Diablo 4’s Gauntlet finally arrives next week, and there’s something cool here even if you don’t care about endgame dungeons

As part of the most recent Campfire Chat developer livestream, Blizzard discussed Diablo 4’s upcoming mid-season update. The patch arrives Tuesday, March 5, and it is indeed the one the will introduce the Gauntlet to the game.

The Gauntlet is the often delayed endgame dungeon that’s similar to Diablo 3’s Greater Rifts. Available to players in World Tier 4 (with monster levels beyond 100, no less!), this dungeon has a fixed layout that changes weekly.

Your goal is to kill as many monsters and open as many chests as you can within an eight-minute window. Doing so earns you Proofs of Might, which is what ultimately decides your score. As you’d expect, the Gauntlet is designed to be run repeatedly, and the idea is that you should be making each of your consecutive runs more efficient.

Depending on your final score, you get to earn any one of four Seals. Score thresholds for each one will change as the dungeon itself changes each week. When it comes loot, every successful attempt will earn you a Cache of Trials, and higher scores award even better caches at the end of the week.

The important thing to note here is that while groups will have an easier time running through the Gauntlet, leaderboards will be separated by ladders for class, party size, as well as normal and Hardcore.

If all of that endgame nonsense doesn’t excite you, there’s another neat addition included in the mid-season update that should make everyone happy. Some Vampiric Powers from Season 2 will be making a return, available as Legendary Aspects that drop from everything in the world.

As expected, there’s going to be some class balance updates in the March 5 patch, too. The full change log has yet to be published, but Blizzard said some of them are being made with the Gauntlet in mind.

Although Season of the Construct has been disappointing, March is looking like a decent month to get into Diablo 4. The game arrives on Game Pass on March 28, and will also be receiving its long-awaited ray tracing update on PC at some point during the same month.