Diablo 4's toning down monsters' power to slow, stun, chill and otherwise cramp your style
This week's Diablo 4 patch will tone down the ability of monsters to control players, nerfing a variety of crowd control effects across the entire game. The variety of cold-enchanted elites with exceptionally quick attacks will no longer pop you with the cold enchant every single hit, Cold Spiders will chill you less, Cold Goatmen will drop ice pillars slower, and chilling winds will overlap its nasty walls less often. That's in addition to a variety of slows and stuns getting shorter durations or more easily avoided animations.
Generally speaking, it's part of reducing how often the monsters can break your stride. "These changes are aimed at the player having less time being Crowd Controlled and receiving more recovery time after being Crowd Controlled, especially at higher World Tiers," said Blizzard's developers.
It's part of a clear trend towards more player power in the wake of poor reception to patches earlier this year. Those are the ones that had some here at PC Gamer complaining about lackluster buffs to weak character archetypes over big class fixes fixes, and that had Diablo 4 developers saying "we don't plan on doing a patch like this ever again."
Otherwise, a nice new set of upgrades to menus and such are starting to get implemented as of this patch. Affixes on items will now sort more consistently, which is laying groundwork for changes to come in Season of Blood in October. It's also now possible to transfer achievements between platforms, and navigating the glyph menu on a controller is much nicer.
You can find the full rundown of changes and bugfixes on Blizzard's Diablo 4 website.
This sort of update is of course just a bump in the road before the big launch of Diablo 4 Season 2 in October. The Season of Blood will be about vampires, and have players tagging along with vampire hunter Erys on the Seasonal Realm as she tries to hunt down a powerful vampire lord. The season will include vampiric powers for your characters as they take down ever-larger swarms of vampires.
Season 2 will also include huge quality-of-life upgrades that make restarting at level 1 each season easier, such as the ability to farm for specific unique items, some renown unlocks from Eternal and Seasonal realms carrying over, gems not taking up i nventory space, and filters for your stash. There'll also be some new and "returning" bosses.