Blizzard changing its entire Diablo 4 patching process after 1.1 controversy

Friday’s Diablo 4 stream was a wild second for the sport and its group. The emergency livestream was Blizzard’s means of quickly responding to the overwhelmingly detrimental suggestions the sport’s newest patch acquired.

Patch 1.1 demonstrated a heavy-handed strategy in stability; nerfing all lessons, flattening the XP curve, blocking a number of power-levelling strategies, and considerably lowering the effectiveness of some key stats – all whereas gamers have been on the point of soar into Diablo 4’s Season of the Malignant.

For sure, it did not go down properly. The excellent news is that Blizzard is kind of conscious of why gamers are upset, and the developer plans to handle a few of their considerations quickly – however a lot of the modifications are staying.

The largest takeaway from the chat is that the way in which patch 1.1 rolled out, contemplating the variety of large modifications it dropped at the sport, is not going to occur once more. Going ahead, Blizzard plans to share patch notes earlier than the patches are stay, to permit everybody to chew on them and provide suggestions somewhat than the way in which it has been performed up to now.

A part of why patch 1.1 modifications have been so sweeping is that it was the beginning of a brand new season. Blizzard mentioned you’ll be able to anticipate main stability patches to reach at predictable occasions, reminiscent of the beginning of seasons. However the cause why gamers have been further disenchanted this time is that the patch nerfed plenty of {powerful} builds with out offering options.

Sooner or later, these builds might be allowed to exist – as long as they are not exploiting a bug – till the developer introduces alternative ways to construct characters.

Within the livestream, the builders defined that the intent behind the modifications was primarily to chop again on ultra-powerful builds that have been tearing via content material. Stated builds relied on key stats like vulnerability and cooldown discount, which the patch additionally nerfed. However the truth that gamers needed to depend on these crutch stats to start with, somewhat than be provided various {powerful} paths to select from, is why these issues exist within the first place.

That is one other factor that Blizzard might be altering, because the developer reiterated the final word objective is to supply gamers the liberty to craft their very own characters.

Within the rapid time period, Diablo 4 acquired a brand new hotfix that targets Nightmare Dungeon issue. In brief, tier 100 will really feel like tier 70, because of reductions in monster HP and harm throughout the whole lot of the Nightmare Dungeon tiers.