Blizzard’s Diablo IV developers say they will patch the game soon after nerfing players

Three directors are working on Diablo IV held Live bonfire chat Yesterday he said that they will change the way they release patches, after a cumulative version 1.1.0 patch for the game suddenly pissed off the players build (via IGN). And they promise that such updates will not happen in the future – at least not like it went down this week.

In the live stream, co-director Joe Faipura, game director Joe Shelley, and head of community Adam Fletcher acknowledged complaints about the patch, which massively reduced player strength for some buildings. Fletcher said of the reduction that “we know it’s bad, we know it’s not fun,” adding, “We don’t plan on doing a fix like that ever again.”

In the short term, there is at least one hotfix that comes to rebalancing things after patch 1.1.0. Piepiora said that the team felt that nightmare dungeons in the game were “dramatically tuned” and that level 100 nightmare dungeons were “horrendously difficult” for most classes, resulting in players chasing a very specific build.

That was never the intention, Pipiora said, and the team plans to drop the difficulty of level 100 dungeons by about 30 percent “later today via a hotfix” to balance things out. It won’t be restoring player power to previous levels, in other words, but it will make the game world a little easier to deal with.

Shelley said the v1.1.1 patch will balance things out even more by, among other things, adding more monsters to Nightmare Dungeons and some Helltide events, so higher level players can have fun mowing down monsters as they move through them. In its next Campfire Chat, scheduled for Friday, July 28, Blizzard will talk more about this patch, which Fletcher says will be out in “a couple of weeks.”

Shelley said the team is changing how it approaches game balance updates, especially those related to player power reductions, and said it won’t do it again without offering some “compelling alternatives for players to continue.” Instead, the team will allow these buildings to remain redundant until they fit more neatly into the overall changes. The team will also introduce these updates predictably, he said, such as at the start of a new season.

Ahead of future patches, Fletcher said Blizzard will offer patch notes in the week before a release explaining the changes.