An ancient evil threatens to engulf Sanctuary in darkness, and new heroes have been called upon to face challenges the world has never seen before.

True to the franchise’s roots, Diablo IV will deliver visceral combat, gruesome and varied monsters, an epic hunt for legendary loot, and endless playability and progression. Players will find a lifetime’s worth of adventure scattered across a land rooted in unique ecologies and inhabited by dangerous new foes. They’ll delve into randomized dungeons packed with unpredictable adversaries and unimaginable treasures. While continuing to fully support solo and coordinated party play, Diablo IV will also provide opportunities for groups of players to encounter each other in the same shared world—whether to tackle bigger challenges . . . or possibly even slaughter one another in player-vs.-player combat.

In Diablo IV, players will attempt to bring hope back to the world by vanquishing evil in all its vile incarnations—from cannibalistic demon-worshipping cultists to the all-new drowned undead that emerge from the coastlines to drag their victims to a watery grave. For the first time in the series, Sanctuary will be a contiguous, seamless landmass comprising diverse regions ranging from the burning desert of Kejhistan, to the verdant werewolf-infested forests of Scosglen, to the harsh and rugged wilderness of the Dry Steppes.

Diablo IV game director Joe Shely, associate game director Joseph Piepiora, and associate director of community Adam Fletcher sat down today to dive deeper into the recent Patch 1.1.0 release and discuss some of the community feedback.

The team detailed why the patch changes were made, what they were aiming to achieve with those changes, and the steps they're taking to ensure they will never implement a patch like that again in the future. 

Diablo IV’s Live Service Mission Statements: 

• Keep the game fun for players. 
• Have a wide variety of viable builds to discover, put together, and optimize, across all five classes. 
• Introduce new items and powers every season to keep the game fresh and increase build variety. 
• Continue to evolve the endgame, with high monster density for powerful builds to mow down and activities to challenge your build. 
• When making changes to increase build diversity, we will let some builds be overpowered until we have provided compelling alternatives.  
• Introduce meta changes will occur at predictable times, like the start of a Season. 
• React quickly to squash game-breaking bugs, damage or crashes. 

Why we released Patch 1.1.0 and what we are trying to achieve: 

• Diablo IV was always meant to be a capped power experience and not an endless grind. We know that building your character’s strength is an essential part of the fun of Diablo – and that it feels bad to take away power.  
• So why did we do Patch 1.1.0? Our goal is for multiple builds to be powerful enough to defeat our toughest foes, like Uber Lillith: one build shouldn’t be the only way to play a class. Some changes implemented in this patch were made to address this issue. 
• We also know that Nightmare Dungeons are currently way too difficult - they should feel achievable through multiple builds, and high-level tiers (beyond Tier 50) are particularly over-tuned towards difficulty. Patch 1.1.0 was the start of the changes needed to map against the changes we’re making to Nightmare Dungeons – which will be hot-fixed in today! 

How we are addressing concerns, and why and how our approach to patches will change moving forward: 

• Moving forward, we will take a more surgical approach when adjustments to balance are needed. We will ensure that if we’re adjusting something overpowered, we will provide compelling alternatives for players to explore for their class instead. 
• We will be improving communication, sharing patch notes at least a week prior to launch so that we can have meaningful conversations with our community. 
• We will be introducing several changes in the upcoming Patch 1.1.1: 
• We will be continually evolving the endgame with high monster density for powerful builds to mow down and activities to challenge your build. 
• We believe that making changes to certain builds, rebalancing Nightmare Dungeons, and creating additional engaging end-game experiences will ultimately result in a better game for more types of players. 

On Patch 1.1.1: 

• Today, we will release a Hotfix that introduces changes to Nightmare Dungeons: these are changes that map to some of the balance changes made in 1.1.0.  
• We will be implementing Nightmare Dungeons tuning changes to pair with class changes that came with 1.1.0. 
• Barbarians and Sorcerers - with Sorcerer first - will be getting adjustments to Legendary Aspects in Patch 1.1.1.  
• Monster density will be substantially increased in Nightmare Dungeons, as well as in Helltide. 
• We will add an additional stash tab as well as Elixir Stack Size increases. 
• We will reduce the Gold respec costs by 40%. 
• We want the leveling journey from 50-100 to be faster and are looking at increasing XP bonuses for playing on higher World Tiers. 
• And more! We will go into more detail on these changes during our livestream next week. 

Blizzard will be holding another Campfire Chat next Friday, July 28 to continue the conversations with the community and discuss more in depth on patch 1.1.1. 

Diablo IV is being developed using modern technology that pushes the franchise to dark, new depths. This technology is at the heart of everything players will see, hear, and feel—delivering much higher fidelity and a more engrossing experience. It opens up countless possibilities for the Diablo series, from smooth character animations, such as the Druid’s fluid shapeshifting, to the seamless, vast overworld players will travel across in search of the next loot-filled underground dungeon. Ultimately, Diablo IV will ground players in a grittier and deadlier world.

Diablo IV is available for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC.