Diablo 4 Devs Won’t Be Nerfing “Overtuned” Vulnerable Damage In Season 1

DualShockers recently had the opportunity to attend a group interview with a panel of Diablo 4 developers ahead of this week’s launch of Season of the Malignant.

One of the questions raised by the group was regarding the game’s current meta. As it stands, vulnerable damage is a key component of most effective high-level builds. Vulnerability makes enemies take 20% more damage, a sizeable buff to any character’s DPS. Associate game director Joe Piepiora was on-hand to give his thoughts on the meta and the prevalence of vulnerable damage in late-game builds.

“Speaking to the idea of meta builds and how we feel about them, we know there are some effects in the game that we want to take a deeper look at, vulnerable damage is a really good example. A lot of characters who are reaching end-game content are finding it necessary to have a lot of vulnerable damage stacked in order to do tons of damage. It’s a little over-tuned right now across the board and as a result, it’s making it hard to want to play other classes or specs that don’t rely as heavily on vulnerable damage as part of their core toolkit. These are things we are talking about on the design side, reworks we want to use to refresh some of these meta elements later on…”

While the power of vulnerable damage is something that everyone on the Diablo team is aware of, they’re not going to be addressing it during season one. Piepiora did state that the numerous other balance changes, as well as the addition of malignant heart powers, are going to do plenty to shake up the meta, though.

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“This is the nature of a live game, we want to continue to look at balance as we go. As we identify these areas where some things are vastly outperforming to the point where they are limiting creativity. There are some choices that are so prevalent that they are impossible to ignore if you’re trying to be competitive at some point of gameplay. As we go deeper into development, these are the things we are going to continue addressing. We’re not making big changes to vulnerable in season one, but we have plans for season two and beyond.”

“In season one, we have tons of balance changes being added to lift up other builds and make other things more viable, and these malignant hearts are going to serve as an additional layer of chaos on top of things we’ve already done. We’re going to give players new problems to solve and new ways to maximise output from their characters.”

Several videos have emerged of players defeating tier-four world bosses in a matter of seconds. Piepiora admitted that the team has seen these videos and is evaluating balance health as they hadn’t intended for these bosses to be defeated so easily.

“We recognise in world tier-four that these world bosses are not withstanding the damage that these players are putting out. These are things we’re going to be making some adjustments to as part of season one and we’re going to continue to monitor moving forward. I think it’s important to call out that as we look at world bosses and their place in world tier-four, we do want these to be highly rewarding, highly challenging fights for players to go and engage with and have a difficult time getting through. So having a player buzzsaw through it in 6 seconds does not comport with our design philosophy.”

Diablo 4’s Season of the Malignant launches on July 20.

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