an issue where ineligible players in a party could interact with the Sightless Eye Pedestal. That was obviously incorrect and needed fixing. The current Resounding Scream reports describe almost the philosophical opposite: eligible players who possess the required item cannot interact with the system they are supposed to unlock.
To be clear, Blizzard never claimed that June fix addressed The Resounding Scream soft-lock. It concerned party members accessing the pedestal when they should not have been able to. We could not find a current public patch note documenting a comprehensive fix for the stuck Seer, blank objective or non-interactable Sightless Eye reports. The distinction matters because otherwise it would be tempting to describe this as a failed fix. It is more accurate — and perhaps stranger — to say Blizzard has already repaired one edge case around who can use the pedestal while a separate multi-month problem continues preventing some legitimate players from using it at all.
Echoing Hatred Has Accumulated an Impressive Collection of Access Problems
This is also not the first time the activity has created friction before the actual combat begins. Players have spent months arguing about Trace of Echoes rarity, prompting Blizzard to increase the drop rate of Echoing Hatred keys from Elites and Champions. That helped players who simply could not find one. Then there is the PlayStation side: PS5 players still report that the Echoing Elites trophy may count bosses while ignoring ordinary elites, turning a 1,000-enemy trophy into something that can require dramatically more runs than expected.
Those problems combine in a particularly unfriendly order. First you need the rare Trace. Then the introduction needs to function. Then you need enough additional access to run Echoing Hatred repeatedly. And if you are chasing the PS5 trophy, the tracking also needs to count the enemies the description says it counts. Echoing Hatred itself is supposed to be the hard part. Increasingly, it feels as though reaching the activity with every surrounding system behaving correctly is the qualifying round.
The Seasonal Objective Makes the Soft-Lock Worse
The September 9 player specifically says the broken quest is preventing them from completing seasonal objectives. That turns the issue from optional endgame inconvenience into progression friction. Blizzard has already made the rarity of Trace of Echoes slightly awkward by connecting Echoing Hatred to seasonal objectives; our recent look at rare activity keys argued that there is a fundamental difference between making a reward rare and making permission to play the content rare.
A quest bug creates an even harsher version. RNG can eventually produce a Trace. The September player has proved that three times. A corrupted quest state does not necessarily improve because you continue farming. It simply consumes additional rare keys while the Seer maintains the serene expression of somebody who has absolutely no intention of helping.
That is why this deserves more attention than an ordinary side quest marker failing to disappear. The affected player cannot simply ignore The Resounding Scream and access the activity another way. The quest is the doorway.
Season 15 Is Almost Here, and This Began in Season 13
The longevity is the uncomfortable part. Reports began during Season 13 in early May. They continued through the end of that season. Season 14 launched at the end of June, and another SSF player documented the same blank-objective state in July. Now, on September 9, with Season 15 approaching and players already debating whether the next season solves enough of Diablo IV's older problems, The Resounding Scream has produced another textbook report.
There is no evidence that every account is vulnerable. Plenty of players have unlocked Echoing Hatred normally, and the activity itself is obviously being completed every day. We also do not know whether the May, July and September cases all share one technical cause. A quest can reach the same broken state through several different bad triggers. But the visible outcome is remarkably consistent: Trace acquired, Seer approached, objective marked or ritual initiated, then progression stops.
A Rare Key Should Not Unlock a Broken Door
Echoing Hatred's scarcity is deliberate. Blizzard wanted finding a Trace of Echoes to feel like discovering access to something unusual and dangerous. That design can work. A rare key dropping unexpectedly in an ARPG creates exactly the sort of “one more run” excitement Diablo has lived on for decades.
What does not work nearly as well is finally obtaining that key and discovering the lock has entered a contemplative phase.
The September 9 player has found three Traces. The quest shows the delivery objective as complete. The Seer cannot be interacted with. The pedestal remains unchanged. Seasonal progression is blocked. Players were reporting the same fundamental problem in May, found a new-character workaround in June and reproduced it again in Season 14.
Echoing Hatred asks how long your build can survive against an endless army of demons.
Some Diablo IV players are still stuck on the earlier challenge: how long can they survive standing next to the Seer?
