Some highly summarised takeaways from the notes:
- Items
- 5 new Class Uniques, 1 new Uber Unique
- 5 new Class Aspects, 2 new General Aspects
- World & Experience
- World Tier 2 gives +20% gold and +15% drop rate
- Higher level enemies give less experience now
- Powerleveling with one player sitting at the entrance of the dungeon was nerfed
- Helltides got a bit harder and take more cinders for chests
- Monsters’ HP scales higher with more players in a party (85%/player -> 100%/player)
- Balance
- Various rebalance changes, most underutilized spells/aspects got buffed, only minor nerfs (to spells/aspects) it seems
- Various nerfs to item affixes including Vulnerable Damage, Cooldown Reduction, Crit Damage, Damage Reduction
- Inherent stats for Swords (Crit Damage), Crossbows (Vulnerable Damage) and Offhands (Cooldown Reduciton) have been heavily reduced
- Damage % affixes have been buffed
I didn’t have time to go through all the details and especially the single class rebalances, but I think this is the most relevant info from these patch notes. If I forgot something let me know.
- Items
Looks like experience in general got a pretty good size nerf?
Oh my god cinders barely drop anymore regular mobs only drop one half the time. I got about 45 minutes in and got 230 cinders
In general it looks like they have made Helltides a giant waste of time.
Tougher mobs and more cinders to open a mystery box? Listen, Blizzard, I didn’t get anything special from the boxes anyway. 95% of the time I sold it or broke it down.
I get the impression they’ve misjudged how valuable we find Helltides.
Cinder drop rate is a confirmed bug, so at least they’ll fix that.
The mystery boxes were definitely worth running if you were looking for legendary aspects. 2+ legendaries per mystery box, I usually got 4 or 5. It didn’t take very long to get 175 cinders and you collected lots of obols at the same time.
Now at 250 cinders it’s just going to be slower. Ugh.
Cinder drop rate is a confirmed bug
Either it was intentional and they’re backtracking or literally no one who actually plays the game tested the patch before they released it, and no devs or anyone working on the game plays helltides themselves. Although that would explain the rest of the patch notes…
Where did you see cinders drop was a bug?
It’s confirmed on the US Blizzard forums. Don’t have time to go hunting for that thread at the moment, but you should be able to find a Blizzard response somewhere in the PC Support section if I’m not mistaken.
Yeah just saw it on one of the posts here thanks
TLDR; nerfs to play longer and increase engagement time
Which, for me, just makes me want to play less.
Absolutely. Not only was I already avoiding trying new builds because of the hassle of respecting, but now the build I do have is less effective and I’ll have to respec anyways? No thanks. I’m out. The game felt like too much of a chore even before this patch.
Oh Wow, these are some awful patch notes. Nerfs all around, no buffs to the deadest of classes. I honestly do not think i will play Season 1. Its like they dont want us to be exicted or look forward to anything. These notes full of Nerfs just leave you feeling Deflated, not the kind of patch you release to advertise your new season.
Already too many affixes, and now they add more! WTF? No UI updates to help us figure out if an item is an improvement or not.
And on top of that they nerfed levelling if you dont want to play the story again. Jeez.
Sigh…blizz
The entire Malignant Heart mechanics should be some pretty major buffs in themselves though.
Not to mention the season journey buffs.
Better to actually play the season and decide instead of just guessing how things will be with only a sliver of info and ignoring info we have outside of these notes.
Have to look at everything together
They pretty much nerf everything. They try to force player to use +physical/bone/etc… instead of stacking crit/crit dmg/vulnerable without understanding that if we focus on those, it’s also because it’s simple to figure out.
There are way to many affix, most people can’t tell if an item is an upgrade or not because of it. Instead of fixing this, they add even more useless affix and nerf the useful ones…
We’re increasing the availability of the Affixes below to make them easier to include in different builds.
I swear it’s like they don’t want people to have fun. It feels like WoW all over again when they added useless stats like resilience.
I’m amazed that they didn’t learn anything considering how old WoW is, they should know that what’s gonna happened is people making softwares to do the maths instead of them.
Not many developers make games with the main purpose being to have fun anymore.
I’m torn over this point, I agree there’s way too many affixes and they make everything confusing, but having all builds go with Vuln/Crit is pretty boring.
I wish they grouped all the +% damage affixes in a couple more generic ones, and made them more impactful, to the point you’d have some freedom in deciding stats for your build without being overwhelmed by the amount of fodder affixes.
Everything goes with vuln/crit though because that’s the best general damage stat. Every class can vuln super easily and crit is always just generally good, if we had vuln split into phys/elemental vulns that could potentially top out at higher numbers than the general vuln that would be cool but as it is designed now every class will always stack those 2 stats until they’re nerfed into the ground and considered useless. And Crit just hinges on so many affixes and it’s so generally good with all damage types that it’s here to stay as like you said % damage is way to specific with what types of damage it buffs. If they had nerfed those stats but then turned around and gave us itemization to work around the nerfs that would actually be interesting instead of just a flat nerf to every build in the game.
Agreed but if they want people to use other affixes, first they need to remove a lot of them.
One of the main point of an aRPG is looting, if you can’t figure out easily if a loot is an upgrade or not, you’ve done a shitty job with your game.
They pretty much nerf everything.
Damage to Frozen Enemies: Increased by ~20%. Physical Damage: Increased by ~25%. Fire Damage: Increased by ~25%. Cold Damage: Increased by ~25%. Lightning Damage: Increased by ~25%. Poison Damage: Increased by ~25%. Shadow Damage: Increased by ~25%. Non-Physical Damage: Increased by ~25%. Physical Damage Over Time: Increased by ~40%. Fire Damage Over Time: Increased by ~40%. Shadow Damage Over Time: Increased by ~40%. Damage with Two-Handed Bludgeoning Weapons: Increased by ~25%. Damage with Two-Handed Slashing Weapons: Increased by ~25%. Damage with Dual-Wielded Weapons: Increased by ~25%. Damage with Ranged Weapons: Increased by ~25%. Damage with Skills that Swap to New Weapons: Increased by ~25%. Damage while in Human Form: Increased by ~25%. Damage while Shapeshifted: Increased by ~25%. Blood Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Bone Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Brawling Skill Damage: Increased by ~33%. Companion Skill Damage: Increased by ~33%. Conjuration Skill Damage: Increased by ~33%. Cutthroat Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Darkness Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Earth Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Frost Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Imbued Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Imbuement Skill Damage: Increased by ~33%. Marksman Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Pyromancy Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Shock Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Storm Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Summoning Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Trap Skill Damage: Increased by ~33%. Weapon Mastery Skill Damage: Increased by ~33%. Werebear Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%. Werewolf Skill Damage: Increased by ~25%.
They’ve nerfed crit, vuln, and cdr. I doubt these increases offset that amount of power loss.
Thanks for showing my point about too many affixes.
Explain to me how you’re gonna know if your current sword with vuln/crit/crit dmg is better or worse than the new shinny drop with +cutthroat/crit/trap for a rogue.
Hint : You can’t without testing, and how are you gonna do that without enchanting + reroll 1 affix ? We didn’t have that many affixes in Diablo 2 LoD and surprise, nobody complained !
What’s gonna happen is the players who’ve gonna keep playing the game will use websites like « Ask Mr Robot » everytime they get loot.
WoW started improving again around the time they started moving people over to work on D4.
It’s the same idiots making the same mistakes.
Powerleveling nerfed into the ground wow. My build (that I got bored with around level 65) seemed untouched, but then saw all the global stat nerfs like 30% to CDR, etc. yikes on this amount of nerfs
Short summary : Fixed an issue where players were having fun.
I was solo leveling to level 92 since the release. I was usually doing 1 to 2 paragons a day lately (usually more challenging/longer 2 NMDs to get one). Before patch I had one milimeter to do to get the next paragon, so I run a NMD 15 leveles above me and I didn’t reach it? 1mm? So, with the same game time, I am going to make one paragon in 10,14 days? There is already nothing to do after campaign, only the Uber boss to fight on lvl 100 and it took ages to get to 92 and now I really don’t feel I want to play it anymore. I possibly could swallow all the other nerfs, but lowering xp gain and slowing the progression for people who can play only a limited time daily or weekly is hearthbreaking.
I am definitely not going to play the first season.
I already didn’t really find Upgrades for what feels like forever. And I am only at level 65. With more stats to look at even noticing an upgrade will be a nightmare.
Levels 50-70 felt like a drag. Better equipment starts dropping once you get to WT4. At least until level ~80, then it appears to just drag again.
There is no way I’m getting past level 59 at this rate. I’ll finish the campaign, but…
I went in to WT4 at level 60 with my Barbarian. I just hate sitting around in WT3 where it feels like there’s no point optimising equipment because it’s all going to be obsolete the moment you step into WT4.
I took my Druid to WT4 at 63, and probably should have gone earlier. I was really thinking we were going to see a WT5 with this patch.
I don’t really replace my gear very often either, all the power I gain seems to really be coming from paragon, which has much bigger bonuses to things like damage.
I don’t see any gear with +20% damage like I do on the paragon board
So, uh… No fix for the lag? No fix for the VRam issue?
Also, is there any overview of what seasonal content will be transfer to non season, that can only be gathered within the season? Or is that just going to be the battlepass related FOMO? Like, if you haven’t played D2, there’s not going to be season specific runewords that I cannot create non season, but the created runeword would become non season if I make it there. Afaik the whole “legendary gems” stuff from D3 will be just a season exclusive thing with no effect on non season, right? More like a “do some ‘fun’ stuff this time, and this time only”?
Edit: Are “Halls of the damned” and “Path of the Blind” new nightmare dungeons? I just found sigils for them but I don’t see anything in the patch notes.
Edit: Screenshots of the sigils: https://i.imgur.com/xYzM2Dq.jpg & https://i.imgur.com/FeR1T1E.jpg
Once the Season has ended, the character you made and its progress will be transferred to the Eternal Realm. All items you collected, including in your Seasonal stash, will be transferred too. You can take this character into Sanctuary whenever you please, but Season-specific features such as Malignant Hearts will no longer be accessible.
From the Season introduction page, so it seems that what you’ll miss if you don’t play will be only the season cosmetics. And the chance to play with new mechanics for the duration of the season.
Cool. Hopefully the FOMO passes aren’t going to be too much of a chore then.
Yeah, new dungeons this time.
Any other druid players totally content with these updates? Reading through the patch notes I found a lot to be happy about:
- New items seem great for build diversity; not much synergy with current meta builds
- Better loot from silent chests; might actually be worth opening now
- Less monster wandering; might help werebear builds by making mobility less of an issue
- More experience for completing whispers
- Stronger Helltide monsters; unpopular opinion perhaps but they always felt a little too easy to me, definitely prefer a more challenging experience to match the apocalyptic atmosphere
- More basic attack options; Storm Strike always had way too much utility to pass up, even after buffing everything else
- Buffs to companion-focused aspects; might even see viable companion builds with the new malignant hearts
- Buffs to unique chest pieces that are currently fun but underwhelming
- More options for CC reduction; not enough to replace bulwark, but a step in the right direction
- More dungeon loot
In fact I have very few objections to these patch notes, nerfs included. Bulwark spam is killing my keyboard - I wouldn’t mind having to dodge am attack every once in a while. The cost of mystery chests seems awfully steep, and the XP bonus for completing a stronghold feels a little underwhelming, but otherwise these changes all seem great for build diversity.
All the nerfs to resists and armor amounts to a quite significant buff to the damage of the bulwark explosion build in PvP. I was unable to kill Barbs and some rogues before the patch but now they go down pretty quick if they choose to stay and fight.
As someone who was excited for this season despite disliking the leveling speed slowdown as you progress, and didn’t like doing helltides: I’m sad now, and it looks like I’m going to have to find something else to play for a while.
Don’t worry, Baldur’s Gate 3 is around the corner and it seems it will be the new RPG gold standard of the decade.
Devs from other companied are whining about it, including Blizzard, because players are gonna compare what Larian is capable to do with their own work and they know they don´t stand a chance.
Hollow Knight and Starfield are coming soon too.
BG3 is a completely different game, one you need to pour your heart and soul, and most importantly mind, into. I don’t have the mental capacity to play a full RPG after a full day of work and then playing with my kids and then chores. I have an hour maybe to chill out and BG3 would only stress me because I would forget the story between my gaming sessions and couldn’t keep up.
Whereas with a Diablo game I can log in for half an hour and have fun. I can be rewarded finding some loot, or making some progres in my build. It’s scratches a completely different itch than BG3.
With one hour a day, you won’t make any progress at all with the nerfs to XP gains and base stats / vuln / crit / crit dmg and it’ll just discourage you to play at all.
You’re making the same excuses as Bethesda fanboys for the shitstain that was Fallout 76.
With a game like Divinity or BG3, an hour will be enough to do one or maybe two flesh out quests with meaningful impact.
I’m not a 20yo teenager with a lot of free time either so if I spend time on a game, it needs to be meaningful otherwise what’s the point of playing it instead of Candycrush?
Sure, that’s why I’m not going to play D4 either after the patch, I’ll just find a roguelike I like or will spend that time going through my PSVR backlog. But recommending BG3 over D4 is apples to potatoes for some of us.
And with an hour every other day I was not able to keep up with D:OS. It was just too overwhelming with huge story arcs, many characters and everything. I don’t have the capacity for that after a long day, it’s simply not fun for me.
If you like rogue-like and card games, I would advise you to try Inscryption! It even has a neat story with plot twist that completely change the game.
If you’ve only got limited time per day I’d suggest Vampire Survivors or one of the clones.
I’m really digging Halls of Torment, it’s basically Diablo 1 survivor style. 30 minute time limit with Diabloesque unique equipment you can send up a well to have for future runs. Early access on Steam.
In case one didn’t dig deep:
New Season 1 Uniques Revealed - Diablo 4
Fuck, was so hyped for season 1 but now it’s really going down the drain.
Helltides didn’t feel really rewarding, never got anything good from the chests. If it wasn’t the only place to get forgotten souls I would ignore it completely.
Also I’m playing hardcore, so I think I’m screwed with all these defensive nerfs…
What are some of the takeaways that weren’t mentioned during the announcement stream?
Nerfs, nerfs all the way down.
They really do not like that everyone has figured out damage buckets and is prioritizing crit and vulnerable.
Nerfed cooldown reduction affix pretty hard
Made mystery chest in Helltide 250 instead of 175 cinders.
Buffed nightmare dungeons again.
Oof. Okay sounds like I should read it, thanks
I really don’t get the helltides nerf. They’re supposed to be special events. If you don’t catch the helltide immediately at the start getting to 250 is way too stressful.
There was a post saying the new drop rate was not internet and is being fixed.
Yeah but if the hotfix is still just reverting the drop rate you still need 250 now instead of 175. As a casual player that tries to do helltides if they happen to be there it basically kills them for me if the timing isn’t miraculous. I’d rather they just limit it to 1 mystery chest or something.
I think it’s nerfs with the expectation hearts will cover what was lost and then some. Here’s hoping that’s right
I can’t believe the dev note that defense is too good. Yikes, if I die its usually because of a 1-shot. Not looking forward to more rocket tag.
