Greater Rifts
Greater Rifts (formerly known as Tiered Rifts) are a higher level of Nephalem Rift, meant to provide a greater challenge and greater rewards for players geared well enough to take them on.
To enter a Greater Rift you must earn Greater Rift keys by completing normal Nephalem Rifts. Once you have a key, click on the Nephalem Altar in town, just like you were opening a normal Rift, and select the Greater Rift option.
Greater Rifts feature a progress bar timer, and require players to kill the enemies quickly, in order to progress to the Greater Rift Guardian. Slower play in a Greater Rift will not result in the big rewards, and normal monsters drop very little in Greater Rifts; the big payday comes from the end boss, which players must move along very quickly to reach in time.
- Greater Rifts aren't yet available in the game; they will be introduced with Patch 2.1 and should be testable on the PTR before the patch goes live.
Greater Rift Details
Blizzard revealed the first details about Greater Rifts in a Patch 2.1 preview blog on June 17, 2014.[1]
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While Greater Rifts are a type of Nephalem Rift, there are some key differences between the two features. In Greater Rifts:
- You’ll race against a clock to fill a progress bar by accruing monster kills.
- Most monsters do not drop loot; rewards have been completely shifted to the Rift Guardian.
- This removes conflicting pressure from attaining a better time versus picking up all your loot.
- Monsters grant differing amounts of progress for your progress bar; the tougher the monster, the more they fill up your progress bar.
- You cannot resurrect at your corpse or in town while in a Greater Rift -- only at the last checkpoint.
- Note that, currently, if you die in a Greater Rift on a Hardcore character, that death will be permanent.
- You cannot use player banners or the Teleport option if the target player is in a Greater Rift.
- Higher Greater Rifts levels are progressively more difficult.
- This difficulty is separate from the standard difficulty settings (Master, Torment I-VI, etc.)
If you complete a Greater Rift before time expires you’ll advance to the next difficulty level. Should your time be exceptionally good, you might even skip a few levels! If time instead expires, you’ll have reached the end of your current Greater Rift journey and your best results will be posted to the appropriate Leaderboards.
Greater Rift Leaderboards
The top characters and teams during each Season will be ranked on Leaderboards, giving bragging rights and epeen to the most dedicated players.[2]
Greater Rift leaderboards will be split between both Hardcore and Normal gameplay modes as well as Seasonal and Non-Seasonal characters. To help encourage a variety of play styles and allow you to measure yourself against similar competitors, we’ve also broken up Greater Rift leaderboards into the following categories:
- Solo play for each class (e.g. top players for Barbarian, Demon Hunter, Crusader, etc.)
- 2-Player Groups
- 3-Player Groups
- 4-Player Groups
Greater Rift Differences
Greater Rifts have an improved notched Progress Bar that lets players see how far along they are without hovering. (Normal Rifts had a similar progress bar during the beta test, before going to the featureless bar upon RoS release; a change most fans did not approve of.)
The difficulty levels are also different in Greater Rifts, with a "Difficulty 1-10" scale. It's not yet known how this differs from or expands upon the standard Normal-Torment 6 difficulty system.
