Blizzard changing its entire Diablo 4 patching process after 1.1 controversy

Friday’s Diablo 4 stream was a wild time for the game and its community. The emergency livestream was Blizzard’s way of quickly responding to the overwhelmingly negative feedback the game’s latest patch received.

Patch 1.1 demonstrated a heavy-handed approach to balance; nerfing all classes, flattening the XP curve, blocking various power leveling methods, and significantly reducing the effectiveness of some key stats, all as players prepared to jump into Diablo 4’s Season of Fiends.

Needless to say, it didn’t go down well. The good news is that Blizzard is quite aware of why players are upset and the developer plans to address some of their concerns soon, but most of the changes will stick.

The most important thing from the chat is that the way patch 1.1 was implemented, considering the number of massive changes it brought to the game, it won’t happen again. In the future, Blizzard plans to share patch notes before patches are made available, to allow everyone to munch on them and offer feedback instead of the way it’s been done up to now.

Part of why the 1.1 patch changes were so sweeping is that it was the start of a new season. Blizzard said that you can expect major balance patches to arrive at predictable times, such as the start of seasons. But the reason players were more disappointed this time around is that the patch nerfed several powerful builds without offering any alternatives.

In the future, those builds will be allowed to exist, as long as they don’t exploit a bug, until the developer introduces different ways to build characters.

In the live stream, the developers explained that the intent behind the changes was primarily to reduce ultra-powerful builds that were trashing content. Said builds relied on key stats like vulnerability and cooldown reduction, which the patch also lowered. But the fact that players had to rely on these crutch stats to begin with, rather than being given multiple powerful paths to choose from, is why these issues exist in the first place.

That’s another thing Blizzard will be changing, as the developer reiterated that the ultimate goal is to offer players the freedom to create their own characters.

Right away, Diablo 4 received a new review which points to the Nightmare Dungeon difficulty. In short, level 100 will feel like level 70, thanks to reductions in monster HP and damage at all levels of Nightmare Dungeon.