A Season 15 player has reported becoming soft-locked by Growing Conquest. According to the report, the relevant Growing Nightmare Dungeon can be completed, but the expected progression into the next stage does not happen correctly. The player's War Plan remains stuck, and because they no longer have enough Marks of El'Druin to generate another plan, the normal escape route is unavailable.
In other words, the War Plan knows what you are supposed to do.
You do it.
The War Plan disagrees.
War Plans Depend on Activities Passing the Baton
The entire War Plans system is built around chaining activities together. Blizzard describes it as an endgame playlist: finish the first activity and the system should move you seamlessly into the next one, generating the required access item when necessary. A plan can include Nightmare Dungeons, Helltides, Kurast Undercity, Lair Bosses, Infernal Hordes and The Pit.
That structure makes progression failures particularly painful. A normal bugged dungeon can usually be abandoned. A War Plan activity is part of a chain. If the system fails to recognize that one stage has been completed, everything behind it effectively waits in line.
We have already written extensively about how Season 15 finally made War Plans progression shared across compatible characters. It was one of the best quality-of-life changes Blizzard made to the system. Your fifth character no longer needs to repeat the same administrative career simply because your first four already completed it.
Shared progression, however, does not help much when the actual plan cannot move forward.
Running Out of Marks Makes the Problem Much Worse
Marks of El'Druin are the reset currency behind War Plans. Players can use them to generate a new plan rather than completing the current board, and party synchronization also consumes Marks when a new shared plan is created. Blizzard's Season 14 documentation confirms that generating a new party plan costs two Marks of El'Druin.
Normally, that provides a safety valve. Get a plan you dislike or cannot complete and reroll it.
The trouble begins when a player is both stuck and out of Marks.
That combination has already caused problems before Season 15. During Season 14, players became trapped when Infernal Hordes appeared in War Plans they could not progress. Several affected players reported that once their Marks of El'Druin were exhausted, they could neither finish the activity nor reset the board.
The current Growing Conquest report therefore does not represent an entirely new category of War Plan failure.
It appears to be a new way of reaching an old destination.
Players Previously Found an Alt-Character Workaround
The older Infernal Horde softlock eventually produced a wonderfully Diablo solution. Players discovered that Marks of El'Druin were shared across characters. Completing War Plans on another compatible seasonal character could restore the Marks available to the account, allowing the trapped character to finally reroll its board.
That workaround may be worth remembering if somebody encounters the current Growing Conquest problem, but there is an important caveat: we have not seen the workaround reproduced specifically for this Season 15 report.
Season 15 also changed War Plans significantly by making reputation and earned progression account-wide within matching partitions. Blizzard says Seasonal, Hardcore and Solo Self Found states determine which characters share that progress, while each character still keeps its own individual planner.
So an alt may provide an escape route again.
It should not yet be treated as a guaranteed fix.
This Is Why Reset Currency Should Never Be the Only Emergency Exit
The larger design problem is not Growing Conquest specifically. It is what happens whenever a War Plan activity becomes impossible to complete.
If a reroll is simply a convenience, charging currency makes sense. Players are paying to replace a perfectly functional plan because they prefer another activity.
A softlock is different.
The player is not rerolling because they dislike Nightmare Dungeons today. They are rerolling because the current plan has stopped functioning.
Those two situations probably should not use the same emergency exit.
An obvious solution would be a free reset after the game detects an abandoned or failed War Plan activity. Another would be allowing players to delete the entire plan without rewards and start again. Even a cooldown-based emergency reset would be preferable to discovering that the only button capable of freeing your character requires currency you can no longer earn through the broken plan.
War Plans Have Improved Enormously, but Progression Bugs Keep Following Them
It is worth emphasizing that War Plans are considerably better than they were when Lord of Hatred launched. Blizzard added party synchronization, increased Activity XP at higher Torment levels and finally delivered the account-wide progression players had been requesting for months. Season 15 also increased their experience value further, particularly at Torment X and above.
The basic idea remains strong. Diablo IV contains enough endgame activities that a system organizing them into personalized chains genuinely solves a problem.
But War Plans have repeatedly suffered from progression states failing to register correctly. We have previously covered activities completing without advancing objectives, characters getting stuck near the end of progression and the old Infernal Horde softlock.
A planner that occasionally refuses to acknowledge completed plans is an unfortunate occupational hazard.
This Is Still a Small Number of Reports
There is an important limitation to the current story. The Growing Conquest report itself is currently a small technical-support thread, not a huge community-wide outbreak. Blizzard's forum index also shows a separate September 27 report titled “War Plan Stuck and have no currency”, but the available public summary does not establish that both players encountered exactly the same underlying bug.
So we should not write that Growing Conquest is universally broken.
Most players may never encounter this.
But the combination is worth watching precisely because War Plans have a documented history of similar failure states.
For Now, Keep at Least One Reset Available
Until Blizzard comments or more players reproduce the issue, there is one sensible precaution: avoid spending your final War Plan reset casually if your current board contains unfamiliar or potentially troublesome activities.
If Growing Conquest stops progressing, repeatedly completing the same activity may not fix the underlying state. And if your Marks are already gone, your options become considerably narrower.
War Plans were designed to answer a simple question:
What do you want to do next?
Season 15 has apparently discovered another possible answer.
Nothing.
You live here now.
