Diablo 2 gets its first updates to class balance in 12 years

pcgamesn.com:

Patch 2.4 is now live for Diablo II: Resurrected, and it includes the first balance changes Blizzard has made to the RPG game’s classes since 2010. Each of Diablo II: Resurrected’s classes has undergone extensive tweaking, which Blizzard says should encourage more build diversity as it prepares for the first ladder season to get underway later this month.

Broadly speaking, the changes appear aimed at making under-used abilities and skills more attractive, and so most of the changes in the extensive patch notes are buffs that come either in the form of increased damage output or shorter cooldowns. However, each class has had specific tuning with some end goal in mind – for example, the developers felt that Summoner Druids were too restricted by the limit of one type of summonable at a time, and so now they can summon spirit wolves, dire wolves, and bears at the same time.

Some other impactful changes include the progress tracking for Uber Diablo being moved to regional databases (rather than within individual server instances), and hired mercenaries always matching players’ level (instead of being within a certain range of that level).

The patch also adds new rune words, new Horadric Cube recipes, changes to set item bonuses and level areas, and a variety of quality of life updates. There are also new options for using the legacy graphics: ‘GDI’ is an emulation of unfiltered software rasterisation, ‘Glide’ emulates the hardware-accelerated look with bilinear filtering applied, and ‘Resurrected’ adds a couple modern artefact fixes for the original Glide rendering, Blizzard says.

The full patch notes are available on the official site, and they go into detail on each of the changes made to Diablo II: Resurrected’s classes,