Having nerfed Diablo 4 XP rates at the start of Season 1, Blizzard is now dialing them right back up for the RPG's upper World Tiers.
Diablo 4 hotfix 1.1.4 rolled out late last night, featuring one minor bug fix and one substantial gameplay adjustment. Under 'game updates', Blizzard says that it's increasing "experience gains for killing monsters across World Tiers 3 & 4." In WT3, you're getting 5% more XP than before, while in WT4 that's all the way up to 15%.
It's the kind of change that you might think would be proving popular, it's potentially having the opposite effect. While players seem pleased to see XP rates going up, they're less impressed by the fact that Blizzard is merely reversing changes it made at the start of the season. Back in July, the reward for killing monsters that are a higher level than the player was nerfed significantly.
Pre-Season 1, killing a monster even one level higher than you offered 15% more XP than killing one at the same or lower levels. At two levels, the bonus was 20%, and at three or more it was a 25% boost. After Season 1 dropped, that dropped to 1.5% and 3% for one or two-level discrepancies, and you'd have to be ten levels below a monster to get the 15% bonus initially available at a three-level gap. World Tier level offsets were also hit, compounding the issue for many players.
The XP yo-yo hasn't gone unnoticed by players. In the comments beneath a post highlighting the hotfix, there's some notable cynicism from players who have noted the changes' proximity to each other. One player describes it as "they nerf something good in one week to spend the next four months slowly buffing it back and calling it an update or a hotfix, when it was fine four months ago."
Despite a pretty good launch back in June, Diablo 4 Season 1 went down very poorly as Blizzard nerfed several XP routes and powerful class builds. Players suggested that the offshoot of this - that leveling new character was now substantially more time-consuming - was a pretty bare-faced attempt to increase playtime, understood to be an important metric at Blizzard. At the time, senior Diablo 4 developers cut an apologetic tone, telling fans "we know it is not good." The hope is clearly that Diablo 4 Season 2, which launches next month, will reverse some of the game's recent misfortune with its vampire-themed additions and plenty of extra late-game content.
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