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Jul 31, 2023

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At 1PM on July 18, 2023, Blizzard released the latest patch notes for Season 1 of Diablo 4 Patch 1.1. This update is HUGE and includes the most extensive class balances we’ve seen yet. You can find all the info below:

New Unique items and Legendary Aspects have been discovered in Sanctuary. Use them to enhance your characters in the Eternal or Seasonal Realm. These Unique items can be obtained from World Tier IV and the Legendary Aspects can be obtained from any World Tier.

Developer’s Note: Ahavarion Spear of Lycander is an extremely rare drop. We wish you luck in recovering it from the armies of the Burning Hells.

Developer’s Note: The Azurewrath and Fleshrender Unique Items have flat damage effects, which scale with power. For example, at 820 Item Power, Azurewrath deals between 3359-6718 damage.

Developer’s Note: We recognize this adjustment is a significant decrease to the Hammer of the Ancients Barbarian build, but we do not want its strength to be reliant on an underlying bug.

We’ve added more dynamic loading screens with the release of Season of the Malignant. This includes adding more assets to the loading screen, such as your player character.

Developer’s Note: We like where World Tier II has landed overall but are increasing its reward pace to better align with its difficulty.

Developer’s Note: We want to give players a better sense of their power progression and mastery over the world while still challenging themselves with structured End Game activities.

World Tier III Example:

World Tier IV Example:

Developer’s Note: We have observed that the experience bonus rewarded for killing higher level monsters escalates too fast when compared to the relative challenge involved. We still want to reward players for taking on this challenge by encouraging them to participate in powerleveling together instead of one player killing enemies while another member of their Party waits at the dungeon’s entrance.

Developer’s Note: We’re looking to increase the danger in Helltide’s risk-reward gameplay by making the monsters a bit more challenging and the Tortured Gift of Mysteries harder to open.

Developer’s Note: As our community continues to battle the Burning Hells, the builds emerging from new players have shocked and delighted us. We’ve chosen to focus Season of the Malignant’s balance updates on clear itemization disparities over redesigns of Class features. The Class changes are largely focused on numeric increases to Skill Upgrades and Legendary Aspects that players haven’t yet found compelling. Additionally, we’re changing Critical Strike Damage Paragon Glyphs to empower all damage—instead of only Core Skills—to enable more build strategies.There are also a few Class stat decreases on sources which grant extreme amounts of damage, healing, or Unstoppable. In general, we prefer build-specific changes to be bonuses instead of decreases, but we feel these changes are necessary for the overall health of the game. Diablo IV is a game that is continually evolving through its Seasons, thus the adjustments we make will evolve with them.

The following balance updates apply to both the Seasonal and Eternal Realm.

Developer’s Note: Many Affixes are too efficient and are outshining alternatives. We’re looking to refine the outliers, improve the number of meaningful choices on competitive slots, and increase the overall flexibility of items. We know these changes will reduce the total amount of possible power a character can possess, so we’ll be monitoring how these changes affect players’ ability to conquer expected milestones throughout the Season.

We’re increasing the availability of the Affixes below to make them easier to include in different builds.

Developer’s Note: The Core Stat bonus on Weapons has been overperforming, so we’re pulling back on this bonus.

Developer’s Note: Cooldown Reduction affixes often felt mandatory due to their raw power. We imagine Cooldown Reduction will remain a highly desirable stat, but the penalty for not prioritizing it won’t be as harsh.

Developer’s Note: We’re seeing Critical Strike Damage and Vulnerable Damage often viewed as a hard requirement for a build’s success in Diablo IV. We believe this is a step towards allowing more builds to flourish and will continue to make changes in support of this goal.

Developer’s Note: Disparities in inherent affixes can rule some Weapons out before the rest of their stats are even rolled. These are receiving harsher reductions than their normal affix counterparts to increase Weapon flexibility.

Developer’s Note: Damage Bonus to Crowd Controlled Enemies was overperforming relative to the ease of activating it versus stricter, Crowd Control type-specific affixes.

Developer’s Note: We have seen that skillful players are frequently slaughtering monsters many levels above their own. We want to support this, but the current situation is beyond what we believe is correct for the long-term health of the game. To chase this goal, we’re shifting power to many offensive Affixes from defensive Affixes. We know this will make our end game content more deadly, particularly for those chasing our pinnacle boss, an encounter not meant for the faint of heart. Overcoming the pinnacle boss will take every ounce of grit you can muster and all tools at your disposal. We will continue to evaluate feedback from the community and make changes to our combat mechanics.