Playing for time, the devs know that they could literally light a match to Diablo IV and people will still play S1 no matter how much outrage this patch generates, they expected it.
The developers know Diablo IV is in a rough spot, and it needs time to fix. So this patch is them putting the emergency brakes on the game, this is entirely obvious with XP nerfs // meta build nerfs so what this does is literally slow your progress down considerably at all levels, no longer will you be hitting the cap in several days even in a full group and for solo players its back to being worse than ever.
These are the knee jerk reaction patches that often destroy a game, I’m going to hazard a guess that this patch was not sufficiently tested, its obvious its garnered a significantly hostile response from the community and that was to be expected, I expected alot of nerfs but it all honesty, in typical Blizzard fashion went well above and beyond yet again.
I’m sorry Blizzard but, this is Nail #1 in your proverbial coffin and I highly recommend for future patches you actually take the communities feedback into consideration because obviously, you are not.
I maybe would have settled for this had they included even a drop in the bucket of a fix for the mount system. Not one single change or fix there, and it is the most infuriating part of the game.
I honestly, expected worse. Once again, the streamers and youtubers are a factor here with so many content videos on how to exploit the game, how to build an OP build that can one shot Lilith etc, and how people brag they are rushing through NMD 100s with little to no effort.
This patch is bringing the content into what they seem to think…a more balanced product but honestly, that balance may not work at all because come S1, the theorycrafters will be busy formulating new builds, especially dots based builds which could become the new focus for S1 - heck right now, I’m going to assume the big youtubers are already making youtube content and micro analysing all the patch notes in both positive and negative views.
One thing though, I think we can all agree on is that vulnerability as a stat as been a huge issue for the entire game though, however just blanket nerfing that without at least seeing how that will effect the game is a bad approach, since so many builds literally require it to do anyform of respectable damage, right now ~ my biggest concern is simple.
Does this patch make the game even more boring and tedious than ever before? And that is most likely the question everybody is thinking about.
I knew there would be nerfs, but didn’t expect to nerf all the corners. It’s like you fall asleep when you go for a haircut, and when you wake up they shave off all your hair, beard, chest hair, armpit hair, pubic hair, all body hair, and you’re back as a baby.
That’s not necessarily true, and that sure may not be true for S2 and subsequent seasons.
Plenty of people have already uninstalled and wouldn’t have under different circumstances, and I’m sure there’s plenty of people who might have been thrilled for S1, or at least check it out, and aren’t gonna.
This patch is bringing back balance to the world tiers as they planned them. Do you really think they expected lvl 60s to be running wt 4 and fully geared?
We did not ask for them to be toned down… we asked for actual alternatives or a change to the way damage is calculated. This literally changes nothing, you still need vulnerable on everything, now you just do less damage.
I don’t think the playerbase was asking to become weaker because they tanked our defense, to do less damage because they lowered the amt of key damage boosting affixes and to cast less cool skills because they ripped into our cooldown reduction…
But they did all this and more. What a stinker of a patch for a game that desperately needed a recovery patch.
I get that they needed to adjust some of the game breaking builds. But this is a blanket fu to all the classes and builds that were already struggling.
Nobody said make vulnerability and crit and crowd control less effective. They said let every class or build have the opportunity and access to it.