Hard to believe we are almost there, but on Thursday, 11 December 2025, at around 8:30 PM PDT, Diablo 4’s big Season 11 patch is due to land and a lot of us are already planning snacks, builds and even which Diablo 4 Items we want to chase first. The hype is real, but it comes with that usual modern live‑service headache: not everything drops at once. Some bits of the season roll out later, which is annoying if you like to binge a new season over one weekend. And under all the patch notes and teaser posts, the real tension is building around one thing coming back that split the community the first time it showed up: the leaderboards tied to the new feature called The Tower.

The Shadow Of The Gauntlet

If you played during the Gauntlet era, you probably still remember how weird it felt scrolling those old boards. You did not just see high scores, you saw ridiculous numbers that made no sense the moment you understood how the dungeon worked. People figured out you could stack Shrine buffs in the open world, then walk into the Gauntlet with Channeling or Protection still running. The game did not clear those effects when you zoned in, so some players were starting with god‑mode turned on. Instead of pushing a tight, skill‑based run, you just watched them delete rooms and melt bosses like they were level 5 trash mobs. It stopped feeling like competition and started looking like a bad joke.

Exploits, Bans And Trust Issues

Once the trick got out, the flood came fast. YouTube filled up with builds built purely to abuse that Shrine glitch, and you would see the same names parked at the top of the rankings for days. Anyone playing fair could tell there was a hard cap on what a legit run could do, and these scores were way past that line. Blizzard eventually stepped in, wiped a bunch of runs, banned some people and tried to scrub the mess off the leaderboards. But by that point, a lot of players had checked out. When you spend hours learning pulls, timing cooldowns and routing every pack, then lose to someone abusing a bug the game itself lets them keep, it is hard to believe the next “competitive” mode will be worth the grind.

Why The Tower Makes People Nervous

So now we are heading into Season 11 with The Tower acting as the new prove‑yourself content, and the mood is pretty mixed. You have got hardcore players who cannot wait to push as high as possible, race their friends and break down every floor. At the same time, loads of us are hanging back a bit, waiting to see what breaks first. People are not only worried about the old Shrine‑style bugs sneaking back in. There is also this nagging feeling that the gap between someone playing “normally” and someone swiping on microtransactions or snagging perfect drops on day one has never been wider. When players talk about “pay‑to‑win” creeping in, this is what they mean: if someone can gear up way faster than you and then post Tower scores that you simply cannot reach, it blurs the line between skill and spending.

Hoping Season 11 Gets It Right

Most of us still want to believe The Tower can be the thing that finally makes late‑game Diablo 4 feel sharp again, not just another XP treadmill. But it is hard to ignore what we have already seen. If Blizzard really wants these new leaderboards to stick, they have to be ruthless about exploits, transparent when stuff goes wrong and honest about how much advantage people can get from chasing outside power like cheap diablo 4 gear. Until we see how the first few weeks go, a lot of players will be excited, sure, but they will also keep one eye on the rankings, waiting to see if the numbers look real this time or if we are just watching the Gauntlet all over again.