Diablo 4's Huge Patch Backlash Prompts Damage Control Chat with Blizzard Devs

What exactly is the problem here? Nerfing classes? If it's not related to monetization or mp imbalance I don't care.

Loved Diablo 3, but glad I sat this one out.

Oh dear……………not good.

I don't play Blizzard games but I gotta say, from the outside looking in, it does seem like their fans are always upset about something. It never seems like Blizzard fans are happy and yet they continue to buy Blizzard games. It seems like a strange relationship!

@Korgon sorry to say but the loudest people are the dumbest imo. MMO kids... honestly its all good and the making of an elephant out of a mosquito does not help at all. Yes it is not okay to not listen to the players and forgetting to adress things bugged and so on. But the game is still the same as before. You are not longer OP and rushing to everything like there are no enemies. But it is really playable and even more demanding. Play more carefully and act more thoughtfully. "Problem solved"

Blizzard have a habit of not listening to their players, not delivering on promises and making changes that affect the people who have invested the most time and effort into the game.
As their management team are despicable people who abuse theit own workforce, customers shouldnt expect any better.
I boycotted this game due to this, and everything I see abiut this companies behaviour has only reaffirmed my personal choice.

I do feel very sorry for those who believe they are badly affected by the changes.

The whole patch just slows down progression. It feels really scummy that they artificially try to keep people engaged longer without providing any real new content.

Everything in this patch made the game essentially worse and they didn't add any QOL improvements either.

@Woder If the game was in this state/pace from the beginning no one would even say a word. Youtubers and Hardcore people with their slogans "Best build" "even more OP build" "unbelievable damage build" "delete Uber Lilith in 5 secs build"... should not be possible. I waited for the worldboss to spawn pre patch for 7 and a half minutes. To accept that he died in (I do not lie) 10 seconds. WTF?! It is better now.

When will developers learn that buffing is much more interesting than nerfing?
If you need people will inevitably feel like something was taking away from them, if instead they rebalance the enemies and buff the weakest classes you make more people happy while still keeping the difficulty.
Unless something is completely broken I'm generally against nerfing. Let people have fun with overpowered builds!

There you go, Microsoft! Your blushing bride awaits!

Its a brilliant game and i'm having a blast. The nerfs have zero effect on my enjoyment. I understand how people can get upset when their uber killing machine takes 5 extra hits to kill something but some of these entitled creatures are acting as if they have personally been targeted..how do they cope with life outside of their basements?

This reminds me of the racial 'balancing' that happed in Elder Scrolls Online.
A 100 page player discussion on why a Wood Elf should be stealthy rather than being aware of stealth (that still doesn't work properly) was just arbitrarily shut down by ZOS moderators and the Bosmer are still broken.

I don’t play Diablo so I don’t know the severity of what’s gone on here. But I can understand how it would be upsetting if, upon returning from the washroom, the steak dinner and mashed potatoes I was enjoying had suddenly turned into a hot dog and fries.

This is the state the game should have been in at launch, not after people have had time to bring multiple characters past level 50. It's not so much the content of the patch, but rather the timing of it. People are rightfully pissed in my opinion, the game has no meaningful endgame so instead, everything will just take longer. I expect the anger to increase after tomorrow's stream, when they tell everyone how they're listening but don't plan to do anything about it.

Blizzard fans are probably the most sadomasochistic fanbase I've seen in gaming.

The need for it to be always online was enough for me to ignore it. However games like this get balance updates all the time and you have to roll with the punches. It’s like in a war game when your favourite unit gets nerfed. You either act like a little kid and rage quit or you grow up and take it on the chin.

@sanderson72 Yeah, as someone whose secondary main is a Bosmer this still hurts.

@Northern_munkey @Triumph741 @ORO_ERICIUS

Y'all are tossing out some broad oversimplifications. It's okay if you're cool with it all. I agree if it STARTED this way, it'd be more palatable. But the fact is, it didn't start this way. The game was released, sold, and reviewed based on a flow and cadence, one that was already deemed slow by many.

There are issues to address, but going after the few fun builds that were discovered and undercutting everyone's ability to progress is just asinine. Especially when they didn't address things players have been begging for since beta.

The changes effect everyone. If only a few were implemented to slowly right the ship, then it could have been palatable. But, in classic Blizzard fashion, they took the nerfhammer to the game. If rolled out over 2-3 seasons, tweaking so players could adjust and bring builds up to new status quos, it would have been better. (The old adage of boiling frogs comes to mind.) Instead, they upset damn near everyone who put a lot of time into the game.

I mean...

Item drops have been slowed, as drops from Elites were nerfed.

The best Helltide chests were nerfed, making loot chasing harder. Cinders in Helltides were nerfed, making loot chase worse.

They gated World Tiers (but reverting this), so you couldn't get XP to progress as quickly fighting higher level foes.

They nerfed XP rewards from those harder enemies by a significant amount, ruining XP rewards for even trying to push, slowing progress to a slower crawl.

The net effect is slowing down gameplay. You take longer to engage lower level enemies, get less XP for doing so, and get killed more easily while doing it, costing you time and resources to fix your gear and complete your objective.

Heck, they made it take 66% longer to exit a dungeon! Why??

Those are all universal truths. You may THINK they "don't effect you" but they very much do/will. You may play similarly, but effectiveness has, undoubtably, been cut back. As will progress through the game itself.

Prior to the patch it was estimated a level obtained during endgame (roughly level 70+) should take 2-3 hours (aiming for fighting enemies +3 levels above you to optimize XP), depending on activity. I imagine that was increased by at least an hour per level, based on my limited post-patch play time.

My 86 melee rogue went from crushing Nightmare Dungeons and enemies +5-6 levels, to struggling to complete when the enemies were at my level. I could trade blows with the Butcher and beat him 9/10 times. Post-patch, he 2-shotted me before he finished saying his name.

That's a fundamental screw up, whether they intend it to be that hard or not, based on how DRASTIC it feels. It's not an understatement to say this patch is a shock to the system. This is dunking us all in ice water when we were begging them to heat things up.

Somebody else mentioned it, but Blizzard has a tendency to nerf, nerf, nerf instead of slowly tweaking, nerfing, buffing, etc. They see something "out of place" and they smash that thing (whatever it is) into the Earth's core from on high (see also: HotS, Overwatch). In this case, they made EVERYONE feel less viable. It's exhausting.

Why would I bother to rebuild myself (as I crest 115 hours in the game) if there's ALWAYS the risk of them undercutting me so severely at any moment? ESPECIALLY when their systems are expensive and not simple to respec/rebuild? It's obnoxious and tone deaf across the board.

@MFTWrecks that pretty much sums it up

I'll be playing later today, hardcore mode, and I'm sure it'll be a blast.

The huge backlash is coming from how many people? That reddit has posts complaining about the patch... can't find one with more than 2k upvotes. Not that those are the only ones, but it sure seems like the people complaining don't come close to even 10% of daily active players, but they'll say "everyone hates this" "you don't listen to us" "many have said" 🙄.

Probably the same people who complained about getting ganked in vanilla WoW because they picked to play on a pvp server. And instead of going to a normal server, they cried until pvp servers were made pvp-less. Man, I'm still bitter about that 😂

I've been a hardcore Diablo fan since the 1st game released back.in the 90s. D2 and 3 will always be among my favourite games ever. Now, I'm playing D4 a lot but struggling to love it. I've got a 48 sorcerer and man, this game is haaarrrddd. Struggling to solo bosses, the Den Mother is a bitch, clearing strongholds is almost impossible.....bosses spawn adds, AoE attacks, only 4 health potions, level scaling....its all making the game not fun at all but more a frustrating slog. Admittedly D3 was a bit too easy but D4 is a hard, unenjoyable slog

@Triumph741 because they removed fun and added grind

@Jimmer-jammer more like a can of spam

@MFTWrecks yes mate. And if you repeat it another 1000 times it does not get any better until a rollback or something. So whether stop playing for now or try to Deal with it. It is my first diablo and it is way too easy imo.

Its not that many people, we are talking about reddit users, not only that, we are talking about fanboys, not only that, we are talking about fanboys that finished the game, not only that, we are talking about SOME of those fanboys on reddit that finished the game.
It is just a very loud minority that makes stuff seem more serious than it is.

As I said a few times, I'm upset they eradicated exploration fun by shared map. Now there is nothing to do if you start new character, because map is revealed by previous characters.

Love this game from a casual player perspective. These patches don't bother me.
I take it for what it is.
I knew what I was getting into and accept it as it is. Will I play the game after my necro is at level 100 and all the side stuff is done? I don't know... maybe for a bit. After that I'll move on.

I think everyone's so damn uptight about a company making changes to a game. Here's an idea... disconnect, go outside and take a walk and enjoy life and stop complaining about stupid %&^*

@MFTWrecks ok bud..still dosnt change the fact i'm enjoying it..

Have you tried playing it. Infinite loading screens, you can't even do a normal cellar. Blizzard have not only failed to do a patch properly but they've failed again on their server stability. It's like watching a company not learn from any mistakes.... funny as anything

Yeah going into cellars to wait a eternity to load to be loaded back outside the cellar it's the little things and the big things that have the casual and hardcore fans pissed it's beyond stupid,let's not try and get some progression on your character just to feel like a dog chasing its tail,it was not this bad at launch. How can you make your game worse after launch ask Blizzard they are experts at it, so no cellars or dungeons unless it's story or side quest driven they don't seem to be as broken at moment give it a hour and they'll probably end up with infinite loading times to be placed outside again.

@ORO_ERICIUS I did stop. And I don't intend to come back until S2 at a minimum.

Also, about difficulty, this is ALSO Blizzard's doing. Diablo 3 had a near-limitless Nightmare level (equivalent to World Tier) system via the Greater Rift endgame activity. You could theoretically play forever based on its design. And people did. People played for ages.

The fact is, BLIZZARD made 4 too easy. BLIZZARD cut down on endgame, loot, and borked the endgame design. This patch does NOTHING to address any of that, hence players are rightfully pissed.

Know what they could have done, if they were worried about players being too powerful? Added a World Tier (or two)! Give strong players a place to GO and things TO DO. Instead, they cut us all off at the knees and want us to thank them for it.

@Northern_munkey I'm happy for you. But objectively speaking, they slowed the pace of the game further, undercut people's ability to progress, and nerfed a good number of what were considered fun builds.

That's not really up for discussion.

@MFTWrecks then why are you discussing it? Horses for courses mate. You are obviously not happy with the game so does that mean everybody else has to be miserable too? Just stop playing it if its causing you so much unhappiness..

@Necon If there was a problem, we must have missed it. Been playing nightmare dungeons all evening and didn't spot anything amiss.

The people in here who are oddly proud that they don't understand why players are killing me. Blizzard is showing us how they intend to steward this game and its balance going forward, and what their showing us is dire. They're hammering down anything fun that crops up with nothing to replace it. They gutting so many builds, and in the case of Sorc literally 100% of their effective builds are dead in the water.

@MFTWrecks looks as though blizzard have "walked back" the latest patch due backlash garnered. I hope the balance in the universe is restored 👍

I don't normally bother trying to defend game developers but Jeez, there are some OTT statements in here. The problem here is almost entirely the community.

Diablo 4 has been out for about 6 weeks. It had a reasonably OK campaign and, for the most part, it's been relatively stable. There have been issues but many of the people complaining the game is broken or simply not fun are the same people who have hundreds of hours invested.

They're making comparisons to an 11-year-old game which has had hundreds of balance passes and dozens of content updates and that really isn't fair.

Is it perfect? No. Is it a good game? Yes. It is. Is it better than D3 was at launch? Absolutely. Let's keep some perspective.

There are lots of people complaining that this patch destroyed the game and yet there are many others getting on and enjoying it.

Balance is difficult and it's naive to think that you should only balance by buffing weaker classes. You fix the outliers. As a result, sometimes nerfs are necessary. Many of the nerfs that went in on Tuesday are the removal of bugs and unintended interactions within builds and you cannot build a computer game around defects so, upsetting to some as it may be, those bugs must be squashed before real balancing begins.

Let's not forget this is standard Blizzard operating procedure. Nerf first, balance upwards later. In the meantime, chill.

@MFTWrecks

"Item drops have been slowed, as drops from Elites were nerfed."

I don't mind loot being slowed. The bigger issue is that there are too many drops and not enough quality. The result was that the game was in danger of becoming Diablo IV: Loot Management Edition.

"The best Helltide chests were nerfed, making loot chasing harder."

The fact that almost every guide said "Don't bother with anything except the mysterious chest" shows there was an issue.

"Cinders in Helltides were nerfed, making loot chase worse."

They changed the drops from certain mobs and increased the drops from items. If anything, I think it felt a bit quicker last night. I was getting 3 or 4 cinders from each Tortured Soul.

"They gated World Tiers (but reverting this), so you couldn't get XP to progress as quickly fighting higher level foes."

No. They gated world tiers to prevent people from being power levelled whilst they waited at the dungeon door. It was reverted because it was affecting genuine players pushing the envelope. If they put this back in with the capstones requiring levels 35 and 58 respectively, this won't affect anyone doing the dungeon legitimately.

"The net effect is slowing down gameplay. You take longer to engage lower-level enemies, get less XP for doing so, and get killed more easily while doing it, costing you time and resources to fix your gear and complete your objective".

The game was not challenging at all. The highest-level content was almost trivial with a decent build. They're trying to add some challenge. Yes, that means you may need to slow down a bit instead of deleting an instance.

"Heck, they made it take 66% longer to exit a dungeon! Why??"

A fix for hardcore players noping out of encounters they were struggling with. It's just to put more reliance on the scroll and death potions. It might be a sledgehammer to crack a nut but it doesn't affect the majority of players.

"Those are all universal truths."

Errr......

"My 86 melee rogue went from crushing Nightmare Dungeons and enemies +5-6 levels, to struggling to complete when the enemies were at my level."

Herein lies the problem at the crux of everything in your post. It's a Nightmare Dungeon. They're supposed to be a challenge. The fact that you were previously crushing a dungeon 5 levels higher than you is exactly the reason they've made these changes. I think you need to make peace with that.

@GKT Yup, pretty much. As usual, the "backlash" and "uproar" seems to be from a very vocal minority.

D3 went through how many changes, patches, tweaks, balance updates, etc.? And it's still great fun to play.

People losing their damn minds over one patch to a game that just came out, that was built for ongoing updates and will be supported for many years to come and go through many iterations, is just silly to me.

@Triumph741 The problem is free to play economy, namely game design driven by exploitative monetisation.