Diablo 4's developers explain the controversial balance changes in update 1.1, and what's happening next.
During an emergency ‘uh oh, everyone’s mad’ livestream today, Diablo 4 community manager Adam Fletcher said that this week’s controversial patch, which heavily nerfed overall player damage output and survivability, is not something Blizzard plans to repeat: “We don’t plan on doing a patch like his ever again,” he said.
“We know that reducing player power is never a good experience in general,” said associate game director Joe Piepiora, who went on to explain Blizzard’s thinking behind the patch. The goal was to slow down builds that were “blasting through content”—which is fun, he admitted—to keep any one stat, namely cooldown reduction and vulnerable, from dwarfing the effectiveness of all the others.
However, knowing that this week’s nerfs were “painful,” Diablo 4’s developers say they’re going to make changes.
“Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is make the game more fun for players,” said game director Joe Shely. “The players are at the heart of everything we’re doing, and if players can’t believe that, as the game evolves, the game will get more fun, we’re not accomplishing our goals.”
In response to the negative feedback around this patch, the devs announced some specific Diablo 4 changes that will happen in hotfixes today and in patch 1.1.1 sometime in the next few weeks. This may not be everything planned, as we’re still combing the stream for details:
Nightmare dungeon difficulty will be hotfixed today, which will increase the enemy density and lower the difficulty of higher tiersHelltide enemy density will be increased in a hotfix todaySorcerer and Barbarian Legendary aspect buffs coming in 1.1.1Adding an additional stash tab in 1.1.1Elixir stack size will be raised to 99 in 1.1.1Respec gold costs will be reduced by “about 40%” in 1.1.1
The developers also made some promises about how they’ll handle future balance changes:
Future balance updates will allow “some builds to be overpowered” until “compelling alternatives” have been introducedBig balance shifts will “occur at predictable times, like at the start of a Season”However, if an OP build results from a bug, they’ll still fix it quickly. (A recent example was a Barbarian build that relied on a bug that was fixed in 1.1.)
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