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

Diablo 4Season 1, 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’ defenses and damage have been reduced, and leveling progress has slowed down significantly, 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 polished. Both Diablo 4 And Diablo subreddits are inundated with complaints about the patch.

Streamer Asmongold summed up the situation in the opening minutes of a video discussing the update. “Number one: everything is worse,” he said. “Number two: everything is more difficult. Number three: everything you did, 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 where parts of the map are overrun with high-level monsters. “Damage reduction: reduced. Vulnerability: stripped. A good decision by the way. I agree with the vulnerability decision, I think it’s smart.” Vulnerability is a mechanism that allows players to deal more damage to monsters brought into a vulnerable state, and it became so overpowered that a damage multiplier against vulnerable monsters had become the most powerful, most sought-after stat in the game.

‘But,’ said Asmongold, ‘everything else is rather worthless. Now obviously there have been some really big problems in the game like resistors not working, people running out of storage space, Necromancers not building a viable minion, characters that weren’t fun to play in the early game. Rest assured, none of those things are fixed.

There were early signs that Blizzard had gone into damage control mode, with a live stream discussing the changes announced for Friday. “We’ve heard feedback from players about some of the changes in 1.1.0,” said community development director Adam Fletcher said late Tuesday. “We’re going to have a Campfire Chat later this week on Friday to talk more about it.”

Some changes are already being rolled back. One of the most controversial changes in the patch – not detailed in the patch notes, but soon noticed by players – was the introduction of minimum level requirements for the third and fourth world levels (basically difficulty levels). This could be intended to block the practice of higher level characters being able to group up with lower level players and pilot them through the levels at tremendous speed by taking them to the higher world tiers.

But it also cut a path for better XP gains and faster progression for skilled players leveling up their characters – something the patch already targeted by reducing the experience reward for killing monsters at a higher level than the player, and lowering the level of monsters so that they chase the player by up to five levels. It seems that Blizzard has already changed its mind about the level gates. “We will remove the level requirement for World Tier 3 & 4,” Fletcher tweeted.

The feeling among players is that Blizzard’s intent is to make Diablo 4 feel more difficult, and for slowing progress to the later levels – an area of ​​the game that had already received criticism for its lack of content and poor loot rewards. But, players say, by trying to delay players’ arrival at those late game problems, Blizzard has actually made them worse, with the side effect of making the whole game less fun to play.

Another line of thought is that the overall player power nerf is meant to balance the increased power that will be available from the season’s Maligne Hearts mechanic – though this would be to the detriment of players who choose not to roll new season characters and continue playing on the game’s so-called Eternal Realm.

Diablo 4 has been a huge hit for Blizzard, and the launch of the first season and its Battle Pass is when its ambitions as a live-service game kick into high gear. Blizzard will have to be very convincing in Friday’s Campfire Chat livestream to keep the game’s core community sidelined at this crucial time.