Later today at 11 a.m. PDT, Game Director Joe Shelly, Associate Game Director Joe Piepiora, and Associate Director of Community Adam Fletcher will discuss the feedback received from the community on Patch 1.1.
As you can imagine, the Patch 1.1 release was pretty controversial. The community didn’t like the nerfs imposed on their characters and players even started review-bombing Diablo 4 on Metacritic, decreasing its review score to 2.3, and asking Blizzard to revert the update.
Today, the Diablo 4 development team will provide answers to some of the feedback received from players.
Highlights
- Blizzard said they will “never release a patch like 1.1 ever again.”
- Nerfing player power feels painful.
- Nightmare Dungeons are dramatically overtuned and require very specific comps.
- As a result, the plan is to reduce some difficult aspects of Nightmare Dungeons soon.
- They will create a new endgame content type for everyone to chase.
- Vulnerable damage is very potent and many builds rely on it to deal damage, so they reduced player power in 1.1.
- They want Vulnerable to not be a must-have stat.
- Blizzard has shared a mission statement on the live version of the game. It includes the following:
- A wide variety of viable builds to discover, put together, and optimize across all five classes.
- New items and powers every season to keep the game fresh and increase build variety.
- Continually evolving endgame content with high monster density for powerful builds to mow down and activities to challenge your build.
- Make the game more fun for players.
- Blizzard cannot nerf overpowered builds until they have provided compelling alternatives.
- Meta changes will occur at predictable times, like the start of a season. They can’t just release patches with a ton of class changes when everyone just had a fresh start.
- In situations where a bug is causing game-breaking damage or crashes, Blizzard will still react quickly.
- Next Friday, Blizzard will be back on a livestream to talk about the next Diablo 4 Patch 1.1.1.
- They will post patch notes ahead of release so the community can react to the changes.
- Blizzard plans on looking through the Barbarian and Sorcerer aspects in Patch 1.1.1. The specifics of the changes will be discussed in a week.
- Nightmare Dungeons will be nerfed via hotfixes later today.
- The mob density in Helltides will go up but not uniformly and the density Nightmare Dungeons will be significantly increased.
- An additional stash tab is being added in Patch 1.1.1.
- They are bringing up elixir stack size to 99.
- Respec cost will be brought down by about 40% in 1.1.1.
- They want to make leveling from 50-100 faster by adjusting XP. They don’t want you to hit a brick wall like you currently do at level 70.
- The goal is to make the game faster not feel like a slog.
Livestream Q&A
It’s Q&A time!
- They are creating an endgame content type directly tied to Leaderboards. The plan is to have them in Season 3.
- They want Uber Uniques to feel extremely rare.
- When you have a high density of monsters and Elites on screen, the tools you have for crowd control need to be better. Some of that will be adjustments to things that feel unfair.
- They are actively discussing a loadout feature, but they have no ETA on when the feature will be implemented.
- Patch 1.1.1 will possibly release a few days after next week’s stream.
- They want to introduce more opportunities to progress through World Tier 4.
- They have plans in Season 2 to have more content you can target farm.
- More patches will release in Season 1 beyond Patch 1.1.1.
- A Group Finder (matchmaking system) is being considered, but there’s no ETA.
- They are nerfing chilling, charging, and corpse-exploding monster types and identifying disproportions between Nightmare Dungeon affixes.
- Players are carrying a lot of aspects currently and the devs want to address that. Having an extra stash space will not hurt the problem, but they want to introduce alternative solutions to the issue.
- Vulnerable damage changes affect some classes more than others, but it goes back to providing compelling alternatives mentioned earlier in the livestream.
- They will go over the existing Legendary Aspects and adjust them accordingly in Patch 1.1.1.
- There could be more opportunities to fight campaign bosses in the future.
- The engineering team is working on resolving crashes on PS5 and freezes on PC.
- The team is excited to bring in more ways for Druids to interact with their Companions.
- They want to improve communication and appreciate the feedback.
- Barbarian and Sorcerer adjustments are coming in Patch 1.1.1.