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Diablo boss Rod Fergusson made a very brave decision yesterday and dropped a “non-binding” poll for his thousands of X followers on whether or not Blizzard should “fix” the bugs that cause its newest class to vastly outperform the others.
“I’m not saying we’re doing anything, I’m just saying that a class that’s been out for 3 weeks versus 16 months is going to have some issues that need to be addressed,” he wrote. “Real question is when.”
Out of more than 10,000 votes, 63.1% say to leave the spiritborn as they are, but the replies (and the Reddit thread) suggest a third option that Fergusson left out.
Many players, including myself, want to see the other five classes improved so that the gap between them and the spiritborn isn’t so ridiculously wide. Spiritborn players have been able to crush most of the game’s hardest dungeons without a lot of effort and I think ripping away that power would upset all the people who have put a considerable amount of time into their characters.
Blizzard has repeatedly said it won’t nerf things within a season to avoid upsetting players like it did shortly after the game’s launch. Unless a bug is ruining the experience for others, like the unlimited evade build earlier this month, Blizzard tends to leave them alone. To Fergusson’s credit, however, this time the situation is a little different.
The Vessel of Hatred expansion rewrote how progression works in Diablo 4 and generally made the game harder with its new difficulty settings and ramping powerful item drops. Building a character involves a lot more interesting choices about what skills and items to use now, but the spiritborn’s excessive damage numbers has allowed anyone playing one to largely sidestep that. Other classes need to perfect their gear to reach even half of what the spiritborn can do with whatever they have lying around.
But Diablo 4 isn’t a competitive PvP game (or at least nobody does any PvP), so the only meaningful imbalance surfaces in how fast you can breeze through dungeons and find the items you want. The game is just slower when you’re not a spiritborn and it can feel like you have to play a meta build to get anywhere. Yes, it’s also true that spiritborn are the only class capable of clearing the highest tier of the hardest dungeon in the game, but I suspect that only really affects a small percentage of players who even care about that. The real issue to fix is the length of the grind when you’re not dealing trillions of damage.
Fergusson made it clear that the poll won’t directly influence Blizzard’s decision. There’s a patch hitting next week that doesn’t include any nerfs to the spiritborn, nor any buffs to the other classes. Everyone will be waiting on the mid-season patch for that, which I would expect to hear about in a few weeks.
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Kurt Indovina
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