Diablo 4’s patch 1.1.0 faces community backlash ahead of Season 1

Diablo 4’s first season, 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’ defense and damage have been reduced, and leveling progress has been significantly slowed, especially in later levels and on higher World Tiers. Players agree that the Sorcerer is one of the weakest classes in the game, and it has an issue with build diversity. Instead, the class was nerfed. The Both the Diablo 4Diablo Subreddits have been flooded with complaints regarding the patch.

Asmongold, a streamer who discusses the latest update in a video, summarized everything within the first few minutes. “Number one: Everything is worse,” he said. “Number two: Everything is harder. The third number is: Now you need to be more diligent to achieve the same results. Number four: Leveling — slower.

“Number five: Helltides — worse,” he continued, referring to the late-game activity in which sections of the map are overrun with high-level monsters. “Damage reduction: reduced. Vulnerability: gutted. By the way, good decision. I agree with the vulnerability decision, I think it’s smart.” Vulnerability is a mechanic via which players do more damage to monsters that have been put in a vulnerable state, and it was so overpowered that a damage multiplier against vulnerable monsters had become the most powerful, sought-after stat in the game.

“However,” Asmongold said, “everything else kind of sucks. There have obviously been some major problems with the game. For example, resistances don’t work, players run out of space in their storage, the Necromancers lack a viable Minion Build, and characters are not fun to play early on. Rest assured: None of those things are fixed.”

Blizzard’s damage-control strategy was evident in a Friday livestream, which addressed the announced changes. “We have been hearing feedback from players regarding some of the changes in 1.1.0,” community development director Adam Fletcher said late Tuesday. “We are going to have a Campfire Chat later this week on Friday to talk more about it.”

Several changes have already been reversed. One of the most controversial changes in the patch — not detailed in the patch notes, but quickly spotted by players — was the introduction of minimum level requirements for the third and fourth World Tiers (effectively difficulty levels). It was likely intended to stop high-level characters from grouping up with lower-level players to boost their levels by boosting them to the next World Tier.

But it also cut off an avenue for better XP gain and faster progress for skilled players leveling their characters — something the patch had already targeted by reducing the experience reward for killing monsters at a higher level than the player, and by lowering the level of monsters so they trail the player by up to five levels. Blizzard appears to be changing their minds about leveling. “We will be removing 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 harder, and to slow down progress toward the later levels — a part of the game that had already come in for criticism around its lack of content and poor loot rewards. But, players say, in seeking to delay players’ arrival at those late-game problems, Blizzard has actually make them worse, with the side-effect of making the entire game less fun to play.

Another school of thought is that the general nerf to player power is intended to balance out the increased power that will be available from the season’s Malignant Hearts mechanic — though this would be to the detriment of players who choose not to roll new seasonal characters and continue playing on the game’s so-called Eternal Realm.

Diablo 4Blizzard has had a great deal of success, but the release of the first Battle Pass and its accompanying season is when its ambitions to become a real-time service kick in high gear. Blizzard will need to be very persuasive in Friday’s Campfire Chat livestream to keep the game’s core community on side at this crucial moment.