Nephalem Trial

• This feature has been put on hold and will not go live when Reaper of Souls is launched. Details below.

Nephalem Trials are in-game events to be added to Diablo 3 Classic and will be present in Reaper of Souls as well. These trials are mini-games of a sort, entered through special "death orbs" portals that are randomly located throughout the game world.

Pass through the Death Orb.

Passing through a Death Orb takes the player to a special dungeon area where they will face a huge onslaught of enemies. The developers have said Nephalem Trials are inspired by the Jar of Souls event from Act One, where players must stand their ground against ever-increasing numbers of skeleton attackers.

Nephalem Trials will be accessed from all acts and will presumably take place in small, custom-made dungeon areas where large groups of varied monsters will swarm the players(s). Surviving these trials will grant rewards, probably in the form of golden chests, with more chests rewarded for faster killing times or for advancing further against the incoming tide of enemies.

• These events are not the same thing as Nephalem Rifts, despite the similarity of their names.

Nephalem Trial Details

This feature was first revealed in Blizzard's official Reaper of Souls FAQ, in a section about new game modes:

Two new game modes -- Loot Runs and Nephalem Trials -- are being added as well, providing fun and rewarding challenges for players to tackle when they’re not busy saving the world.

Postponed from RoS Release

In November 2013 Blizzard announced that Nephalem Trials were not going to be ready when Reaper of Souls was released, though they hoped to patch them into the game (and into D3V) sometime afterwards.

[blue]Nephalem Trials are indeed still alive in some form, but they will not be added with the launch of Reaper of Souls. We absolutely love the idea behind the Trials (challenge-based systems can be so much fun), but before we implement them we want to make sure they have a strong underlying reward structure and tracking system. That kind of hook is important for a system like this and we didn’t want to add in Nephalem Trials to the game without it.

The gameplay felt great and was in a good place at gamescom 2013 where we announced them – which is actually why a lot of the individual Trials have been added on their own as standalone events into Reaper of Souls – but the mechanism that made the overall system feel meaningful over a long period of time wasn’t and would take some pretty significant tech and time to implement (in this case, at the expense of other features as well).

Rather than delay the release of the expansion to make sure Nephalem Trials could make it in with all the necessary components, we made the decision to cut them for now and re-focus our efforts on making sure other key systems like Adventure Mode, Bounties, Nephalem Rifts, and Clans & Communities (just to name a few) are solid. It’s not an ideal scenario, but these are the kinds of hard calls we sometimes have to make in a world where we can't stack +Maximum Resource.

Datamined Information

Code strings in early Reaper of Souls datamined information list a number of types of Nephalem Trials. These are early versions of the content and may be entirely different in the final product.

• Berseker Trial – Slay monsters before they become enraged! Killing marked monsters before they enrage grants bonus experience and gold!
• Collapsing Dungeon – Loot Nephalem Relics to delay the dungeon collapse and earn time bonuses!
• Goblin Hunt – Find the treasure goblins before they all escape!
• Horde Trial – Slay an unending horde of monsters. Kill monsters before the timer ends to earn bonus experience and gold for every kill!
• Nephalem Trial – (No details provided.)
• Wave Trial – Destroy each enemy wave as quickly as possible. Extra time is converted into bonus experience and gold!