Diablo 4 patch 1.0.3 makes big improvements to endgame grind

Diablo 4 has largely gone down well with players — better than Diablo 3 did during its troubled launch period, anyway — but a consensus has been forming that the late-game and endgame just aren’t well balanced. After around level 70-75, experience doesn’t come fast enough, and neither does loot.

The fixes for this — new high-level loot tables, and a potential fifth World Tier difficulty — won’t come quickly. Update 1.0.3 is the most recent patch for the game and it does a lot to smooth things out.

The patch notes also detail some changes to the rewards for experience. Nightmare Dungeons, which are at the heart of advancing your character later in the game, award “significantly increased” XP for both completion and monster kills. Some players claim to have gotten up to three times as much experience by running a Nightmare Dungeon. An issue that caused no XP to be awarded for completing the “hold out style event” that can occur at the end of a dungeon has also been fixed. There’s also a time-saving measure for those running the Nightmare Dungeon hamster wheel — these dungeons can now be teleported to directly through the map.

These aren’t the only ways in which the late game has been made more generous: Helltide roaming bosses will drop higher quality loot, and Helltide chests now award more bonus experience. There’s also the promise of more to come: “We are currently working on increasing the monster and elite density of endgame content and plan to introduce this change early in Season 1,” Blizzard said. The first season is expected to be out in July. But the meager progress afforded by Nightmare Dungeons was definitely the community’s biggest bugbear, and players already seem happy with the changes.

Every class was given a boost to keep the popular theme going. Damage increases and cooldown reductions were made for all classes. and other skill improvements, some of them quite major — such as the cooldown on the Barbarian’s Iron Maelstrom skill being cut from 60 to 45 seconds while its critical strike bonuses are more than doubled. There is not one nerf in the list, which suggests that these changes were made to address a perceived imbalance among the classes. Diablo 4It feels slow in general.

Diablo 4The endgame is now in better shape as the game heads into its first year. But it’s only when that first season drops — and the community comes to terms with its requirement for a fresh character to enjoy the seasonal content — that we will start to get a true sense of the game Diablo 4Long-term, it will not be.