Yesterday, Blizzard held a Campfire Chat stream to discuss Diablo IV’s 1.2 update, due to go live alongside Season of Blood on October 17th.
To begin with, the developers have taken to heart the Diablo IV community’s feedback that Unique items should be much more powerful. As such, these items will get completely new stats to empower them further, along with increased ranges on existing stats and adding stats (such as Critical Strikes) to slots that previously hadn’t existed.
Another common piece of feedback is that Elemental Resistance simply wasn’t useful enough. Now, though, it’ll become a core component of a character’s survivability. Associate Game Designer Charles Dunn explained:
Going forward into the Season of Blood, Elemental Resistances are going to change how they’re calculated. They’re now going to be additive. That means if you have the 20% poison resistance and you have another piece that has 20% more, you’re going to have 40% resistance on your character stat sheet, exactly as you would expect. Although, since this adds up additively now, we do need to add a cap, so the Elemental Resistances are going to be capped at a baseline of 70%. There are some effects in Diablo IV that allow you to go up to 85% with various effects that increase your maximum resistance, but those are rather rare because they are quite powerful.
Elemental Resistances are going to matter a lot more in Season of Blood. They are just going to be a very important part of building your character. You’re definitely going to want to try to cap up at that 70% as you’re getting into the late game and fighting the most dangerous monsters.
Blizzard is also reworking how damage is calculated. There will still be different damage buckets, but the base amount of bonus damage these methods provide will be multiplicative. The rest of the bonus damage to these categories will be additive when combined. As a result, players can expect Overpower builds to be much more competitive.
Last but not least, Diablo IV’s 1.2 Update features extensive class overhauls. Generally, the developers have implemented scaling effects for several class mechanics through the Paragon system or Key Passive abilities. For instance, the Barbarian’s Hemorrhage Legendary Paragon Node will now multiplicatively increase Bleeding damage by a portion of the Damage to Vulnerable Enemies stat.
As usual with any patch, there is a bunch of quality-of-life improvements. Auto-run has been added to Diablo IV, Streamer mode has been implemented, items can be marked as favorites, the Stash can be filtered and searched, and the minimap has been zoomed out to display a wider area. For the full patch notes, head to the official website.
