Blizzard continuing to work around the clock to make Diablo III an epic online gaming experience

Blizzard has addressed fan concern over recent and future changes to Diablo III regarding game balance and design.

“As with any new game, gameplay issues are inevitable, and we hear a lot of feedback regarding what’s balanced, what’s not, and everything else in between,” said Blizzard in a new community update. “We recently made some decisions to adjust (or outright nerf) a few class skills, and today we wanted to explain our overall philosophy on design changes – as well as give some insight into some more changes that are coming up.

“When it comes to making game changes, in general, our intent is to react quickly to critical design and balance issues, bugs, and other problems that seriously conflict with our design intent through hotfixes. For issues which aren’t as severely out of line, we plan to react in a more measured fashion — through client patches. We have a patch coming within the next week (patch 1.0.2) that has been in development since the game’s launch and is mainly aimed at addressing service issues. The first real game balance changes, outside of hotfixes, will be coming in patch 1.0.3. We expect that because the game is new, some other issues will arise that will need to be immediately addressed through hotfixes, but in general, most changes will arrive through patches.”

The community post continued: “Regarding the changes to Lingering Fog, Boon of Protection, and Force Armor: we determined these skills were simply more powerful than they should be, and we felt their impact on class balance and how each class was perceived warranted hotfixes as soon as we were able.

“However, we don’t want you to be worried that a hotfix nerf is lurking around the corner every day. If a skill is strong, but isn’t really breaking the game, we want you to have your fun. Part of the enjoyment of Diablo is finding those super-strong builds, and we want players to be excited to use something they discovered that feels overpowered.”

A good example is the monk’s Overawe rune, which many players are enjoying using. Blizzard agrees that this skill is strong, but doesn’t believe it to be “so far out of line that we’re going to swoop in and hotfix it out of existence”.

And whilst Blizzard believes all tweaks made have been correct, moving forward it will aim to give players a longer heads-up of incoming changes.

“Our intent moving forward is that when there are circumstances where a hotfix is necessary, we’ll communicate changes that could impact your ability to play your class through ‘Upcoming Changes’ posts in the General forum. Ideally, we’ll let you know as soon as we even have the idea that we want to make that kind of change.”

Diablo III is out now and is rather good, as its 9/10 review reveals.