EQL Source / Learn / Difficulty

Harder, not
higher level.

Difficulty does not make anything higher level. It makes mobs hit harder, resist more, notice you sooner, and run player-style class kits — and it decides what condition your loot arrives in. The con colour of a mob is the same at every tier, which is exactly why the setting catches people out.

5 tiersD4 is the maximum 20 sessions cross-checked

Where this comes from, and what is ours. The scaling work on this page is not ours. EQL Tools measured it T3 and, to their credit, labels every claim by how it is known — developer-confirmed, player-measured, or unpinned. Their figures are credited below and linked, never restated as though we found them, and where they say a thing is not pinned down, neither do we. What is ours is the part read from our own combat logs TIER M: how the tier is written in the game, and one observation about class kits that goes a step further than the published claim. If you want the full scaling tables, read theirs — this page answers the question for a reader of this site and points you at them for the rest.

The tiers

Five settings

The names are the game’s own. EQL Tools lists them, and our logs print them on entry — two sources that did not derive from each other.

Tier	Name	Note	In our logs
D0	Base / Normal	the open world, and what you get if you never touch the setting	2 sessions, 4 kills, 2 zones
D1	Awakened	the first instanced tier	14 sessions, 1107 kills, 3 zones
D2	Adaptive	—	3 sessions, 68 kills, 1 zone
D3	Fused	—	4 sessions, 29 kills, 2 zones
D4	Refined	the current maximum	3 sessions, 19 kills, 2 zones

Reading it

The game tells you, twice

Zoning in prints the tier as a number and a name in the same line:

You have entered Befallen 1 (Awakened).
You have entered Blackburrow 2 (Adaptive).
You have entered Befallen 3 (Fused).
You have entered The City of Guk 4 (Refined).

A zone line with no number and no name is the open world, D0. Both readings agreed in every session where both were present — 20 of 20, no disagreements TIER M. That is worth stating because it means you never have to guess or remember: the answer is in your own log, and it is checkable against itself.

Loot gives a third, independent reading. Items drop pre-upgraded, and the tier you are on is the +N most things arrive at — a night at Awakened is a pile of +1. Read the dropped value rather than the created one: looted a Keg Mallet +2 … to create a Keg Mallet +4 is a +2 drop.

What scales

What each tier actually does

All measured by EQL Tools T3, credited and linked, not re-measured by us.

Levels do not move Con colours are identical at every tier. A tier is not a level range, and treating it as one is the mistake the setting invites.
Nearly everything else does HP, damage, resists, armour class, mana, movement speed and aggro radius, roughly linearly per tier.
Hit points, D1 and D2 ×1.15 and ×1.30 on multiplayer tuning, ×1.10 and ×1.20 solo. D3 and D4 run well above those and are not pinned — their words, and we are not going to invent a figure.
Experience ×1.15 / ×1.30 / ×1.45 / ×1.60 across Awakened to Refined on multiplayer tuning; ×1.10 / ×1.20 / ×1.30 / ×1.40 solo. Whether the bonus is currently live is one of the things they mark unpinned.
Loot is the same table What changes is the condition it arrives in: D0 drops the base item, D4 the same item at +4, with a chance of better. A +4 is worth sixteen base copies of upgrade progress, so the tier decides how far a drop carries you rather than what drops.
Every tier is its own lockout Loot lockouts track per difficulty, so the same named can be worth killing again on another setting.

Ours

One thing we measured that goes further

The published claim is that named mobs are often multiclass from D2. We have it on ordinary trash at D1. In Castle Mistmoore at Awakened, two trash types — an initiate familiar and a pledge familiar — backstabbed 39 times between them while the same types were logged casting Root, Screaming Terror, Shadow Vortex, Shock of Poison and Engulfing Darkness. TIER M

Backstab is the part that settles it. A spell list on its own proves little, because those spells could plausibly sit in one broad caster kit — but backstab is a rogue ability, and a mob type doing both is running two kits. At D1, on trash.

Its limit, stated: a log aggregates by mob type, so whether a single individual carries both kits cannot be told apart from two individuals carrying one each. And this is one zone on one night. It does not contradict the published claim about named mobs; it suggests the behaviour starts earlier and lower than the claim implies.

Measured so far across 6 zones: Befallen, Blackburrow, Kerra Isle, The Castle of Mistmoore, The City of Guk, The Ruins of Old Guk. Each plate carries its own figures under Measured in play.

Sourcing

Where to read more

EQL Tools — Difficulty T3 Source of every scaling figure above. Current to the launch patch of 28 July 2026, and labelled by confidence throughout, which is rarer than it should be. Go and read it if you want the mote grades, the lockout timings and the full tables — this page deliberately does not reproduce them.