Diablo 4 players become unkillable gods as a minor bug fix in Lord of Hatred turns into a major problem for Blizzard

Blizzard recently dropped the first big patch for Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred, addressing several issues that cropped up in the first few weeks of the expansion. Disabled items that were breaking the game came back and a mountain of bugs were fixed, including one that was supposed to help players make their characters a little tougher against the demons of Sanctuary.

It was not, however, supposed to grant them near-immortality.

One of the main defensive mechanics in the game is called resolve. Basically, it’s a buff several classes can stack up that reduces their damage taken from all sources. In Diablo 4, this kind of damage reduction is incredibly important as you move up in the difficulty tiers in your search for better loot. Monsters fling lightning bolts at you, leave poison pools on the ground, and make all sorts of other attacks that frequently overlap when you’re clearing through crowds of them.

To not get popped like a balloon, you need a lot of damage reduction. The recent patch fixed one of the strongest ways to achieve this: a Legendary power called Glynn’s Anvil. Before, it did absolutely nothing. But now, when you slap this power onto one of your items, you’ll gain 4% damage reduction for every stack of resolve you have, capped at eight stacks, or 24% damage reduction, by default. That would be a lot on its own, but Blizzard didn’t catch a separate bug that takes this to game-breaking levels of damage reduction.

Several classes, like paladins and spiritborn, can add a stat onto their gear that increases their resolve cap by three. That wouldn’t be a problem if upgrading your item—and therefore the stat—didn’t inexplicably bring it up to 12, an increase that was clearly not intended. You can exploit this weird math on three pieces of gear and increase your total resolve stacks to 44. With Glynn’s Anvil now working, that gives you 176% damage reduction, AKA the closest thing to immortality you’ll ever achieve in Diablo 4.

Diablo 4 creator MacroBioBoi demonstrated how ridiculous this bug is in a recent video. Without the resolve stacks, he took a 30,000 damage hit. With them, he was tickled for merely 4,000 damage. He still takes damage because the math for damage reduction is multiplicative, which essentially means you can’t perfectly negate 100% of it. But Macrobioboi’s results show how absurdly powerful this can be for max level characters who are already built to be pretty tanky. It’s the difference between needing to chug an emergency potion and not drinking one ever again, especially if your build naturally regains life over time.

And this is without taking advantage of the unique mechanics different classes have that interact with resolve, like a Legendary power that gives you an increased chance to block incoming attacks for every stack of resolve (a 100% chance to block is easily achievable with this bug).

Blizzard must’ve been so busy playing whack-a-mole with people achieving infinite damage it missed a bug that let people achieve infinite defense. It’s been a few days and the studio still hasn’t mentioned that a fix is incoming, but I doubt this is a bug that will last very long. Some of the game’s most valuable loot is locked behind bosses who can one-shot you with some of their attacks and I’m sure Blizzard wouldn’t want half of the classes essentially getting it all for free.