Update 4pm PT: Blizzard has disabled Decay Augmentation temporarily while it works on a fix for an exploit players were sing to deal damage far beyond what's supposed to be possible.
Decay Augmentation arrived in Diablo 4 last week with Season of Witchcraft, and it wasn't long before players found out it was bugged and could be used to deal near infinite damage with certain builds. A Blizzard spokesperson told GamesRadar+ yesterday that the issue was "high priority," and now the power is disabled, with plans to bring it back next week.
"We have seen the reports related to some very egregious numbers coming from a few builds/classes," Diablo's global director of community said on the Diablo forum. "The team has some fixes underway, but in the meantime we will be disabling the Decay Augmentation Witchcraft Power in the game as this is tied to some of these issues."
Fletcher confirmed that, for the time being, "players will not be able to equip the power." While it's still purchasable, you won't be able to equip it until it's been re-enabled.
Original story:
Folks, it's been a little over a week since Diablo 4 season 7 launched with its new Witchcraft powers, and players are already exploiting a bug to deal trillions of dollars and beating the game's hardest content in record-breaking times.
Various Diablo 4 streamers, including Mekuna (via Polygon), are showcasing the exploit, which appears to be related to the new Witchcraft power, Decay Augmentation. In the below video, Mekuna builds out a pretty standard Spiritborn Fireball build and uses Decay Augmentation to deal Burning damage along with Greater Fireball, which stacks additional damage equal to 10% of the Witchcraft power's Burning damage. Well, it's supposed to be 10%, but after seeing Mekuna deal literal trillions of damage and clear Pit Tier 150 - the game's toughest challenge - in mere minutes, I don't think the math is mathin'.
One Spiritborn player, KerkyBoi, climbed to the very top of the unofficial leaderboards with a staggering 2:48 clear time using a similar technique. Mekuna's 6:27 run is just below that at number two at time of writing.
"It's like magic, everything just explodes," Mekuna says as he leisurely clicks his way through what would otherwise be an utterly grueling challenge for even the most powerful Spiritborn builds. Mekuna himself admits he doesn't know exactly how the bug works, nor whether it's a bug or intended feature, but I'm going to go with bug.
A spokesperson for Blizzard tells me the dev team is aware of the exploit, calling it "high priority" and assuring work is being done to address the situation.
The developer has wavered somewhat on its approach to tackling Diablo 4 bugs and exploits, sometimes fixing them immediately and, more recently, waiting a whole season to patch them out.
Diablo 2 creator says players treated the action RPG like a "lifestyle game" because it was fun, and MMOs like World of Warcraft had more to do with starting the live service trend
Diablo 4 boss would push for patches to have more fun stuff to balance out unpopular but necessary nerfs: "Lots of medicine, don't see much sugar"
