Diablo 4 devs address balance patch criticism

Last week's pre-season balance patch for Diablo 4 drew a lot of criticism. On Friday afternoon, the developer team held a stream to address the community, kicking things off by saying they won't be rolling out a patch like that again. 

Patch 1.1.0 made pretty much everyone unhappy, with sweeping nerfs across the board, reducing player power and survivability, as well as reducing XP gains from various sources. The player base quickly made their dissatisfaction known across forums, social media and via the Metacritic User Reviews system, plummeting the user score.

Blizzard admits that it made the game less fun with some of its changes. They are already planning some changes for Barbarians and Sorcerers to reverse some of the power loss those classes sustained, although Druids, Rogues and Necromancers seem to be managing well still, particularly with the new seasonal abilities.

Moving up to new World Tiers will not be level-gated like initially planned. Additionally, Blizzard is increasing the mob density in Helltides and Nightmare Dungeons, and will rebalance Nightmare Dungeons to allow more players and build-types to reach Tier 100. Moving forward, Blizzard is aiming to make the Level 50 to 100 process faster for all players.

Blizzard is also going to be looking into buffs more regularly alongside future nerfs to balance out the good with the bad, rather than having a patch that only makes cuts.

Some of these changes will be talked about in a bit more detail during next Friday's developer stream, which will coincide with the unveiling of Patch 1.1.1, which will release the following week.

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KitGuru Says: The stream wasn't particularly upbeat and positive this week but at least Blizzard answered some tough questions and agreed to changes in its process. Hopefully future patches are far less divisive. 

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