Diablo IV – Season of the Malignant and the nerfing of fun

thesixthaxis.com:

The Season of the Malignant has started in Diablo IV, the first season for this quasi-MMO action RPG, and it boasts a few interesting additions. Alongside the new malignant enemies there’s a new questline to follow, a new boss, and some new loot of course. All of those might sound like fun new things, but they come alongside a Diablo IV patch that seems to nerf everything enjoyable in the game to make it take longer, reward less loot, and just generally be less enjoyable for players.

The response to this patch has been so poor that Blizzard quickly said they would respond to it today, while those of us who have been waiting for this season to start for six weeks now enter into it under a storm cloud of frustration.

Let’s start with the season itself, which is a decent expansion to the game. The Season of the Malignant features a new story about a new form of Lilith’s corruption spreading through Sanctuary, creating extra powerful Malignant monsters  that apparently murder people at random, which is somehow different to how other monsters behave – they do have more minions for you to clobber. Still, once you’ve killed one they’ll drop their Malignant heart, which you can fit into matching sockets in your jewellery for a powerful new ability.

These new abilities seem to be genuinely powerful, even build-changing in places, such as one that causes skills to use your health instead of your mana/etc to cast a core skill when you’re above 60% health, but adding an extra 10-20% damage as well, or one that stores critical damage on an enemy for 2-4 seconds then explodes it into surrounding enemies, with damage increased by 10% per second it was stored.

It’s not just Malignant hearts though, as completing the season’s chapters will