Welcome to the guide for Diablo 4 detailing everything you need to know about Nightmare Dungeons. In this guide we’ll explain what Nightmare Dungeons are, how you can gain access to them, and some tips on navigating them and their loot.

Nightmare Dungeons Explained

Nightmare Dungeons are more difficult versions of dungeons that become available in World Tier 3, after you’ve completed the campaign and the first Capstone Dungeon. When playing on the Nightmare difficulty, you’ll find Nightmare Sigils: consumables that are found in your inventory and can be used to access Nightmare Dungeons.

Nightmare Sigils correspond to specific dungeons and can only be used to access that dungeon. They also come with randomly rolled positive and negative affixes that add one specific benefit and multiple debuffs to create an additional challenge. Positive affixes include things like dealing additional frost damage, enemies dropping additional gold, or killing enemies reducing player cooldowns. Negative affixes include enemies having a faster attack speed, dealing more lightning damage, and other strange things like a lightning storm striking you with high damage lightning on a regular basis or a sentient crystal following you around trying to stomp you flat.

In addition to being more challenging, Nightmare Dungeons also allow for a finite number of revives, and if you die more than the dungeon allows you’ll fail and get kicked back into the overworld.

Completing Nightmare Dungeons grants high value loot and the ability to upgrade Glyphs, which you can read more about here. You’ll also find more Nightmare Sigils at the end of each Nightmare Dungeon to keep your nightmarish exploits going.

Salvaging and Crafting Nightmare Sigils

Nightmare Sigils come in a wide variety of Tiers, indicating how challenging they’ll be, how many negative affixes the player will face, and how rewarding that dungeon will be when completed. You’ll get a Tier 3 Nightmare Sigil by completing Tree of Whispers bounties in Tier 3, and by completing a Tier 3 or higher for the first time, you’ll get a priority quest that unlocks the ability to salvage and craft your own Sigils.

An Occultist vendor can help you salvage your Sigils, which are converted into Sigil Powder. Sigil Powder is then used in turn to craft Higher Nightmare Sigils. Tiers go very high, but you’ll need to unlock World Tier 4 by completing the level 70 Capstone Dungeon before you’re able to tackle any Tier above 20. Completing higher Tier Nightmare Dungeons awards better loot, more XP, and faster progress in leveling up your Glyphs.