During its recent livestream, Diablo 4 associate game director Joe Piepiora, game director Joe Shely, and community chief Adam Fletcher admitted that the studio messed up with the recent nerfs to several characters that were brought along with updates earlier this week.
“It’s not the greatest play experience for players out there,” said Fletcher. “We don’t plan on doing a patch like this ever again. We hear you loud and clear.”
The developers said that the studio made a mistake in its attempts at balancing out some of the more overpowered builds that were popping up in Diablo 4, but that it may have gone too far, with Piepiora stating that “sometimes we just don’t get it quite right.”
The trio announced during the livestream that it will be releasing a new update to the game, patch 1.1.1, some time in the next two weeks. Among other things, the update aims to increase monster density in Nightmare Dungeons and Helltides, and also adjust XP gains from level 50 to 100.
The update also aims to bring some quality of life changes, such as an additional stash, and the raising of the elixir stash size to 99. The update will also bring down costs for character respecs by roughly 40%.
Going forward, the studio plans to hold more Campfire Chat livestreams close to the release of new updates to discuss the developers’ thought processes with some of the changes, as well as to gauge player feedback from the updates. The studio will hold another Campfire Chat on July 28 to dive deeper into patch 1.1.1.
For context, the most recent update to Diablo 4 that was released earlier this week was so controversial that several players took to voicing their displeasure by review bombing the game’s user scores on review aggregating website Metacritic, bringing its user rating down to 2.8 on PC, 2.5 on PS5 and 4.2 on Xbox Series X/S.