Blizzard accidentally left a placeholder item in Diablo 4 and a couple of lucky players went god mode with it
It wouldn't be a new Diablo 4 season without someone figuring out how to deal so much damage the game can't compute it anymore. A couple of lucky players looted a pair of placeholder gloves and proceeded to go god mode with them, crushing the action RPG's hardest dungeons before Blizzard disabled them in an emergency patch.
At first glance, it doesn't look like Bilibili user Alaimo was doing anything new in a Diablo 4 video they posted earlier this week. The hot new rogue build this season plays with big traps that suck enemies into them like a black hole, which is technically what Alaimo was doing. But their build had a secret ingredient that allows them to deal infinite damage: the Ichorous Salvation gloves.
There's no way these gloves were meant to be in the game. Not only are they marked with “[PH]” for placeholder in the tooltip, but they have an extremely exploitable unique effect that scales your damage up to infinity. Every time you drop stun grenades they deal bonus burning damage, and with the right setup you can drop buckets of them in a few seconds. Add in some of this season's unique boss powers that scale burning damage up even more and you have a recipe for a game-breaking combo.
A user in the Sanctuary Diablo 4 Discord server who claims to have found their own pair of these posted a screenshot of the kind of damage numbers they got. The numbers are in the quintillions and show up as a negative because the game basically gives up on trying to do the math at that point. I would too—numbers are irrelevant once you can delete monsters like a walking eraser tool.
They said they were able to complete the highest level of the Pit with them, an achievement that is considerably harder to pull off with season 8's increased difficulty. I'll bet the Diablo 4 developer who said it would be so hard that he would "do something silly on stream" if anyone completed it isn't laughing now.
The fun did not last long, however. Blizzard issued a hotfix that disabled the item's effects. Curiously, though, it didn't remove it from players' inventories. If you were one of the few who found them, they now say “this item has been blocklisted” on the tooltip. I hope they stick around as a souvenir to remember their short-lived glory.
This isn't the first time placeholder items have snuck into Diablo 4. Usually, they're too incomplete to be usable or simply don't work. Judging from WoWhead's datamining, many of them exist for developers to test different interactions, sort of like console commands in other games.
If you've played Blizzard games, especially World of Warcraft, you've probably seen various placeholder items show up over the years. The most notorious one was Martin Fury, a WoW shirt that "kills all enemies in a 30 yard radius." In 2009, a Blizzard game master messed up and gave one to a player that used it to one-shot raid bosses before everyone involved was banned.
I don't expect anyone will be banned for using the Diablo gloves. Blizzard seems to refrain from direct punishments unless they actively harm other players' experiences. Other than making everyone else look like they were fighting with pool noodles, I don't think this was bad enough to qualify.