Diablo 4's first major balance patch is here and it buffs every class
rockpapershotgun.comDiablo 4's first major patch, 1.0.3, is out now. It fixes a lot of bugs, but its main goal is to re-balance and buff every class and to "smooth out the leveling experience" by increasing the power of certain skills.
"We’re continuing our efforts to make all Class builds feel fun and powerful with another round of balance updates. In particular, we have seen community feedback stating that Basic Skills aren’t impactful enough in combat," says a developer note on the full patch notes. "These changes will not change the fundamental relationship between Basic Skills and Core Skills, but we hope that they help smooth out the leveling experience while we explore additional ways to strengthen them. We are also increasing the power of some Skills that players feel are lagging behind their peers."
The full list of changes includes increases to base damage output for a lot of basic attacks, mostly in the region of 1-3%. There are also changes to the rate at which the Barbarian generate Fury, Necromancer's generate Essence, and so on, as well as reductions to ability cooldowns. This should mean each class runs out of energy less often and generally feels more powerful from the beginning of the game.
Once you do reach the endgame, there are also tweaks to the world that may help. Players will now receive more experience for completing Nightmare Dungeons and opening Helltide chests, for example, and Helltide roaming bosses will now "consistently drop higher quality loot."
There are bug fixes across all parts of the game, including dungeons, UI, general combat, local co-op and more. None of them sound funny out of context though, so I won't list them here.
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