Blizzard gets candid with Diablo 4 Season 1: "We know it is bad, we know it is not fun"

gamesradar.com:

Kicking off the community address it scheduled in response to intensifying backlash to the Diablo 4 Season 1 patch, Blizzard opened with candid agreement that the game is less fun after the update. 

"We want to acknowledge everyone's feedback in regards to reducing player power," says associate community management director Adam Fletcher. "We know it is bad, we know it is not fun. We ourselves know that it's not the greatest play experience for players out there. 

"We do want to explain why we ended up doing it within the actual patch, and 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," he continues. "Separately, we want to talk about how we don't plan on doing a patch like this ever again. We have most definitely heard the feedback from the players on that front, and we do want to talk about our philosophy and internal statements we're setting for ourselves for future updates."

The tone of the developers, including associate game director Joe Piepiora and game director Joe Shely, is decidedly apologetic. Piepiora concurred that "reducing player power is never a good experience," noting that the underlying intent of the patch was to prevent outlier abilities and affixes from unhealthily warping the game. 

Piepiora reasons that one of the factors behind the dominance of top builds, which often rely on cooldown reduction and Vulnerable and other newly nerfed effects, is due to the nature of Diablo 4's existing endgame content. For example: "The reality is that Nightmare Dungeons are dramatically over-tuned for where they actually need to be based on the role they fulfill in the game." 

To that end, a difficulty nerf is coming to