Image: Blizzard Entertainment
Blizzard has acknowledged the widespread criticism surrounding Diablo 4’s Season 1 patch.
It’s no secret that Diablo 4’s Season 1 patch earned widespread controversy when it went live last week, thanks to some nerf-heavy balance changes that worsened the levelling experience for most classes. During a special developer live stream, Blizzard acknowledged players’ criticisms and assured viewers that it doesn’t, “plan on doing a patch like this ever again.”
Diablo 4’s Season 1 patch delivered balance changes that nerfed most classes with longer cooldowns and lower damage across the board, disabling some of the game’s most powerful builds while forcing everyone to reset with a new character for the season. During the live stream, Blizzard admitted that a key reason for these nerfs was to keep players from, “blasting through the content,” the way they did in the base game.
In response to the patch’s criticism, community manager Adam Fletcher said:
We want to acknowledge everyone's feedback in regard to reducing player power. We know it is bad. We know it is not fun... We also want to talk about what we were trying to achieve specifically with this patch and with the changes that players ended up seeing. And then, separately, we do want to also talk about how we don't plan on doing a patch like this ever again.
Due to the patch notes going live at the same time as the update, Blizzard didn’t have time to collect player feedback until it was too late. The developer now plans to give players a look at patch notes for upcoming updates, “well beforehand,” with up to a week’s notice before these changes land. The game’s next update for version 1.1.1 is set to arrive soon, and Blizzard plans to go over the specifics of that patch on July 28, meaning that we could get the patch notes then.
The update will include changes to alleviate some problems introduced in the Season 1 update. Nightmare Dungeons will now have higher enemy density, and an extra stash tab is also on the way. Players’ Elixirs can now stack up to 99 and skill tree respec costs are getting drastically lowered to encourage players to experiment with their builds. While these don’t address the main problems surrounding Diablo 4 right now, like the low endgame viability of classes like the Sorcerer, Blizzard has more changes it plans to discuss on July 28.
At the end of the day ,however, these changes are not being rolled back. Blizzard does want to introduce more alternative builds when nerfing existing ones, which hopefully means that a patch like this won’t happen again - but Season 1 will likely stay the way it is for some time yet. Diablo 4 has plenty of problems that will take months of changes to fix, from the confusing worthlessness of mounts on consoles and empty Level 70-100 endgame grind, to heavy ability cooldowns slowing down gameplay and an unrewarding battle pass to grind through.
These are problems that will take time to solve, and Season 1 has only just begun.