Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Diablo 4 Season 1 feels like a slower and less engaging game than it was a month ago, and here’s why.
Diablo 4 Season 1 launched this month to an avalanche of complaints from its devoted playerbase, thanks to a patch that nerfed nearly every class in one way or another. Blizzard has since said that it doesn't, "plan on doing a patch like this ever again," and has already announced a series of buffs to help out the weakest classes in the game. Unfortunately, the problems players are facing this season are far too lengthy for just one patch to resolve - especially since more than a few of them were carried over from the base game.
It's fair to say that Diablo 4: Season of the Malignant has not lived up to expectations. For players, it's a downer follow-up that nerfs classes across the board for the sake of slowing things down. For Blizzard, it's a clumsy start to Diablo 4's much talked-about future as a live-service game. If Season 1 gave players this much to complain about, what do they have left to look forward to in Seasons 2, 3 and beyond? Even after Patch 1.1.1 drops, the game is still rife with problems:
The Sorcerer is insanely underpowered (and their new unique doesn’t help)
The Sorcerer is not a bad character class per se, but it does get worse to play the further along you get in the game. From Level 1 to 50, playing as the Sorcerer is a blast for anyone who enjoys the power fantasy of a ranged magic user, and there are quite a few elemental builds to try out if you ever get tired of playing a specific way. This class does not have a lot of survivability however, and relies heavily on keeping mana up and cooldowns down to get through fights.
The glass cannon nature of Sorcerers becomes a real problem at higher World Tiers, when enemies and dungeons become more punishing while builds and gear seem to have diminishing returns compared to the early-to-midgame. Season 1’s patch made all of these problems much worse without alleviating the concerns of many Sorcerer mains, nerfing the few abilities that kept them viable in the endgame and hitting the class with cooldowns galore. Even when one of Season 1’s paltry six new Uniques was specific to the Sorcerer, it also happened to be the only one with a ridiculous drawback: you teleport randomly upon using it. Not only does this make the Unique that much less enticing to chase, but it has led to some rather irritating bugs:
Predatory Battle Pass purchase button (and currency weirdness)
Blizzard and predatory monetisation get along like a house on fire, so it’s no surprise that Season 1 launched with a few controversies relating to its Premium battle pass. Two big ones stuck out during launch week, the first of which involved players activating the battle pass by accident. Streamer Rurikhan first drew attention to this issue in a viral Twitter clip where he accidentally clicked on the ‘Activate Premium Battle Pass’ button, which was located right next to a button meant for checking Season Journey progress.
Checking the Season Journey often is pivotal for players who want to progress through Season 1’s many objectives as efficiently as possible, but since the cursor defaults to the ‘Activate Battle Pass’ button whenever you try to check it, a lot of players have ended up accidentally activating their pass when they didn’t mean to. Rurikhan was saving the free Premium Battle Pass activation he got from buying the more costly Deluxe or Ultimate Editions of Diablo 4 for a later season, but ended up being stuck with the Season 1 pass instead. Blizzard has fixed this problem in a recent patch, but not before being criticised for ‘dark pattern’ game design - a term used for game mechanics and UI that sneakily pushes players towards making in-game transactions.
That’s not the only Battle Pass problem Diablo 4 has right now. The Season 1 pass gives players 666 Platinum upon completion - a fun little nod to the game's hellish roots, but yet another ‘dark pattern’ decision in game design according to many. The cheapest item in the in-game cosmetic store costs 800 Platinum, and Season 2’s battle pass will supposedly cost 1000 Platinum. That means Season 1’s Battle Pass doesn’t give you enough Platinum to buy anything in the game whatsoever, and that’s if you have the patience to finish it in the first place.
Many, if not most games with seasonal battle passes (Fortnite, Call of Duty: Warzone) offer enough in-game currency within the battle pass to not only buy the next season’s pass, but a cosmetic or two for good measure. This keeps the cycle of playing through seasons fun and rewarding, without feeling too grindy. Overwatch 2 is another Blizzard game that doesn’t give players any in-game currency to afford future Battle Passes, but Diablo 4 is a full-priced game, whereas Overwatch 2 is free-to-play. This level of corporate double-dipping so early in the game’s lifetime does not bode well for its future.
The death of popular builds (and no fun alternatives to replace them)
Remember the Sorcerer's chain lightning builds that dominated Diablo 4’s open beta, before they were nerfed to oblivion upon full release? Blizzard decided to do the same thing to every other class this season, and the Sorcerer was once again not exempt. The pre-patch nerfed a long list of abilities, skills and gear that were considered necessities for some of the game’s most powerful endgame builds. That wouldn’t be a problem if a few more fun builds rose up to replace them, but Blizzard chose violence and robbed players of the ones they already had.
Seasonal content in a Diablo game is a tricky thing. Balancing multiple character classes, gear systems and itemisation while adding new content to the game every few months is a juggling act that Blizzard clearly isn’t good at yet - just look at Diablo 3 or Overwatch 2’s approach to seasons for proof. In Diablo 4, each season adds something to the mix by taking away something else. For example, Malignant items replace gem slots for jewellery this season. Old characters are rendered unusable for the sake of new game-changing content.
Since the base game gave players plenty of time to try out different character classes and builds, it would make sense for each season to also tweak new builds into existence for replayability. Chain Lightning Sorcerer had their time in the beta, but why not bring them back for another season and bring nerfs to now-dominant ice-powered Sorcerer builds? That tradeoff makes sense and doesn’t hurt too much, because it just gives players a different way to feel just as powerful - and it’s all temporary to boot. Blizzard’s philosophy for Season 1’s pre-patch was not exchanging one build for another - it was nerfing all of the most popular builds in the game to slow players down.
This is not speculation; in a recent Campfire Chat, Blizzard said these nerfs were introduced to stop players, “blasting through the content.” The ongoing controversy has changed the team’s mind, as buffs are slowly coming later in August.
Gameplay feels slow now (and the horse makes things worse)
Diablo 4 has a horse problem. It simply does not make sense to use mounts that get stuck on overlong cooldowns whenever you have to travel on foot. Barricades set up by skeletal monsters, gaps between cliffs, ropes and disabled sprinting in camps all serve to keep you off your mount for long enough that you might forget you even had one at all. The only purpose these poor horses seem to serve are for two additional cosmetic slots in the shop - mount skins, and mount armour.
Diablo 4’s horse problem feels like a microcosm of its appallingly slow gameplay loop. The game takes away all of your movement abilities whenever you’re in a town, but also spreads vendors like the Occultist and the Blacksmith so far apart that you end up doing laps each time you want to work on your gear. Malignant Hearts are a fun new mechanic, but their item drops are strangely easy to miss, and it can get frustrating waiting for enemies to spawn into a dungeon when you actually realise a Heart has dropped. Dungeons in general have problems that become more and more apparent in the endgame - repetitive objectives either force players to seek out scattered mobs of enemies around the map or backtrack through areas they’ve already explored.
The fact that endgame activities fail to diversify from Level 70-100 also means that players can feel like they’re grinding through the same content again and again with no purpose beyond maxing out their characters. Season 1’s Battle Pass at least offers a few more objectives to tick off along the way, but these objectives aren’t activities in and of themselves. These are all problems the base game already suffered from, and the repetition of it all has barely sunk in yet. By Season 2 or Season 3, the endgame grind might get to be too much for most players.
Season 1’s big update also brought some now-infamous nerfs to XP gain, ability cooldowns, and the amount of cinders needed to open Helltide chests. If you’re jumping into Season 1 from the base, you’d be correct to notice how slow everything feels compared to how it was before. A more recent patch is even going to buff up boss health, making those fights last much longer. If Blizzard doubles down on these changes next season, it will clearly be part of an effort to slow down the pace of Diablo 4’s gameplay so players stay active for longer. What other reason can there possibly be to pump the brakes when people are having fun?
Things have changed
In the process of writing (and rewriting) this article, Blizzard unveiled a new patch to combat the issues it introduced to the game. After players complained about the Sorcerer getting nerfed, the developer announced new buffs for the class. After players complained about the Mount being on constant cooldown, Blizzard announced that it would soon break through barricades. After players complained about nerfed XP gain and poor loot drops, Blizzard announced that it would increase enemy mob density and make Legendaries more attainable.
Here’s the thing: none of these changes bring the game back to where it was pre-Season 1. All of the game’s classes will still be worse off, seeing as their many nerfs haven’t been reversed. A few buffs will help Barbarians and Sorcerers out, but they’re still the worst-performing classes overall. Mounts being able to break through barricades is well and good, but we’re still getting cooldowns just to pick up loot, go into towns and hurdle open-world obstacles. Granted, this is a minor patch - but the real, impactful changes players want right now seem so far in the horizon that one has to ask: where’s the live-service in this live-service game?