Diablo 4 Team Says ‘We Have No Plans To Do A Patch Like This Again’

Blizzard says it understands players’ frustration with the latest patch for Diablo 4, and promises it will “never do a patch like this again.”

During a candid hearth conversation, a key member of the Diablo 4 team said they were “aware of everyone’s feedback” and admitted that while the goal was to slow down “content blasting” for players, the nerf had the opposite effect of the team’s intention to “make the game more fun for players.”

Community Manager Adam Fletcher said, “We would like to thank everyone for their feedback regarding player power reductions.” “We know it’s bad. We know it’s not fun… We also want to talk about what specifically we were trying to achieve with this patch and what changes players ended up seeing.

“Then, apart from this, I also want to talk about the fact that we don’t plan to do a patch like this again.”

“At the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is make the game more fun for players,” added Game Director Joe Shely (thanks PC Gamer). “Players are at the center of everything we do, and if players can’t believe the game will be more fun as it evolves, we haven’t achieved our goal.”

Therefore, it is expected that the fix docket will be published first and will be part of the currently published server-side hotfix. Nightmare dungeons have been enhanced to increase enemy density. Sorcerer and Barbarian Legendary Aspect enhancements and additional hidden tabs are also in the works, but these won’t be available until patch 1.1.1 goes live in the next few weeks. Also, the Elixir stack size has been increased to 99 and the re-spec gold cost of “around 40 percent” should also be enabled in the patch.

The team also assured that future hotfixes and patches would be published proactively going forward, and promised that future balance updates would be left to allow “some builds to be over-buffed” until effective alternatives were implemented. There was also a notable lack of commitment to rollback the current patch.

However, the developers say that major balance changes are inevitable and will “happen at predictable times, such as the beginning of the season,” but that if bugs do occur they can be expected to be fixed quickly.

Diablo 4’s subreddit is filled with rants from all players, not just the Sorcerer class, with lots of suggestions for improvement. One response joked that the patch “fixed an issue players were having fun with”. Another is to stream the game for 20 minutes as a sorcerer and offer a developer $1 million to see how it feels in real life.

Other players are simply review bombing the game: According to Metacritic, the game has a user score of just 2.2 at the time of writing.