Blizzard is nixing an uber-popular Diablo 4 Spiritborn build as it's actually just broken, not powerful: "This is one of those instances"
What do you mean I'm not supposed to play Diablo like it's Vampire Survivors?
Diablo 4's new Spiritborn class is a tad broken. Not just in the sense that it's rather good, unfortunately, but in the sense that one popular build is mega-bugged, so it's getting fixed by Blizzard.
Over on Twitter, global director of community for all things Diablo, Adam Fletcher, says the team is lining up some patches and hotfixes to tackle several crash-related items and "hot button" items from Diablo 4 DLC's first week. First, though, we've got to talk about the Spiritborn class.
"We also looked at the Spiritborn's Evade cast animations that some are employing in specific builds," he says. "This is a bug as the Spiritborn is able to break animation frames during Evade immediately. We will be fixing this so you won't be able to Evade instantly during another one, and instead it will be normalized to the standard Evade cast rate in all situations."
Fletcher goes on to say that Blizzard isn't hitting the Spiritborn's Evade cast animations to nerf the fun but because it's impacting other players in-game. As you'll likely remember, the Diablo 4 team changed tack over how it handles class balance early into the RPG's life but always maintained that there's a difference between broken in a fun way and broken in the way that something isn't working as intended.
"We have mentioned before that if a build ends up impacting the experience of others, we may make changes immediately, and this is one of those instances," he says. "We expect this change to come in 2.0.3 later this week."
If you missed it, the evade build essentially turned Diablo 4 into Vampire Survivors.
Diablo x Vampire Survivors crossover WHEN? pic.twitter.com/XV2ymMWZKzOctober 12, 2024
So long, sweet prince, we barely knew ye.
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Check out our Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred review to find out why we think "It's a reason to return to Sanctuary."
Iain joins the GamesRadar team as Deputy News Editor following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When not helping Ali run the news team, he can be found digging into communities for stories – the sillier the better. When he isn’t pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new hat, you’ll find him amassing an army of Pokemon plushies.