Season 9 rolled in swinging the nerf hammer harder than a toddler with a toy mallet, and we’re left scratching our heads… Of course, we get that stability matters—you wouldn’t want the game to explode in your face mid-season. But pulling builds back isn’t what players want. We want more builds that will go in and blast away just like the current meta powerhouses Bloodwave Necro and Lightning Spear Sorc.
Here’s a cheeky wishlist of tweaks that’ll keep us giggling instead of groaning:
Move from blanket caps to granular tuning
Nerf only the truly egregious interactions, not every little damage source. Spot those Pit 150+ outliers and tweak them specifically.
Expand the number of “broken” builds per class
Craft 2–3 high-ceiling, meme-worthy builds every season—each with its own flavor and GIF potential. Rotate the spotlight so the meta feels like an all-you-can-eat buffet, not a single bouncer.
Buff the underdogs
Give sad, unloved skills and legendary affixes a 10–20% “you’ve got this!” pep talk. Shrink the gap between “I-can’t-clear-T4” and “I-one-shot-Duriel-with-a-snorkel.”
Seasonal “God-Tier” build challenges
Announce 1–2 brand-new broken concepts with themed cosmetics or mini-quests. Reward early adopters and broaden the fun spectrum each season.
Transparent, data-driven patch notes
Share the metrics behind every cap (“5% of Barbarians cleared Pit 150 in 48 hrs”). Clarify your goals: slow clears? encourage swaps? extend the grind?
Public PTR Balance Test Realm
Keep the PTR Live, Let us test patches and provide feeback constantly, not just for 1 week when you feel like testing a new season
Regular community pulses & dev Q&As
Be more interactive with the community. Send out polls, ask the players for their feedback. You have all the tools and information at your fingertips to drive the game to a more successful direction, why not use them?
Improve Masterworking
The current “lazy RNG” approach—pour mats in, cross your fingers—makes every upgrade feel like begging a goblin for mercy. Give us targeted rolls or guaranteed bump-ups on 1–2 stats so we can actually plan builds instead of soul-crushing speccing into hope.
Rebalance Difficulty vs. Reward
If we’re clearing Pit 130+, we should get rewards worthy of Pit 130+—not the same drops as someone who just scraped by Pit 101. Scale legendary drop rates, XP globes, and chalice rewards to reflect the real risk we’re taking.
Set Pit 100 as a “bar of succession,” not a single-build gatekeeper
Treat Pit 100 as a baseline milestone multiple builds can hit—think buffet, not VIP list. Dare we say… fun?
Respect Players’ Time & Effort
Some players pour more than one hundred hours into a single season—let us look back on that grind with pride, not frustration. Make our effort feel meaningful and rewarding, not a chore.
Embrace Seasonal Endgame & Replayability
Diablo 4 lives and dies on seasonal variety. The endgame loop and memorable, over-the-top moments are what keep us coming back. Let’s keep blasting away and crafting stories worth retelling.
Build examples we’d love to see hitting Bloodwave Necro / Lightning Spear Sorc levels:
Rogue: Twisting Blades, Dance of Knives, Barrage V, Heartseeker, Pen Shot, Rapid Fire Precision, Rapid Fire, Death Trap, Poison Death Trap, Rain of Arrows, Shademist
Druid: Poison BoulderCane, Landslide, Hurricane, Lightning Storm, Pulverize, Wind Shear, Cataclysm, Stone Bust, Wolf Companion, Werenado, Poison Druid
Mythic uniques are supposed to be the crown jewels of Diablo 4—that moment when you see the drop and shout “YES!”—but right now they’re a mixed bag (and to be honest, 75% of them get outclassed by easy-to-get tempered legendaries or uniques, so that excitement just fizzles) and are simply looked at as instant Resplendent sparks instead of build altering behemoths.
Brightest Stars: Ring of Starless Skies, Harlequin Crest, Heir of Perdition, Shroud of False Death—BiS in nearly every build.
Solid Performers: The Grandfather, Doombringer—great on Overpower builds or Hardcore, but not meta-shaking.
Needs Some Love: Shattered Vow, Nesekem, the Herald, Ahavarion, Spear of Lycander—practically gathering dust. How about an explosive AoE on execute for Shattered Vow, an all-skills/passives bonus on Nesekem, and massive shrine buffs plus movement speed on Ahavarion?
Niche Picks: Melted Heart of Selig, Andariel’s Visage, Tyrael’s Might—fun for early or niche builds but could use tweaks to compete at endgame.
In short: don’t wipe before you poop—wipe after, and give us something to celebrate! Let Season 9 feel like a carnival of chaos instead of a clinic of caution. Pretty please, with extra shattered glass on top, tell us: what brilliant strategy led to this logic? And maybe slip us a few new toys while you’re at it?
This is a follow up to my post from a few days ago with several suggestions on how to help the current state of the game:
Loads of good stuff in this post - sadly though this all takes time/ money to develop and Blizz seem determined to take the easy approach of the general nerf bat rather then actually balancing the game in ways that allow players to have fun and feel rewarded.
I like what you said about rebalancing. But I disagree with the level of pit. The devs clearly want pit 100 to be the capstone. The highest clear for the most minmaxed builds. This is evident with the trending nerfs and glyphlevel upgrade at up to minus 50 pit levels.
What i think most people want is every build to be t3 farm able with t4 farmable with investment. That seems to be the direction the devs are taking.
The glaring issue is the repeated nerfs to top builds but no balance for the bottom. I took stormclaw to 70, never cleared in time and gave up. Glphys and MW could be better but mathematically would max out at 75ish. This is the issue.
People want to play stormclaw, pulverize, hydra, twisting blades, penshot all the meh builds to the 90s. They need to balance the classes.
Didn’t you hear? you’re suppose to agree with the mob, don’t want your kneecaps broken right?
Ok i’ll shut up but yeah this will always be a thing. Come to think of it wonder if this is how blizzard sees feed back for this game(or use it as an excuse to change something they were going to change anyways).
Nerfs are needed. Some are happy about the nerfs. Some are scratching their heads because all the whining about it. Not everyone likes the idea of blasting through all content without any effort required.
There are plenty of threads about it and the community is divided. Go use a alrdy existing thread where its being discussed. There are plenty of arguments and counter arguments there.
I would strongly recommend ppl to w8 for the ptr and try things out before screaming into the void.
1 shotting everything is bad design. Like a grown man with his family at Macdonald’s and after eating the wife and kids want to go home but dad wants to play in the McDonald’s Playplace with the ball pit. The wife seated with her purse in her lap and her head down with her eyes closed with her hand on her brow and the kids all seated sulking looking bored in their chairs while dad is going down the slide and jumping around in the ball pit going “WHEEEE!!! HA HA!!!” his tie flopping everywhere in his dress socks and work slacks. That’s called playing meta.
But Blizzard nerfed literally everything for everyone. Not just the dad’s in the Mcdonald’s playplace that are ruining their families day.
What I would hope is now that they have pooped on everyone even harder than pre season 1 that they bring everyone back up a little but focused on a more even scale. Let these not be the last PTR patch notes we see. Let us see joyous updated patch notes.
Plenty of good points aside of the the intended power creep, the cap should be pit lvl 75 not 100 or worse 150.
Remember pit scale per level 1.2 or 1.17.
Twenty levels is between 26-38 times jump, it freaking trivialize Torment 4.
The nerf hammer actually already dropped in Season 8, just many players didn’t notice it. Monster HP in Pit has been increased significantly this season, any increase of monster HP is equal to blanket nerf to all builds. Players just focus on the issue that the damage number of their build get nerf and complaint. They don’t realize that actual strength of their build is measured against how fast they can defeat the monsters at certain pit level. It doesn’t matter your build has billions or trillion damage, if the monster at Pit 100 not die within a reasonable time then the build is considered weak.
Blizzard can buff every build just by nerf the HP of the monster in the Pit. We shall see how far players can progress in the PTR, then we have data to convince Blizzard to nerf the monster. I will not want to invest so much time to analyze how weak each build next season and argue with Blizzard why those builds need buff. As their damage number is meaningless if we can’t clear the content quick enough.
I would say the ratio of people hating it to liking it are about 20 to 1. And it’s not 20 people like me. Every hate post is people that have been playing every season. Blizzard is really trying to kill this game.
When you take out those who are paid to like it that becomes 500:1.
They have manipulated the statistics so much they no longer represent anything but what they want to them represent. They have completely lost touch with a very large segment of the playerbase.
But, since streamers and 3 forums users are happy with it all is good.
Make Mythics that deal bonus AOE damage like Tyrael’s drop at any level and be equippable at any level. That change alone could be fun and is a very simple change. Doesn’t have to be all Mythics but being able to see it drop at any time and equippable at any time could be amazing.
I don’t think broken levels of dps should be supported btw. It needs to reigned in for the health of the game frankly. Just because you see Pit 150 doesn’t mean you need to be able to get there as it’s just a GR with its infinite scaling. Now if they later add an expansion that adds stupidly op options you can aquire that are very rare and that makes you very op that’s fine after the math is balanced and reigned in. But not to the point SB was over everyone else, which was what 2,000% more damage or whatever? Rare and very rare drops need to feel good cause you know they’re going to be powerful when you get them and help you feel stronger.
I’m sure everyone had fun with the broken SB class on launch but it shouldn’t be the norm. But you should be super powerful if you have an insanely rare perfect roll in every slot, mw boosted perfect stats, Mythics, and are maxed out and the build works.
