Blizzard on this week's Diablo 4 nerfs: 'We know it is not fun ... we don't plan on doing a patch like this ever again'
During an emergency 'uh oh, everyone's mad' livestream today, Diablo 4 community manager Adam Fletcher said that this week's controversial patch, which heavily nerfed overall player damage output and survivability, is not something Blizzard plans to repeat.
«We want to acknowledge everyone's feedback in regard to reducing player power,» said Fletcher. «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.»
Associate game director Joe Piepiora went on to explain some of Blizzard's thinking behind the patch. The goal was to slow down builds that were «blasting through content»—which is fun, Piepiora admitted—to keep any one stat, particularly cooldown reduction and vulnerable, from dwarfing the effectiveness of all the others. However, knowing that this week's nerfs were «painful,» Diablo 4's developers say they're going to make changes—without totally backpedaling on the 1.1 patch.
«Ultimately, what we're trying to do is make the game more fun for players,» said game director Joe Shely. «The players are at the heart of everything we're doing, and if players can't believe that, as the game evolves, the game will get more fun, we're not accomplishing our goals.»
The following Diablo 4 changes are coming soon to alleviate some of the pain from the last patch:
The patch that will contain most of these changes, patch 1.1.1, will be here within two weeks, say the devs. Notably, they didn't say that they'll be rolling back any of the most controversial changes in patch 1.1, such as the massive
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