Diablo IV – Developers Talk Diablo IV Changes

In addition to Diablo Developer Updates, which are scheduled streams to talk about the development of various Diablo games, Diablo IV developers are also hosting more impromptu streams, titled Campfire Chats, to discuss hotter topics with the community. The second of these took place yesterday.

After the game’s release, as more and more players reached the endgame and, for some, the end of the progression that the level 100 of their character, more and more dissatisfaction appeared in the returns of the players vis-a-vis certain concerns and lacks that the game could present.

In response, the developers held their first Firecamp Chat (which can be translated as “Discussion by the fireside (from camp)”) in order to answer players’ questions without waiting for the next regular stream. The developers explained their vision of the game and the changes to come in the short and medium term.

With the release of patch 1.1.0 bringing changes accompanying Season 1 (patch on July 18 for a season launch on July 20), players were faced with a host of balance changes that were seen as uninteresting because they undermined the effectiveness of the most powerful mechanics that players relied on to face the biggest challenges offered by the game.

A second Firecamp Chat was quickly organized to communicate on the changes made and those to come, in order to allow players to better understand the intention of the developers.

One of the first topics discussed was unsurprisingly the nerve stats: cooldown reduction, damage against soft targets, and damage from critical hits. These are mechanics that were too powerful (and unavoidable) and require a major change. While waiting to make these changes, they have decided to lower the value of many sources. Which is not particularly effective because, if they have lost power, they keep their position in the builds.

Other changes are coming to improve all this but the main changes announced are on the methodology: the next time such changes are necessary, they will leave mechanics deemed too powerful as is until a complete solution has been prepared. Also, for the next big updates, they will communicate about it about a week before the release of the patch (with the risk of missing the changes that they weren’t sure they could finish in time for the patch).

The other big topic is experience. The patch reduced the experience you could get from fighting higher level enemies. The change was seen as a desire to slow down progress. The developers said that was not the case (except for the power leveling where a low level player stands at the entrance of the dungeon doing nothing while another player does everything) and that they even found that on average the progress was already slower than what they had estimated. But the change was made in anticipation of upcoming changes, in particular an increase in enemy density in helltides and nightmare dungeons. Once this is in place, progress should be faster than before.

A change has already taken place since the stream (hotfix during the night) with the modification of the difficulty of nightmare dungeons. They felt that the difficulty was too high for what they intended for this content and that the current Tier 70 dungeon difficulty was what they wanted to be for Tier 100. So they adjusted the enemy health and damage across the different Tiers.

If this change was eligible for a hotfix, many changes planned to arrive in the short term will be presented ata new stream, scheduled for next Friday, which will detail patch 1.1.1. There’s no release date for the patch yet, but they’ve hinted that we can expect it to arrive the following week. And, due to the dedicated 1.1.1 stream, they didn’t go into detail about what this patch will contain.

But there will be more rebalancing (especially Barbarian and Sorceress – with a focus on survivability for Sorceress), there will be a fifth chest tab, there will be a reduction in the cost of respect (for a drop of about 40%)…

We do know, however, that the resistance overhaul shouldn’t happen until Season 2 (but they’re working on solutions that might happen by then to reduce the frequency of more frustrating deaths) and that there won’t be any leaderboards until Season 3. will help make the endgame more interesting. They are aware that the endgame lacks elements to make it less repetitive, they are working on solutions to add milestones and intermediate objectives and believe that the content of Season 3 will contribute to this.

Work is underway to eventually offer a loadout system (save a build to change quickly) but they are still at the beginning of the thing and no date has been announced.