On July 18, Diablo 4 released Patch 1.1.0 that was met with universally negative feedback from the community. Players didn't like massive across the board nerf for classes, as well as general game balance for offensive and defensive stats, as well as for experience.
Yesterday during a live developer stream Game Director Joe Shely, Associate Game Director Joseph Piepiora, and Associate Director of Community Adam Fletcher detailed why the changes in Patch 1.1.0 were made, what the devs were aiming to achieve with those changes.
Diablo 4 leads agree that the Patch was a letdown for the players, and they want to ensure they will never implement a patch like that again in the future. If you’d like to watch the full livestream, see the video below.
If you’d prefer to skim the highlights of the Diablo 4 Patch 1.1.0 Campfire Chat, they can be found below.
Livestream VOD
Talking Points
Diablo 4 Live Service Mission Statements:
- Keep the game fun for players.
- Have a wide variety of viable builds to discover, put together, and optimize, across all five classes.
- Introduce new items and powers every season to keep the game fresh and increase build variety.
- Continue to evolve the endgame, with high monster density for powerful builds to mow down and activities to challenge your build.
- When making changes to increase build diversity, they will let some builds be overpowered there're compelling alternatives.
- Introduce meta changes will occur at predictable times, like the start of a Season.
- React quickly to squash game-breaking bugs, damage or crashes.
Diablo 4 Patch 1.1.0 and what it was trying to achieve:
- Diablo 4 was always meant to be a capped power experience and not an endless grind. Building your character’s strength is an essential part of the fun of Diablo – and that it feels bad to take away power.
- The goal is for multiple builds to be powerful enough to defeat our toughest foes, like Uber Lillith: one build shouldn’t be the only way to play a class. Some changes implemented in this patch were made to address this issue.
- Nightmare Dungeons are currently way too difficult - they should feel achievable through multiple builds, and high-level tiers (beyond Tier 50) are particularly over-tuned towards difficulty. Patch 1.1.0 was the start of the changes needed to map against the changes they’re making to Nightmare Dungeons – which will be hot-fixed in today!
Addressing concerns, and changing approach to patches:
- Moving forward, they will take a more surgical approach when adjustments to balance are needed. They will ensure that if we’re adjusting something overpowered, they will provide compelling alternatives for players to explore for their class instead.
- They will be improving communication, sharing patch notes at least a week prior to launch so that they can have meaningful conversations with our community.
- They will be introducing several changes in the upcoming Patch 1.1.1:
- They will be continually evolving the endgame with high monster density for powerful builds to mow down and activities to challenge your build.
- They believe that making changes to certain builds, rebalancing Nightmare Dungeons, and creating additional engaging end-game experiences will ultimately result in a better game for more types of players.
On Patch 1.1.1:
- Today, they will release a Hotfix that introduces changes to Nightmare Dungeons: these are changes that map to some of the balance changes made in 1.1.0.
- They will be implementing Nightmare Dungeons tuning changes to pair with class changes that came with 1.1.0.
- Barbarians and Sorcerers - with Sorcerer first - will be getting adjustments to Legendary Aspects in Patch 1.1.1.
- Monster density will be substantially increased in Nightmare Dungeons, as well as in Helltide.
- They will add an additional stash tab as well as Elixir Stack Size increases.
- They will reduce the Gold respec costs by 40%.
- They want the leveling journey from 50-100 to be faster and are looking at increasing XP bonuses for playing on higher World Tiers.
- And more! We will go into more detail on these changes during our livestream next week.
On July 28 at 11 a.m. PDT Diablo 4 will be hosting another Campfire Chat to continue the conversation with the community and dig in to details about the Patch 1.1.1.
Visit official Diablo Twitch and YouTube channels to watch live! Following the livestream’s conclusion, we’ll publish another article with a video so you can still catch up on the details.
