Diablo 4’s first season is off to a rocky start before it even begins

polygon.com:

Diablo 4’s first season, Season of the Malignant, begins Thursday at 1 p.m. EDT. This should have been an exciting moment for fans of the game, but instead the community finds itself in open revolt over the hugely unpopular changes in Tuesday’s pre-season update, patch 1.1.

The patch is short on buffs and long — very, very long — on nerfs. Players’ defense and damage have been reduced, and leveling progress has been significantly slowed, especially in later levels and on higher World Tiers. Even the Sorcerer class, which players agree is the most underpowered in the game and has a serious build diversity problem, was nerfed instead of buffed. Both the Diablo 4 and Diablo subreddits are overwhelmed with complaints about the patch.

Streamer Asmongold summed the situation up in the opening minutes of a video discussing the update. “Number one: Everything is worse,” he said. “Number two: Everything is harder. Number three: Everything you were doing, now you have to work harder to do it again. Number four: Leveling — slower.

“Number five: Helltides — worse,” he continued, referring to the late-game activity in which sections of the map are overrun with high-level monsters. “Damage reduction: reduced. Vulnerability: gutted. Good decision, by the way. I agree with the vulnerability decision, I think it’s smart.” Vulnerability is a mechanic via which players do more damage to monsters that have been put in a vulnerable state, and it was so overpowered that a damage multiplier against vulnerable monsters had become the most powerful, sought-after stat in the game.

“However,” Asmongold said, “everything else kind of sucks. Now, obviously there have been some really big problems in the game, like resistances not working, people