Diablo 4 Season 4 is keeping the powerful builds that players discovered on its recent PTR as part of an attempt to leave you feeling OP.
In an interview with 12DOVE, Diablo 4 lead producer Tim Ismay said that Blizzard's aim with Season 4 is to "try and preserve the things that felt overpowered and cool." There's is a slight limit on that, of course - "we can't let them literally crash the game" - but the main aim is that the powerful PTR builds "should still feel highly viable."
"If players were able to make builds that felt like 'wow, I'm killing everything on-screen, one-shotting bosses', we still want them to have that feeling," Ismay continues. "Those were built intentionally, it wasn't an accident."
It does sound as though the power level has been dialled down very slightly. Ismay says that while those big builds will be "viable," they won't be so to quite the same "broken level" as before - "but hopefully it still feels like you can just eliminate everything on screen. We want to increase the amount of places you can do that, not decrease it."
Ismay goes into a little more detail about preventing those truly 'broken' outlets, suggesting that "with the release of every season, we do take the liberty to say 'hey, we're going to do a little bit of rebalancing'." Season 4 is no exception, and while popular builds will remain "endgame viable," Ismay says that Blizzard does "bring the back more in alignment with where we expect player power to be, across the board."
That's a notable departure from the approach that brought criticism of Diablo 4's first season, which players accused of deliberately dialling back power levels in an attempt to pad playtime statistics. Since then, Diablo 4 has been on a broadly upward trajectory, and it seems as though the team is leaning far more happily into letting the most ridiculous power levels speak for themselves. The PTR for Season 4 was well-received, and while it does sound like players won't be quite so powerful, it looks like the builds they cooked up back then will be fun to take into the full release of the new season. We'll find out for sure when Diablo 4 Season 4 releases on May 14.
