Being a truly insufferable goofball, I was immediately drawn to the Sorcerer class in Diablo 4 and quite enjoyed turning the legions of Hell into a pool of electrified, sludgy sparks. But not everyone, it seems, had the same power fantasies. Those who opted for the rippling, muscular barbarian in closed beta lamented that the class felt oddly weak (open in new tab).

But Blizzard told GamesRadar (opens in new tab) that it plans to change that; according to Diablo game director Joe Shely, Blizzard "created the Barbarian as a low-level, weak We don't want them to feel weak at low levels," and the developers plan to use feedback from the beta period to "adjust class balance so that the game is not unfair at low levels so that strength is felt at the end of the game."

Shely makes it sound like the real challenge in balancing the Barbarian is threading the needle without upending every other class in the game. Since the various classes in the game are not all equally powerful at any given level, it is a bit of a challenge to tweak them so that they do not increase or decrease the usefulness of the other classes.

In other words, it's very easy to enhance a Barbarian's damage output or defensive capabilities, but it could make the other classes feel relatively underpowered like the Barbarians do now.

This is probably why Shely did not go into much detail about how Barbarians would be enhanced. On the other hand, he did remark that the Sorcerer's frost abilities are "really strong" at this point.

So far we have only seen three of Diablo 4's five announced classes, the Rogue, Sorcerer, and Barbarian, but the other two, the Druid and Necromancer, will be playable in an open beta (open in new tab) later this week. The open beta will begin this Friday, March 24, at 9 a.m. PT/12 p.m. ET/4 p.m. GMT, with preload available tomorrow.