Diablo

(stolen from reddit)

Campfire Chat

We want to point out this is not a dev livestream. It's not intended to be around new dev updates regarding future content.

That will be our dev livestream coming in July and it will focus on Season 1

Launch Overview

We're loving the feedback and we intend to support the game for years

Season 1 is nearly done and they are working on Season 2 as well as expansions (plural)

In general consoles have a different process for getting updates (called certifications) and that is why they can't always change things overnight

PezRadar has around 13 pages of notes for an upcoming patch (though the patch notes may not actually be that long)

Currently those "stability fixes" lines in hotfixes are regarding under the hood stuff. Anything gameplay related will get its own note.

Community Discussions on Buffs & Nerfs

Rod explains that the longterm health of the game means nerfing things that, although are really fun, are not good for the game

He references the Destiny Loot cave which was great for an afternoon activity but obviously couldn't persist

They want the game to be filled with choices for the player, and that includes where to level and how to build your character.

However, they cannot simply buff everything to match an outlier. Not only does this create more challenges for balancing, but it also creates an unhealthy standard where players expect extreme power (they mentioned the Whirlwind bug that was doing 65,000 % increased damage).

Dungeons

In general, longer dungeons should have more elite packs and shorter dungeons should have less. The dungeon nerfs recently were to fix shorter dungoens have more packs than longer dungeons.

They very much feel they have a baseline now and can move up from there.

They want to fix Nightmare Dungeons not being the end game loop for xp and farming items. Going forward, this will get an update to reward significantly more XP.

They mention they have telemetry on xp/hr for these dungeons, and to better simplify that, they are changing travel time to dungeons.

At a later patch, consuming a sigil to start a nightmare dungeon will instantly port you to that dungeon.

This will be in game before Season 1

Renown

They're still considering what should be repeatable and what shouldn't be and they're open to changing things that seemed important and fun but turn out to not be fun in repeated seasons.

One change from a previous stream -- you will now keep your revealed map and your discovered altars of liliths from the eternal realm, with their renown rewards.

Capital City waypoints will persist but others you'll have to find.

Gems

They're having a lot of conversations on inventory space currently.

To help alleviate this, they will be moving Gems to the Materials tab, as well as increasing material caps (specifically veiled crystals mentioned)

The material caps will change before Season 1, the Gem update will come in Season 2

Resistances

The game has a lot of inputs that are making the resistance conversation confusing.

In general, the game reduces your character resistances as you go up in World Tiers. (many players may not seem to know this)

So, we want you to ideally be collecting resistances as you go up in tiers.

Despite all of this... currently resistances are less valuable than we'd like.

Not to mention there is also armor, which provides physical resistance, but also half that amount towards elemental resistances.

Because it's so complex, it's going to take a bit to dial it in to the right feel.

We are aiming for Season 2 to resolve this and make resistances a better system.

Hardcore Death Protection

We're aware of the bugs involving Quin's death.

We are going to fix these bugs in the short term.

Separately, we are going to add d/c protection. If the game realizes you DC'd, it will consume your Scroll of Escape.

This is the hardcore only item and consuming it will teleport you back to town.

So make sure you have these scrolls.

System won't be perfect but should resolve most of the disconnect deaths out of your control.

World Caches from Boss are higher level -- why?

This is a bug and will be fixed.

World Scaling

They feel that some players struggling with this may not be gearing their character appropriately (seems to be what was implied but not verbatim stated)

There was a discussion on understanding Item Power vs. Required Level and how some items may be better for you, despite having a lower required level, when they have an item power

So be looking at your gear as you choose what to continue to equip

Social Features like LFG

There is a large bucket of features we want to iterate and add to the game. (no specific feature or timeline given)

Q&A

Can we teleport to people without going to town first?

We're carefully looking at teleporting. We want it to be easy to meet up with friends. We don't have plans to change it but we're keeping an eye on it.

Are you planning to buff resource generators?

There's a variety of changes coming (referencing PezRadar's 13 pages of notes) and that includes particularly classes who are having a harder time with some builds when it comes to resources.

However, we are not looking to completely remove the need to generate resources as this can be overpowered and invalidates having a resource as a cost.

Questions around mob density...

We've created the baseline in dungeons and we can move up from there. We don't intend to move down. The upcoming changes will improve XP but won't change the number of monsters.

Will there be more options for character customization?

We will keep looking at ways to improve this. Short term we should be adding more options for character creation.

However we also recognize that sometimes people just want a new haircut, not a new character. This is probably further down the road.

Are you going to add a completed sidequest tab?

This corresponds to the journal which we want to improve on.

The hardcore race is still going -- with around 700 spots remaining.

Next stream is a Dev update stream in early July -- still aiming for mid-to-late July for Season 1.

(Let me know if I missed anything)