Diablo IV Datamining - Examining Higher Rank Gems and World Tier 5

wowhead.com:

Recent datamining by DataMineARPG revealed evidence of World Tier 5, suggesting new challenges soon coming to Diablo IV, but is this really what Blizzard has planned for the release of Season 1? Our own digging suggests these could be leftover development assets and may not necessarily be coming anytime soon.

In their defense, DataMineARPG's blog post makes it very clear that their findings are speculative, but while the assets certainly make it look like a new world tier is in the works, our own digging suggests the complete opposite — that they're actually old assets rather than new ones. Note that World Tier 5 uses the older style of icon from the test development builds, whereas World Tiers 1-4 have since been updated with new art. In previous test builds, there really were five world tiers — Adventurer, Veteran, Nightmare, Hell, and Torment — which progressed the same way we do now, with each being unlocked through the completion of a different capstone dungeon. In this build, progressing from World Tier 4 to 5 required completion of the Archives of Issalia capstone dungeon, which was removed in the live release, while WT4 was renamed Torment and WT5 features like Ancestral items merged down. Even the developers have indirectly mentioned this change in direction. During an interview last November, Game Director Joe Shely commented on the existence of five world tiers and their capstone dungeons, though IGN writer Travis Northup reported that later interviews only mentioned four — indicating that plans changed during development. The level 100 Echo of Lilith is the game's current pinnacle challenge.

Of course, this doesn't mean that there couldn't be a fifth world tier,