War Plans: the board, the trees, and what to rush : schillman.se

War Plans: the board, the trees, and what to rush

War Plans is the system most likely to be sitting unused in your game. It is a playlist you build out of endgame activities, and it quietly doubles as seven permanent upgrade trees for the activities you were going to run anyway. Ignoring it costs you loot for no reason.

Last checked against current sources on 10 August 2026.

Where the board is

War Plans unlocks after you finish the Lord of Hatred campaign. The board itself is in Temis, the main city of Skovos, on the table next to Tyrael. Interact with the table and you start drawing up a plan.

A plan is a set of endgame activities to go and complete. Finishing them pays extra loot on top of whatever the activity normally drops, and it pays Activity Experience into that activity's own skill tree. The loot is the short term reason to care. The trees are the real one, because they are permanent for the season.

Seven activities, seven separate trees

Each of these has its own tree, levelled by its own Activity Experience. Progress in one does nothing for the others, which is the main strategic constraint: spreading your plans thin across all seven leaves you with seven half finished trees and no completed payoff.

Tree of Whispers

Nightmare Dungeons

Helltides

The Undercity

Lair Bosses

Infernal Hordes

The Pit

Seven levels, one point each Every tree has 7 levels, and each level gives you 1 skill point to spend in that tree. So a fully levelled tree is 7 points, and the order you take them in is the whole decision.

Activity Experience scales with difficulty You only earn it by completing activities that are part of an active War Plan. It starts at 25 per activity on Normal and climbs with your difficulty tier, so running plans at the highest tier you can actually clear is worth more than clearing more activities lower down. Sources disagree on the exact Torment 12 figure, quoting both 125 and 150, so read the number off your own board rather than trusting either.

The Whispers tree is the cheap one Tree of Whispers needs less Activity Experience per level than the others. If you want one completed tree early to feel the difference, that is the one.

You can reroll, three times The New Plans button redraws the board. You get up to three resets, so a plan full of activities you hate is not something you have to grind through.

Syncing a board with your party

Patch 3.1 added party sync, which is worth knowing about before your group wastes an evening running three different plans. Everyone has to be in Temis, it costs 2 Marks of El'Druin, and it works as a vote. If everyone accepts, the player who started the vote has their own board reset, and that exact board is pushed to everyone else.

Note the cost of that: the initiator loses their current plan. Start the vote from whoever has the least progress on their board, not whoever happened to suggest it.

Nodes worth the first points

These are the node names I could confirm on a primary source. What they do is summarised briefly; the tree itself tells you the numbers, and the numbers move between patches.

Confirmed War Plan nodes and why they get picked early.
Node	Tree	Why it goes first
Hellmouth	Helltides	Makes Hellwyrms spawn something extra every time they surface. It is the setup for the node below.
Writhe and Rot	Helltides	Forces Hellwyrms to produce only Maggots, instead of splitting between Chaos Rifts, Bloodseekers and Maggots. Maggots drop Experience Orbs, so this is the fastest levelling and Paragon node in the game right now.
Nemesis	Nightmare Dungeons	The first big Nightmare Dungeon upgrade, and the one worth rushing before anything else in that tree.
Fearless Conviction	Nightmare Dungeons	Taken straight after Nemesis to juice Nightmare Dungeons further.
Branching Pathways	Nightmare Dungeons	On the middle path. Gives you more consistent choice over which resources you take out of Escalations, which is what turns them into targeted farming instead of a lottery.
Lair of Runes	Lair Bosses	Raises Lair Boss monster power by 1, so more life and damage but also more experience and better rewards.
Lair of Plenty	Lair Bosses	Spawns a second Hoard Chest after the kill, at the cost of another point of monster power. Worth knowing that the extra chest is reported not to trigger Nemesis, which is why some players skip it.
Golden Hoard	Lair Bosses	Converts all equipment from Hoard Chests into gold, except Uniques and Mythic Uniques. Taken with the two above it strips the yellow clutter out of a boss farm and leaves only what you actually wanted.
Tree of Plenty	Tree of Whispers	More options to choose from each time you complete a Whisper Cache. Cheap, because the Whispers tree levels fastest.

One name worth getting right The Helltide node is Writhe and Rot. It gets miscopied as "Wither and Rot" constantly, including, until I checked while writing this page, in my own Ledger. If you are searching for it and finding nothing, that is usually why.

If you only do one thing

Take Hellmouth then Writhe and Rot on the Helltide tree first. It is the strongest single combination available, it feeds off Helltides which is where the Season 14 Rupture loop already puts you, and levelling faster makes every other tree cheaper to fill because Activity Experience scales with the difficulty you can hold.

After that, split by what you are short of: Nightmare Dungeon nodes if you need materials and gems through Escalations, Lair Boss nodes if you are sitting on Superior Lair Keys and want more out of each pair.

War Plans, Maxroll, for the unlock, board location, the seven trees, level and point structure, Activity Experience scaling and node names.

Season of Death Awakening Guide, Maxroll, for party sync and its cost.

Endgame Progression, Maxroll, for which nodes are prioritised.

War Plans, Fextralife wiki, for the Lair Bosses tree nodes.