Last 48 hours of Diablo IV there was a bit of chaos after intensely controversial changes to player power levels IN the game’s first pre-season patch. Now, developer Blizzard is doing some damage control, taking a live stream on July 21 to try and explain its decision-making process, and the changes they’re making in response to overwhelming negative feedback.
Diablo IVThe latest patch of 1.1.0 has greatly reduced player power across the board. Changes include a reduction in XP earned for various activities, as well as a diminishing role for status effects like Vulnerability that have played a central role in the class building. It was a chaotic series of changes to say the least, all recorded in a full list of changes via the official patch notes. As promised, Blizzard held a live stream today to address these changes, as well as provide some updates on future changes to the game—especially in response to negative feedback about the previous patch. You can Watch the full stream here:
Player Power Reduction: ‘We know that’s bad. We know it’s not fun.’
On stream, Blizzard’s VP of community management, Adam Fletcher, immediately responded to extremely negative feedback about the patch, acknowledging that there had been mistakes and that the player nerfs had ruined the fun of the game for some players.
While Fletcher stated that Blizzard had specific goals with the most recent patch and that they wanted a chance to explain why they made these changes, the good news is that the team does not “plan to make another patch like this.”
Blizzard plans to ‘always provide patch notes first’
While the most recent patch has dramatically reduced player power and hit the heart of the burgeoning meta, one of the most chaotic elements of all is how suddenly the patch notes come in, their length, and the feeling of total unpredictability in the game’s first season, which kicks off July 20.
As a way to sidestep similar issues in the future, Blizzard has promised to provide patch notes “in advance”, estimating that the notes will appear about a week before a new update is available. The game’s next patch, version 1.1.1, is expected to be out soon, and Blizzard will discuss the specifics of that patch in another live chat next Friday, July 28.
Explanation of changes to player power
While some might find Blizzard’s explanation for the lack of comprehensive, dramatic nerfs, VP of Game Joe Piepiora explained that reducing player attributes like cooldown and status effects like Vulnerability was done to try and amplify player choice. Regarding the specific cooldown ratio, Piepiora said:
[Cooldown reduction (CDR) is the most powerful stat] IN Diablo IV, and the reason for that is clear: When you can get CDR up to a certain point using certain class mechanics, you can effectively gain instant active skills. That can give you limitless resources, can give you unlimited movement speed, can give you unlimited damage resistance, and it starts to degrade the effectiveness of the other options once you start taking these into account.
During the live stream, both Piepiora and game director Joe Shely recognized that powerful builds and taking down tons of enemies are at the core of the action-packed power fantasy. However, the team is now concerned that player choice in builds is slowly tilting towards the meta, meaning that if you don’t emphasize reducing cooldowns or optimizing builds to put enemies into Vulnerable state, you’re operating at a disadvantage.
According to Piepiora, the vulnerability greatly reduced its damage modifier in patch 1.1.0, becoming the only way to actually start damaging enemies at certain levels of play. This doesn’t align with their vision of the game, the team says, and in many ways they believe it’s the result of the over-influence of the high-level Nightmare Dungeon, Piepiora says it’s one of those areas of late-game content that tends to require very specific builds without a lot of room for customization and choice.
The fact that Nightmare Dungeons are dramatically altered from where they really should be is based on the role they take on in the game itself. So Level 100 Nightmare Dungeon is extremely difficult for most classes to actually get through, and as a result it begins to sift through the opportunities and choices players have once they start interacting with content at that Level. You need to rely on very, very specific builds, very specific setups with access to things like near-instant cooldowns on certain skills in order to make a real effort to push through those spaces. And that was never really the purpose of that content.
It’s clear that Nightmare Dungeons will see at least two changes: Crowd density will be increased to accommodate the illusion of power killing large numbers of enemies and, in reference to Piepiora’s claim that the level of crushing difficulty they pose has too much of an effect on build choices, the difficulty will be reduced, bringing Level 100 Nightmare Dungeon down to Level 70’s current difficulty level.
Patch 1.1.1 is expected to address some concerns
During the stream, the team emphasized that the actual goal is not to slow down the game and slow progress, although many feel that changes to the game system like increasing the time it takes to teleport out of a dungeon seem to suggest otherwise. Commenting on the change itself, Shely said the team will continue to evaluate changes like these, but isn’t afraid to say exactly why that particular change was made in the first place.
The next patch, 1.1.1, is expected to address various issues in the current build of the game. Blizzard has revealed a number of such changes, such as an additional tab on inventory sizes to mitigate inventory management concerns and a 40% reduction in respec costs so players can more fully respond to changes in the game’s meta and have more choices about how to build as the game progresses. Other specifics, such as changes that dramatically reduce the strength and power levels of certain classes compared to others, will be explored in more depth during next week’s live stream.
The team emphasizes that they don’t want to abruptly remove powerful skills and items as they did with the most recent patch, and are committed to providing more alternatives when there are potentially far-reaching changes in the future. A hotfix is expected to arrive later today (July 21), with patch notes expected to hit Diablo IVthe Web of right before it goes live.
It’s not uncommon for live service games to make sudden changes like Diablo IV did here, but community frustration over poorly communicated and implemented changes can easily build up over time to create burnout and resentment. Time will tell how quickly Diablo IV recover from this latest kerfuffle.
