Diablo 4's On-Death Effects Kill More Players Than Enemies Do

1 week ago 10

Diablo 4-1 Action Games That Are Longer Than 100 Hours

Published May 14, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

Melissa Sarnowski is a Gaming Writer at DualShockers who has been covering games professionally since 2022. She specializes in lists, reviews, and features, with additional experience writing guides for Hardcore Gamer.

Before joining DualShockers, Melissa contributed to Screen Rant, and she currently writes for CBR and Hardcore Gamer in addition to DualShockers. Her work focuses heavily on RPGs, horror games, MMOs, indie games, and simulation games, with recurring coverage of franchises such as Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, The Legend of Zelda, and The Sims. She holds a Bachelor of Science in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Diablo 4 has been improved in some ways since it was released, but it has the lingering issue of on-death effects. While these aren't new additions to the game— they've been there since the beginning— they grow increasingly frustrating as more content is added to the game without anything being done to address the complaints that have been there for years now.

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On-death effects are traits that elite enemies have where killing the enemy results in an ability being cast after their death, usually from the location of the enemy's corpse. If you've played any Diablo game, this description is enough to tell you why having on-death effects is going to be an issue. You have too much on your screen to properly see a new effect happening after an enemy dies if every other effect happening at the same time is present.

On-Death Effects Need to Be Removed or Reworked

There's no way around it. I love Diablo, and I've loved the franchise since I started playing it when Diablo 2 was out. While Diablo 2 also had moments where you have a lot happening on your screen, the number of enemy traits has only increased going into both Diablo 3 and Diablo 4. I know it's a way to increase the difficulty for players, but there has to be a way to accomplish that without on-death effects, or to rework on-death effects so that they can be seen under the clutter of every other effect happening at one time.

The traits are often randomized on enemies, and that makes it even more difficult, because you might end up facing elites with traits that all have visible effects on the ground. If they also have an on-death effect, then you aren't going to be able to see it. You might not even see where the corpses are as you kill them if the group is large enough, which happens frequently since you can gather a lot of enemies in one location.

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Why On-Death Effects Are An Issue in Diablo 4

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It's easy to say that you should just be better about watching for on-death effects, but that's not a reasonable solution when you know what your screen can look like mid-fight in Diablo 4. The problem is that players are reporting that the majority of their deaths come from on-death effects that elites have rather than from fighting the elite. It's not enjoyable to get through a tough battle with elites, and then end up dying even though you killed them just because they had an on-death effect that wasn't visible.

Games are allowed to be punishing, but there's a line where the design choices that punish you are simply unfair rather than an obstacle that you can overcome through grinding or skill. There's not much you can do if you have so many effects on your screen that on-death effects are hidden, and the corpses that spawn them could be hidden, too.

I have a tendency to get motion sickness when a lot happens on my screen as well, so I imagine that there are other players with similar issues that make spotting additional effects that much more difficult. I don't know enough about color blindness and the options Diablo 4 might offer to help, but I imagine that and any number of other conditions only make on-death effects worse for players that have them.

Even if you ignore the non-game reasons that on-death effects should be removed, you still have years of players reporting that it's just not a feature they want in the game. At some point, you have to accept that it's not a part of the game that's working and adjust accordingly to improve the player experience of Diablo 4.