On July 18, we released Patch 1.1.0 for Diablo IV. Since then, we’ve received valuable feedback from the community regarding the changes it implemented. We took the opportunity to address that feedback directly during our Season of the Malignant Campfire Chat on July 21.
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 we were aiming to achieve with those changes, and the steps we’re taking to ensure we will never implement a patch like that again in the future. If you’d like to watch the full livestream, see the below video on demand.
If you’d prefer to skim the highlights of our Campfire Chat, they can be found below.
Diablo IV’s 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, we will let some builds be overpowered until we have provided 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.
Why we released Patch 1.1.0 and what we are trying to achieve:
- Diablo IV was always meant to be a capped power experience and not an endless grind. We know that building your character’s strength is an essential part of the fun of Diablo – and that it feels bad to take away power.
- So why did we do Patch 1.1.0? Our 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.
- We also know that 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 we’re making to Nightmare Dungeons – which will be hot-fixed in today!
How we are addressing concerns, and why and how our approach to patches will change moving forward:
- Moving forward, we will take a more surgical approach when adjustments to balance are needed. We will ensure that if we’re adjusting something overpowered, we will provide compelling alternatives for players to explore for their class instead.
- We will be improving communication, sharing patch notes at least a week prior to launch so that we can have meaningful conversations with our community.
- We will be introducing several changes in the upcoming Patch 1.1.1:
- We will be continually evolving the endgame with high monster density for powerful builds to mow down and activities to challenge your build.
- We 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, we 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.
- We 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.
- We will add an additional stash tab as well as Elixir Stack Size increases.
- We will reduce the Gold respec costs by 40%.
- We 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.
Tune in to the Next Campfire Chat
On July 28 at 11 a.m. PDT we will be hosting another Campfire Chat to continue the conversation with the community and dig in to details about Patch 1.1.1.
Visit our official Diablo Twitch and YouTube channels to watch live! Following the livestream’s conclusion, we’ll publish another article with a video on demand so you can still catch up on the details if you miss them.